Albert Giraud

Albert Giraud (June 23, 1860 – December 26, 1929), was a Belgian poet writing in the French language. He was born Emile Albert Kayenbergh in Leuven, Belgium. He studied law at the University of Louvain. He left university without a degree and took up journalism and poetry. In 1885, Giraud became a member of La Jeune Belgique, a Belgian nationalist literary movement that met at the Café Sésino in Brussels.^[1] Giraud became chief librarian at the Belgian Ministry of the Interior.

He was a Symbolist poet. His published works include Pierrot lunaire: Rondels bergamasques (1884), a poem cycle based on the commedia dell'arte figure of Pierrot, and La Guirlande des Dieux (1910). The composer Arnold Schönberg set a German language version (translated by Otto Erich Hartleben) of selections from his Pierrot Lunaire to innovative atonal music.

Works

Pierrot Lunaire: Rondels Bergamasques (1884)
Hors du Siècle (poems written between 1885 and 1897)
Le concert dans la musée (1921)

Quotation

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Coucher de soleil

Le Soleil s'est ouvert les veines

Sur un lit de nuages roux:

Son sang, par la bouche des trous,

S'éjacule en rouges fontaines.

Les rameaux convulsifs des chênes

Flagellent les horizons fous;

Le Soleil s'est ouvert les veines

Sur un lit de nuages roux:

Comme, après les hontes romaines,

Un débauché plein de dégoûts

Laissant jusqu'aux sales égouts

Saigner ses artères malsaines,

Le Soleil s'est ouvert les veines!

--- Pierrot Lunaire

References

• Albert Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire, translated and with an introduction by Gregory C. Richter, Truman State University Press, 2001.

Notes