Le Livre de Jade and the reprises of Judith Gautier's prose poem

• Grant number: 22/15907-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: April 01, 2023
• End date: March 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Comparative Literature
• Principal Investigator: Francine Fernandes Weiss Ricieri
• Grantee: Ana Beatriz Farias Costa de Brito
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project aims to analyze Judith Gautier's production of prose poems from her debut volume, Le Livre de Jade (1867). Presented as a collection of poems "according to" certain Chinese poets, the book was received as a collection of translations, soon evaluated as inaccurate and excessively free. Since its publication, it has been associated by critics with the tradition of the prose poem form spread by Charles Baudelaire in the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as with the vulgarization of classical Chinese poetry for Western audiences. The hesitation about whether to attribute the texts as creations of the author or not has reflected in the judgment of her work, so that anthologies of Chinese poetry exclude Gautier's "translations," and theorists of the prose poem neglect or review her production as less original by replicating the argument that the author merely combines borrowed themes into a form conceived beforehand. Therefore, the relationship between theme and form in Le Livre de Jade is crucial for us to understand its organization and the author's poetic ideals. By reviewing the study of the book's sources and analyzing a corpus of poems, we seek to highlight distinctive features of Gautier's prose poem, among which: the choice of enunciative voice, the themes, and the implications of the chosen form. Thus, we intend to offer contributions to the critical reception of the book in order to update the author's literary production.