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

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