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Marguerite Yourcenar (1903 - 1987)
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 Dreams
and Destinies by
Marguerite Yourcenar, Donald Flanell Friedman (Translator)
Dreams
and Destinies, the Rosetta stone of
Marguerite Yourcenar's canon, is an intimate journal of her
dreams. In this book, Yourcenar writes in a daring yet
unconventional autobiographical form that allows the reader to
view her life as it is refracted through the poetic sensibility of
her own sleeping mind. Men, women, children, animals, and mythical
creatures populate her dreams as Yourcenar wanders through a
picture gallery of the soul, pausing before ruined cathedrals
filled with candles, dark ravines that hold dead bodies, and still
reflecting pools located deep inside soaring gothic churches.
Revised to include changes that she requested before her death,
and now available for the first time in English, Dreams and
Destinies is a reminder from one of the greatest writers of
the twentieth century that the dreams we create are with us
forever. "In 1938, Dreams and
Destinies made what was intended as an initial sounding of
Yourcenar's oneiric strata. It is a revealing investigation of a
realm not so reflectively explored since Freud's great analysis a
century ago. Never reprinted, and never continued, this early
probe is both lock and key of this astonishing writer's
sensibility, lyrical and scholarly at once, as we have come to
expect from the lucid dreamer of Hadrian's memoirs and her
own." --Richard Howard
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Excerpt:
...real
name, Marguerite de Crayencour, French poet, novelist, dramatist,
and translator. Yourcenar was born in Brussels, Belgium, to a
French father and Belgian mother. She had little formal education.
In 1947 she became an American citizen, but she wrote only in
French. Her first volume of poems, Le Jardin des chimères
(1921), showed her sophistication as a writer by reinterpreting
ancient Greek myths to make them relevant to the modern world. In
1922 she published another collection of poems, Les Dieux ne
sont pas morts. Her first novel, Alexis, ou le traité du
vain combat (1929; Alexis, or the Story of a Vain
Struggle,1984),
was written from the point of a view of an artist trying to remain
dedicated to his work, but faced with opposition from his family.
Her visit to Italy prompted her to write Denier du rêve
(1934; A Coin in Nine Hands,1982), a novel about the
difference between dream and reality....
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Excerpt:
French novelist, essayist, and short story
writer. Yourcenar gained international fame with her historical
novels, which dealt with modern issues such as homosexuality and
deviance, and in which she drew psychologically penetrating and
fully credible portraits of people from the distant past....
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Excerpt:
Marguerite Yourcenar once defined herself as a
"poet historian" and "novelist". But she was
also a translator, essayist and critic, and the first woman to be
elected to the Académie Française. Her work is an exploration of
the past, be it family, mythology or history, and she achieved
world-wide success with Les Mémoires d'Hadrien and L'Oeuvre
au noir, which feature protagonists wavering, not unlike her,
between the thirst for knowledge and the temptations of the flesh.
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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