Bruges-la-Morte

by Georges Rodenbach

Overview

Source of the famous opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and inspiration of many illustrations by distinguished Belgian and French artists, a major francophone Belgian Symbolist text.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783690823296
Publisher:	Prodinnova
Publication date:	09/30/2025
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.15(d)
Language:	French

About the Author

Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898) born in Tournai, spent most of his time in Ghent and later Paris where like his childhood friend and Flemish compatriot Emile Verhaeren, he rubbed shoulders with all the main players of the symbolist fin de siecle. But Rodenbach is forever associated with Bruges, the location for his most celebrated and enduring work. He also wrote a number of collections of poetry of which 'Le Regne du silence' from 1891 in many ways prefigures Bruges-La-Morte. A further novel 'Le Carilloneur' 1897 (translated by Dedalus as The Bells of Bruges) is also set in Bruges.

He has published over eighty translations from German.. His translation of Rosendorfer's Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink. His translations have been shortlisted four times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize: Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000, The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008 and The Lairds of Cromarty by Jean Pierre Ohl in 2013.

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of four novels,The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell and The Line of Beauty. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award and the James Tait Black Memorial for Fiction, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 and won the prize in 2004.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
 
Introduction
 
Chronology of Works By Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898)
 
Bruges-la-Morte

Editorial Reviews

There is an opiatic quality to the writing which at its best hovers on poetry's border. Hugues's relationship with the dancer who closely resembles his dead wife provides the plot, but the book's real heart lies in the descriptions of Bruges itself, and its 'amalgam of greyish drowsiness'. The Times

A precursor to W G Sebald, a Symbolist vision of the city that lays the way for Aragon & Joyce, and a macabre story of obsessive love & transfiguring horror that is midway between Robert Browning & Tod Browning. Bruges, "an amalgam of greyish drowsiness", is the setting and spur.' Scotland on Sunday

'Bruges evoked in melancholy imagery, in this new translated Symbolist novel.' Summer Reading Recommendations in The Financial Times

From the Publisher