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Renée VIVIEN

Poème autographe à Kérimé "Pour elle seule" [Eminé]

s.l. s.d. (1906), 17,7x21,9cm, 2 pages sur un feuillet.

Handwritten poem to Kérimé
« Pour elle seule » [« Eminé »]

Handwritten poem entitled « Pour elle seule », dedicated and offered to Kérimé. Two pages written in purple ink on a leaf of lined and margined paper, in total 30 alexandrine verses.
 
The poem was published under the title « Eminé » in À l'heure des mains jointes (Alphonse Lemerre, 1906). This first manuscript version has several variations from the printed text. Some verses have even been totally abandoned: « Et lui dirai: Voici que les temps sont venus/Visage détaché sur le fond d'une trame; /Mais je dédaignerai les arbres aux troncs d'or/Et les fleurs de saphir pour un plus beau trésor. »
 
Le couchant répandra la neige des opales,
Et l'air sera chargé d'odeurs orientales
Les caïques furtifs jetteront leur éclair
De poissons argentins qui sillonnent la mer.
Ce sera le hasard qu'on aime et qu'on redoute.
A pas lents, mon destin marchera sur la route.
Je le reconnaîtrai parmi les inconnus
Et lui dirai: Voici que les temps sont venus.
Et mon destin aura la forme d'une femme,
Visage détaché sur le fond d'une trame;
Et mon destin aura de profonds cheveux bleus.
Ce sera le fantasque et le miraculeux.
Involontairement, comme lorsque l'on pleure
Je me répéterai: toute femme a son heure.
« Aucune ne sera pareille à celle-ci.
« Nul être n'attendra ce que j'attends ici. »
Celle qui brillera dans l'ombre solitaire
M'emmènera dans le domaine du mystère.
Près d'elle, j'entrerai, pâle comme Aladdin
Dans un prestigieux et terrible jardin.
Mon cher destin, avec des lenteurs attendries,
Détachera pour moi des fruits de pierreries.
Mais je dédaignerai les arbres aux troncs d'or
Et les fleurs de saphir pour un plus beau trésor.
Car je mépriserai le soleil et la lune
Et les astres fleuris, pour cette femme brune.
Ses yeux seront l'abîme où sombre l'univers
Et ses cheveux seront la nuit où je me perds.
à ses pieds nus, pleurant d'extases infinies,
Je laisserai tomber la lampe des génies.
 
Provenance: Kérimé Turkhan-Pacha.



The Sappho lover and her sofa muse

Considered as a literary work in its own right, Renée Vivien's correspondence with Kérimé Turkhan-Pacha is sprinkled with very rare poems that enhance the poet's romantic passion for her oriental muse.
In spring 1904, Vivien received an unexpected letter. A mysterious young Turkish woman, living in Constantinople and who signed Kérimé Turkhan-Pacha, enthusiastically told her about a book she had just read. [...] Intrigued and at the same time flattered, Vivien responded to the unknown woman [...] This letter was to be followed by more than a hundred others and dozens of postcards to Kérimé Turkhan-Pacha. [...] During the summer of 1905, when Vivien will make a pilgrimage to Lesbos with Natalie Barney, she will absolutely stop in Constantinople to get to know the fictional (as she imaged) Kérimé. She saw her again several times, always in Constantinople, and their correspondence continued until 1908. Born in 1876, Kérimé Turkhan-Pacha belonged to the Constantinople high society. Very cultured, raised French, she shone in the salons of the Ottoman capital. She was distinguished by her real beauty [...]. This seductive creature, whom Vivien had to imagine languishing on cushions in the shade of a Bosphorus harem, had married a Turk much older than her around 1900, Turkhan-Pacha. [...] Becoming a widow, Kérimé lived in Paris, where she had the opportunity to court Natalie Barney; she died in Athens in 1948. Worldly and very beautiful, [...] Kérimé belonged to the Turkish elite [..] whose women began to change their mentality. Just like Loti's Désenchantées [...] Kérimé found it troublesome to support the old customs of her country. «I was very young and I was cloistered away and aspired only to bite all the forbidden fruits», she told Le Dantec. [...] For Vivien, Kérimé represented the mirage of the East, which had already fascinated the entire 19th century: Chateaubriand, Delacroix, Nerval, Flaubert, Loti, Barrès... Turkish romanticism then permeated French literature. In 1898 Jean Lorrain had published La Dame turque (another pasha woman...) and in 1906 Loti would publish his famous novel Les Désenchantées." (J.-P. Goujon, Tes blessures sont plus douces que leurs caresses)

This superb elegy with its "Bosphorus sultana" takes up all the elements of this aesthetic mythology in a superb sapphic reappropriation of the languor and sensuality of the fantasized East.

Exceptionally rare, the manuscripts to the lovers of this icon of modern lesbianism are missing from most public collections, with the notable exception of the Jacques Doucet collection, which includes nine poems from Vivien to Natalie Clifford Barney.

Only these four manuscript poems to Kérimé are known to date.

 

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