Renée VIVIEN

Poème autographe à Kérimé "Pour elle" [Elle demeure en son palais...]

Name: Renée VIVIEN • Handwritten poem to Kerima • Poème autographe à Kérimé "Pour elle" [Elle demeure en son palais...] • Autograph • 1907
SKU: 78725
Availability: OutOfStock
Author: Renée VIVIEN

Handwritten poem to Kerima

Constantinople [Istanbul] s. d. [1907]|21 x 27 cm|une page sur un feuillet

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⬨ 78725

Handwritten poem to Kérimé « Pour elle » [« Elle demeure en son palais... »]

Constantinople [1907] | 21 x 27 cm | one page on one leaf

Handwritten poem entitled « Pour elle », dedicated and offered to Kérimé. Half a page written in black ink on a leaf of headed paper from the Constantinople Péra-Palace & Summer-Palace, a total of 32 alexandrine verses.

The poem was published under the title « Elle demeure en son palais... » in Flambeaux éteints (Edward Sansot & C^ie, 1907). This first manuscript version has several variations from the printed text. Some verses have even been totally abandoned:
« Elle est indifférente, à l'égal d'une fleur / Dont la fureur ressemble aux cris du désespoir / Qu'ombragent les cyprès des morts d'Orient »

Elle habite un palais serein, près du Bosphore,
Où la lune s'étend comme en un lit nacré...
Sa bouche est interdite et son corps est sacré
Et nul amant, sauf moi, n'osa l'étreindre encore.
Des nègres cauteleux la servent, à genoux...
Ils sont humbles, avec des regards de menace,
Fugitifs à l'égal d'un éclair roux qui passe,
Leur sourire est très blanc: ils sont traîtres et doux.
[...]

J'entre le palais baigné par l'eau charmant...
Où l'ombre est fraîche, où le silence est infini,
Où, sur les tapis doux plus qu'un herbage uni,
Glisse légèrement le pas de mon amante.
Ma sultane aux yeux noirs m'attend, comme autrefois....

Des jasmins enlaceurs voilent les jalousies...
J'admire, en l'admirant, ses parures choisies,
Et mon âme s'accroche aux bagues de ses doigts.
Nos caresses ont de cruels enthousiasmes,
Dont la fureur ressemble aux cris du désespoir...
Plus tard, une douceur tombe, comme le soir,
Et ce sont des baisers de sœur, après les spasmes...
Elle redresse un pli de sa robe, en riant...
Et j'évoque son corps souple, dont je suis fière,
Auprès du mien, dans un inégal cimetière
Qu'ombragent les cyprès des morts d'Orient.

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 her "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.