Ideas - The Passion of Émile Nelligan: Canada's Saddest Poet

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

Broken violins, cruel love and absent fathers... At the end of the 19th century, Émile Nelligan wrote hundreds of tragic, passionate, sonnets and rondels on these subjects and more. And yet, most English-speaking Canadians seem never to have heard of the Quebec poet. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 9, 2024.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Oh how the snow has snowed. My window panes a yard of frost.

Oh how the snow has snowed. What is this will to live my most despite this pain in me, in me? And all the ponds lie frozen. My soul is dark. Where do I live? Where do I go? All my hope lies frozen. I am the new Norway from which fair skies have disappeared. Mourn, you February birds. Mourn the evil chill of all. Mourn, you February birds. Mourn the evil chill of all. Mourn, you February birds. Mourn my tears and mourn my roses up in the boughs of the juniper tree. Oh, how the snow has snowed. My window panes a yard of frost. Oh, how the snow has snowed. What is this will to live my most with all this pain in me, in me. That's Mark DiSiverio.

He stands in a grove on a freezing cold day on the outskirts of Hamilton, Ontario. Beyond that, a field, a busy road, a Tim Hortons, a big bear food mart. Driving in these drab suburban environments, you just never know. Perhaps, hidden in that nearby stand of white pines, a poet is declaiming. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Mark is a poet. He's also a translator. That poem, Winter Evening, is his rendering of a work written 125 years ago, in French. It's called Soir d'hiver.

And though Mark is one of the most recent Anglophone interpreters of Soir d'hiver, he's not the most recent. There are others. Ah, how the snow did snow. My window is a garden of frost. Ah, how the snow did snow. Oh, how the snow, it has snowed. What good is a flicker of life when compared to my woe, to my woe? The original Soir d'Hiver became one of Canada's best-known poems among French speakers. Ah, comme la neige a neigé. Ma vitre est un jardin de givre. Ah, comme la neige a neigé. Qu'est-ce que le spasme de vivre à la douleur que j'ai, que j'ai. Émile Néligan est mort.

Émile Néligan is indeed dead. He stopped writing in 1899, but the Montreal poet had a rebellious spirit and it refused to die. Today, his spirit's will to live its most finds expression in people like Marc de Severio, people who feel moved to revive Nelligan, translating his works again in new ways, or as others do, drawing on Nelligan's work to compose an opera, a ballet, a painting. The tale of Émile Nelligan, his poetry, his life, his afterlife, gets picked up now by Ideas producer Tom Howell. I was speaking with a professor in New Brunswick, and she was telling me about this place called Montreal and what it was like there 125 years ago.

The battle over what to write, how to write, what literature should look like, how it should be read, and by whom, you know, was really important. This is what she wanted me to understand in order to get the significance of Emil Nelligan's arrival on the scene in 1896. And the key point is, this past is a foreign country, a place where what to write, how to write, how it should be read, are for some bizarre reason held to be really important. Can we even imagine such a place today? We must. And so I asked Andrea Sobieski to come and help

us do this because she's known for her ability to So, Montreal, Quebec, late 1800s, a place where what a person thought about poetry finally mattered. Why was this? Literature became increasingly polarized as the Catholic Church clamped down on the circulation of print culture, especially in the last half of the 19th century when literacy rates were rising. The Catholic Church would have promoted a more patriotic poetry. The 19th century is known as the century of nations. So this was a poetry that was meant to inspire individual and collective feelings of belonging to the group, to celebrate historic battles, for example, French victories from the Seven Years' War a century earlier,

or it sought to mythologize historical figures, or to evoke the local landscapes, snowy scenes, or maple trees, but this local landscape was imbued with a patriotic sentiment. And for an example of this sort of thing? A poet named Octave Cremazy was basically Quebec's first national poet. Cue the blazing patriotism. Yes, this is a bit

hissy. It's a recording of a musical setting of Octave Cremézy's most famous poem, Le Drapeau de Carillon, and it was recorded in 1905 and preserved by Libraries and Archives Canada. So I think we should just be pleased it exists at all. So it's about a flag, the very one that would later morph into Quebec's fleur-de-lisée. But back when Cramsey was writing, it was known as the flag of Carrion, the place, not the luggage. And the character in the song is announcing his plans to die, imminently, next to this flag.

A declaration that pleased local Catholic authorities. The bishop loved it, the priests and the schoolteachers praised it and taught it. They maybe didn't know much about art, but they knew what they liked. And dying bathed in love for one's country, almost literally wrapping oneself in the flag, this was good stuff. But there was another kind of poetry, a modern variety. This was the bad stuff, and not just bad, wicked, evil, ruinous to the soul of Quebec. A liberal blasphemy against which the Bishop of Montreal himself waged a very personal war. For instance, he stepped in to prevent a Catholic burial happening for a man who'd been a member of a library where bad books could be borrowed. A man named Joseph Guibord.

And the story doesn't end here. In fact, it just begins here because his widow did not take this news lying down and she hired two lawyers. It took five years for this case to make its way through the courts. But in the end, in 1874, it was decided that Guibor should be buried actually in a Catholic cemetery. In the meantime, he had been buried in a Protestant cemetery. So his body was exhumed. He was given a Catholic burial. And the Bishop of Montreal, Monseigneur Ignace Bourget, did not take this news lying down himself. And he deconsecrated the ground in which Guibor was buried in. So really, just the idea of clamping down on the circulation of print, you know, we don't

really think of literature being involved in high stakes games anymore at this point in Canada's history. An irony is one of the biggest fans of the new poetry, in fact, one of only a handful who ever appreciated Emil Nelligan's work was a priest. The guy was leading a double life, using a fake name to work as a literary reviewer, editor and publisher by night. And when he got caught, well, everyone heard what happened to him.

He had to leave the church because his superiors were really upset that he was handling this heretical work and then goes into exile because of it. I mean, it's fantastic. It's fantastic. I mean, it's like, it's a movie. It's like two movies. Carmen Stagnino talking there. We'll meet him properly later. So this was a time when writing literary verse was pretty cool. And I don't know what, was there anything you'd like? Not all of them are good to read, you know, for various reasons.

Sometimes an explanation is required. This is Ian Allaby. Author of Selected Verse of Emile Nelligan, a book of translations of some of Emile Nelligan's best poems. Ian's book came out in 2023, making him, at the time of recording, the most recent published translator of the Enfant Terrible and Poète Maudit, Émile Nelligan. I don't think this is a person that I would like, you know.

He might be a real somebody tough to handle. Because? Because he was a nervous wreck sort of thing. because he was a nervous wreck sort of thing, and because his style was to be a poet maudit, which is sort of like, in our era, we might say a punk, you know, a punk poet or something like that. And I guess I consider myself not a punk, you know.

Emile Nelligan was born on Christmas Eve, 1879. In 1897, he was a good-looking and unruly 17-year-old high school dropout, a long record of truancy behind him, and he showed up in Montreal's poetry scene with a chip on his shoulder and no qualms about saying so. So I hope you're ready to hear some of this filth. Here's Ian reading his translation of one of Emile's early rock and roll numbers. Okay, Villanelle violin. A Villanelle is a country dance.

In the valley breeze where the moonlight glows Come all ye blonde bells and brown-haired bows, where the fiddle plays and the woodwind blows, dance the villanelle. Sweet perfumes the fields on you bestow, come kindle your joy in the bonfire's glow. Be merry about it, by leaps and bounds go, dance the villanelle. The old folks are here on an oaken seat With tears in their eyes they mark every beat As you brush right past on your joyful feet Dance the villanelle

Go to it gaily, may the moon shine bright Let it paint your brows with its shimmering light This feast of St. John, dance into the night Dance the villanelle I don't want to prejudge anybody else's experience of that poem, but for me, it is a little like listening to raunchy hits from the 1950s. One can be told that it seemed diabolical at the time, but it's very hard to viscerally feel that sense of, oh no, he didn't just do that, that apparently was once front and center. Now, assuming you

weren't too shocked by the Villanelle, let's move on to another edgy Emil Nelligan piece. Listener discretion is advised. How about the rondelle to his pipe? Okay, I could do that. Okay, should I start now? Yeah, go ahead. All right, this is an example of a Nelligan rondelle,

and it's called Rondelle to My Pipe. I'll put my feet up to the fire and beer in hand, my finest pipe, we're buddies of the broody type, we'll share a dream safe from winter's ire. Against me heaven holds some gripe and crowns my woes with flue so dire, I'll put my feet up to the fire

and with our beer we'll dream, old pipe. Death will come, the time is ripe, this earthly hell must soon expire and when I'm sent to Satan's shire Good for him, taking a positive attitude to the future for once. We're laughing at that because Emil Nelligan's poems are, for the most part, extremely sad. Canada's Anne Carson translated two of them, Funeral Marches and Night Confession. She published them both in the London Review of Books, along with a note. And the note is well put. Carson said, The poems are black stabs at winter and transcendence.

Not just sad, he seems a sort of vesper of himself. By the way, a vesper is an evening prayer in Catholicism. And Carson goes on to say, maybe some people are born into the evening of their life, and although they remember a morning and an afternoon, they do not live it. They are already far on in the shadows. I think this is a fairly accurate description of Nelligan's vibe. He's often grieving over a childhood that seems fairy-like and mythical. And when he's not doing that, he's obsessing over the tragic death that's sure to come. That's his preoccupation, of course. Now, it's not unusual for a teenage guy to be preoccupied with death,

but he was a bit extreme in that respect. But for all his chaotic moodiness, Emile Nelligan wrote using the prettiest and neatest of classic verse forms, the villanelle, the rondelle, and the sonnet. I like that type of poetry. I have to say that. I like music and poetry. I miss it in the free verse universe that we live in. I miss the kind of music that poetry. I miss it in the free verse universe that we live in. I miss the kind of music that poetry could convey. Sweet perfumes the fields on you bestow. Come kindle your joy in the bonfire's glow. Be merry about it. By leaps and bounds go go, dance the villanella.

There were problems with fixed-form poetry and rhyming poetry and so on. It could become tedious, you know, and it could limit the possibilities of expression, which is one reason my free verse took off. But in my heart, I do think poetry should have music in it. When I encountered Nelligan's poetry, I guess that's what I picked up on. It rhymed and it was musical. One thing about rhyme and structure is you can see that it involves work

on the part of the poet. Whereas free verse, I'm not saying free verse writers don't write and rewrite and work on the part of the poet. Whereas free verse, I'm not saying free verse writers don't write and rewrite and work on this word. I'm not saying they don't put a lot of work into it, but it's not as visible somehow. And it's not as easy for the public to talk about it either. But this type of poetry, it seems to me, should be retained as one of our types of poetry. It should not be forgotten. Emil Nelliger is not well known and is in danger of being forgotten among English-speaking Canadians. However, among French-speaking Canadians, it's very unlikely that he'll be forgotten anytime soon. And that's thanks in large part to a handful of his best poems

written in the last year that he was active as a poet. This was 1899, just three years after his highly promising arrival on the Montreal scene. Give me Evening in Winter now, seeing as you're all ready. All right, let me see. There might be something needs explaining, though. Evening in Winter is Ian Allaby's translation of Soir de Verre, Emile Neligan's best-known poem. Norway, Norway is the thing. All right, so this poem is called Evening in Winter. It will mention Norway,

and the importance of Norway to Nelligan was that it was the land's end, the northern land's end in Europe. And Nelligan very often had the point of view of somebody European. He was oriented very much towards French literature. But, of course, he's writing this in Montreal on a snowy February evening.

Ah, how the snow did snow. My window is a garden of frost. Ah, how the snow did snow. What a thing is the spasm of living with all the pain that I know that I know all the ponds lie frozen dead my soul is dark where am I where to go all my hopes lie frozen dead I am the new Norway whence the fair skies have fled weep birds of, at the evil vibration in things. Weep, birds of February, weep for my roses, weep for my tears, on the boughs of the juniper tree.

Ah, how the snow did snow. My window is a garden of frost. Ah, how the snow did snow. What a thing is the spasm of living, with all the woe that I know, that I know. I first learned about the poem Soir d'hiver from a YouTuber named Geneviève. Salut tout le monde, c'est Geneviève, votre prof de français. Cette semaine, on a une capsule un peu spéciale. On va regarder le poème le plus connu de ce qui est probablement le plus célèbre poète québécois, Émile Néligan. Comme vous l'avez peut-être compris, Geneviève est votre professeure française. Elle est Geneviève Breton et elle fait des capsules de vidéos enseignant la culture et la langue au Québec, aux anglophones, aux allophones

et à un nombre de francophones québécois aussi. Donc, je m'appelle Geneviève Breton. Je suis la créatrice de Ma prof de français, qui est une entreprise qui a pour mission d'aider les immigrants, For the benefit of those of us still working on our French, let's hear the rest of Geneviève's comments in translation. For me, it was important to tackle this poem because my impression is it's the most important, most known Québécois poem. Émile Néligan is without any doubt the best-known Québécois poet,

so I felt it was important for my listeners to hear this poem spoken about. I asked Geneviève to read us Soir d'hiver using the actual words that Émile Néligan wrote. Ah, comme la neige a neiger, ma vitre est un jardin de givre. using the actual words that Émile Nélegin wrote. Espoir gise gelé. Je suis la nouvelle Norvège d'où les blonds ciels s'en sont allés. Pleurez, oiseaux de février, aux sinistres frissons des choses. Pleurez, oiseaux de février. Pleurez mes pleurs, pleurez mes roses, aux branches du genévrier.

Ah, comme la neige a neigé. Ma vitre est un jardin de givre. Ah, comme la neige a neigé. Qu'est-ce que le spasme de vivre a tout l'ennui que j'ai, que j'ai. Elle a continué de me dire les sons de ce poème et je vais laisser cette prochaine partie sans traduction parce que je pense que c'est assez clair ce qu'elle dit. Donc, pour moi, ça m'évoque beaucoup la glace. Tous les étangs gisent gelés. Ouvies, jouvèges, tous ces espoirs gisent gelés.

Ça crisse un peu comme la neige sous les pas. Pleurez, oiseaux de février, au sinistre frisson des choses. Donc, il joue beaucoup avec les airs, branches du genévrier. Ça me rappelle la glace. Pour elle, les sons évoquent l'ice. For her, the sounds evoke ice. One of the interesting things in terms of language is he breaks a rule of grammar. In French, all the verbs for describing weather are impersonal. It rains, it snows. The it doesn't refer to a person.

The it essentially doesn't exist. There's a film about the life of Nelligan, and it shows this scene where he reads this poem to his fellow poets, and they start laughing at him. De la neige qui neige. Tu l'as entendu. Je neige. Tu neiges.

Pourquoi pas? Parce que lui, il vient ajouter un sujet. He just added a subject. Who has snowed? The snow has snowed. Well, you can't do that if you're following the rules of grammar. But he did it. In my opinion, that's kind of the definition of a poet or artist. Generally speaking, it's someone who can push the limits,

cross the line, escape the normal in order to create, go further, innovate. So it's a nice, intriguing bit of language. I asked Geneviève where she gets her impression that this is the best-known Québécois poem. I did a poll of my social circle, people who are not big poetry fans. And when I asked, who's Émile Néligin, everyone said he's a Québécois poet. And when I asked, give me one line he wrote, they all said, ah, how the snow has snowed. It really shows how everyone comes across Néligin somewhere in their schooling.

I think it's in the popular culture now. Several stand-up comics have made it part of their act, people with really big audiences. That shows that they expect everyone to get the reference. One of her favorite examples of someone doing this is André Sauvé. For example, in one case, he totally removed all the ah sounds. Then he did it as quickly as possible,

timing himself with a stopwatch. Yes! Then he goes, yes, like he's won a world championship. It's totally absurd. It's completely absurd. The funniest variation that most made me laugh was when he put swear words into it with a really strong Quebec joual pronunciation. When it's that, that little bastard of space, come on, bastard!

Come on, bastard! Translating Nelligan into curse words is kind of apropos because he's often been called Canada's cursed poet, or to use the French term, poète maudit. Le poète maudit, c'est une expression qui fait référence un peu à l'artiste incompris qui vit en mal. It's an expression referring to the misunderstood artist, living at the edge of society. Think of all the clichés of poets you've seen in films. Someone flirting with madness, intensely creative, often self-destructive, drinking, abusing drugs.

Drinking, abusing drugs. It's usually an artist whose value will only be recognized after they die. Someone will come across their work and say, wow, this is amazing. That's kind of the cliché. A cliché, yes, but in Émile Nélegant's case, it was literally his life story.

On Ideas, you're listening to The Passion of Émile Nélegan, Canada's saddest poet, by Ideas producer Tom Howell. We're a podcast, and since 1965, we've been a broadcast. Heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, in North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find us on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. However you listen, I hope you enjoy what you're hearing.

You can let us know what you think by writing to ideas at cbc.ca. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most

about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. If we were to randomly pick up a book of Anetigan's poems, we wouldn't necessarily be immediately struck by the newness of his poetry. Andrea Cebisky of the University of Moncton. He writes about loss, anguish, and solitude. He writes about his state of mind,

about his emotional state. And in this way, he reflects exactly what we think that poetry should do and has always done. Many of us sit down to write a poem when we're trying to make sense of difficult emotions or reactions. But in the context of the late 19th century, Néligan, along with other members of the so-called Literary School of Montreal, broke new ground precisely by exploring the inner landscape of the mind. They were going against the grain of more orthodox views of what poetry should look like, should sound like, and what poetry's social role should be.

Émile Nelligan wrote poems for three years. Then, before his 20th birthday, disaster struck. Émile Nelligan est mort. Émile Nelligan is dead. So begins the preface to his first book of poems. It was published in 1904. The writer of the preface to his first book of poems. It was published in 1904. The writer of the preface was a priest and a poetry lover. This was a tricky combination at the time,

since Quebec's Catholic authorities wanted to stamp out the new literary culture growing in Montreal. And there's a second notable point about that opening line from the preface. While the priest was writing it, Émile Nelligan was not dead. No matter that our friend had not closed his eyes, says the priest, all that we loved in him is gone. The story of Émile Nelligan's life is gone. The story of Émile Néligan's life is tragic.

A famous Quebec playwright, Michel Tremblay, found the tale operatic. In 1990, Tremblay worked with composer André Gagnon, and they created Néligan, the opera. On today's episode of Ideas, Tom Howell rediscovers Émile Néligan,

his poems, his tragedy, and his afterlife, not just in Quebec, but among English-speaking Canadians elsewhere in Canada. Square Saint-Louis is a very pretty spot in the heart of Montreal. It has a fountain. It has beautiful 19th century apartment buildings on three sides. Big trees everywhere. Pigeons, squirrels, lovers. A tiny cappuccino place that's almost never open.

In New York, there's an advocacy group called Project for Public Spaces, and they say Square Saint-Louis is the closest thing to a European neighborhood square you'll find this side of the Atlantic. When Emil Nelligan wrote his poems, the park was brand new, and apparently teenage Emil liked to wander over here and mull things over.

So the first job is just to introduce yourself, say who you are and where we are. Oh, so my name is Carmen Sternino. We are in Square Saint-Louis, front of the monument to Émile Nélegant. And we're actually watching a little tour group that is assembled here. Today is November 18th,

which is the day that Nélegant died. Back in 1941, long after he had stopped writing. Yeah. Long after he stopped writing, yeah. Decades after. Carmen is a poet, editor and publisher in Montreal. How would you characterize his life story? Well, it's funny because I think poetry has a lot of really intriguing origin stories, but I don't know of any quite like Nellie Gans.

I mean, like, he's born to an Irish dad and a Francophone mom, sort of like the bastard child of Canadian poetry. Two solitudes kind of fuse into one. Interested in music because of his mom, who introduced him to all sorts of composers, and because of his father's insistence that he read English, he discovers Poe.

And the two kind of work together, this whole music and Gothic into this voice of his. Yeah, I mean, that'd be the short answer to how he got to where he did. The other thing that is really cool, I mean, I guess I say the word cool, but his life was pretty tragic. Three years. Most of the word cool, but his life was pretty tragic. Three years.

Most of the work we understand was written between the years of 16 and 19. So the guy's a teen prodigy, like an adolescent genius. Then he cracks and then he sort of drifts in an asylum until he dies at 61. And his beloved mother visits him only once.

What's the story there? I don't know. I mean, it's sad. It's sad. This monument to Émile Nelligan is a bronze bust. You see his bouffant hairstyle, his far-off look, and the jaunty high collars of his jacket. We have this image here of him, and this is like the branding around Émile Nelligan, this is like, you know, beautiful

adolescent. In fact, Michel Tremblay praises him as this like beautiful adolescent. And I think he has something about his Apollonian features. And that's the image we know of him. And I think he got very lucky because someone snapped that photo. Carmen means that the sculpture looks to be based on the one photographic portrait that exists of Émile Nelligan at his peak, from early 1899, when he wrote Soir de Verre. This picture captures him looking really like the cliché of a bohemian poet. It's the image used on any edition of his collective works. And that is the image we have of him.

But there is another image that doesn't circulate as often. It was taken in 1920, and that's where he was deep into his asylum years. He had 20 years left before he died. He was in his 40s. And he doesn't look like that at all. He looks a bit more like Pablo Escobar. He does, yeah. Like these burning eyes looking to the camera. He's got his arms sort of folded.

Now that is the Nelly Ghan no one really thinks about. We like this version of him. We try not to think about the other version of him, even though the other version of him is the one that gives this version glamour. Earlier, Geneviève Breton mentioned there's a movie called Nélegant. It's a biopic from 1991, and it begins in the asylum. Here is the adult, Nelligan, silent, trapped in shadows, at last fully in the hands of

a Catholic institution. And in fact, Nelligan the opera begins pretty much the same way. So when Carmen says, that is the Nelligan no one really thinks about. It's not that no one mentions this part of his life. It's just not really fun to dwell on what he experienced beyond his adolescence. And in fact, that moment a few seconds ago when Carmen catches himself. The other thing that is really cool, I mean, I mean, I guess I say the word cool, but his life was pretty tragic. That I really identify with. The tension between finding pleasure in the drama of Emil Nelligan's life and acknowledging the pain. Because once upon a time, Emil Nelligan was a real teenager.

In fact, he lived about 120 meters away from where we're standing. And if you walk up Avenue Laval, you can see the window of his bedroom where he spent his sleepless nights feverishly writing dozens and dozens of beautifully over-the-top symbolic poetry about misery. Of course, by the summer of 1899, he may have been up because of the horrific visions and voices that tormented him constantly, oncoming signs of what seems to have been schizophrenia. I mean, this is the reason why I was so interested in Marc DiSiverio's translation,

which we published at Vehicle Press. Marc's sense of him was that Nelligan was the first one to actually, first Canadian, first poet maybe, certainly North America, to write about, at that time, to write about his neuroses, suicide, you know, suicidal inclinations, depression. Voices. Voices, hearing voices. His famous poem, Le Vasseau d'Or, is essentially a shipwreck.

The ship is, in fact, his sense of self, his happiness. Ship of gold. She was a massive ship, hewn in heavy gold, with masts that fingered heaven on seas unknown under redundant sun with scattered hair was proud outspread venus bear but then one night she hit the huge reef in waters where the siren sings and this ghastly shipwreck tilted its keel to the depths of the chasm that immutable tomb she was a ship of, but her diaphanous flanks showed treasures over which the blasphemous sailors, spite and nausea and madness, clashed. So, when I survived this flash of storm, what about my heart, abandoned ship?

Oh, still it sinks, deep in dreams abyss. Yes. Yeah, he had it going on. Like he just, but it just all slid away, you know. It's sad. He got diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 19 and I got diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was 19. We have a lot in common.

That's why I wanted to, one of the reasons I want to translate him. I felt akin to him, you know. Quick editorial note here, when I met up with Mark, he'd been going through a difficult patch in his own mental health, and it didn't make sense to take on the stress of a radio interview, but he was able to read out loud from his book, which is called Ship of Gold, The Essential Poems of Emil Nelligan. Carmen Starnino was his editor. Mark is someone who I feel sees Nelligan as a kindred spirit because his own art and need to write poetry has kind of cost him too, a little bit, I feel.

But also oddly kept him alive, maybe. I think that's how he would see it too. We've had conversations about this. Yeah, I think on some level, for me, I've always been drawn to the Plaths and the Hughes and the... Meaning? Can you just... Yeah, meaning people whose drive to write poetry comes out of a need to sort of harness energies and forces

that can't be harnessed otherwise. It's a way of tapping into a kind of mythic scriptural sense of what language is. I've always seen that as a kind of high watermark. I'm not sure I've ever achieved it. But certainly like... Maybe it's a relief if your wife and family

have never achieved it. Maybe. But you know, there is a cost to any kind of decision to pursue an art. There is a kind of selfishness to it, a need to separate yourself from others. And it needs to pursue it even in the face of financial loss, career loss, societal loss. Like, there is certainly better things to do than spend your time writing sonnets, you know, or book-length poems on, like, you know, winter or whatever it is. Like, on some level, there is something deeply absurd about this need of ours to write poems.

I think Nellie Gane redeems it a little bit. One sees him and sees the kind of seismic effect he has had on Quebec. And you think, well, even if I don't get to that point, this is why one does it. You're a part of this tradition. Something that has a kind of thunderbolt effect on people. How did you come across him? I think the same way a lot of people do,

which is in a used bookstore. Yeah, it was unlike anything I had read. Néle Gant obviously appealed to me because of that doomed sensibility. I have to say, now that I've read more of him, the work is extraordinary in French. It's a little uneven

and extremely hard to translate into English. In French, there's something ecstatic, something sort of incantatory. Once you carry it over into English, it feels hyperbolic, super saturated. Sometimes it can be hard to see what the value is.

Could just be an overwrought teenager. It could, yeah. And some of the work is. It's just really overwrought. But some of the more famous poems, like Les Vesseux d'Or and La Romance de Vingt, The Romance of Wine, you can almost get a sense,

if the translation is in sync enough, get a sense of what it is that really excited his contemporaries also i hear or read i hear he was a terrific reader like he was really good i think it was a little monster vein was the one he read and then the crowd hoisted him up on his shoulders and took him home that was his very last public appearance and then he broke down. Next, I would like to recite the Romance Du Vin or the Wine Song. All things mingle in the brilliance of gaiety, and the chorus of the songbirds, like my sharded fancies, proclaim a prelude through my open window. O beautiful beautiful evening. Oh, joyous May evening. An offish organ beats out cold monotonies and sun rays like purple swords

pierce the heart of the dying day. I am happy. I am happy. Pour red wine in the singing crystal. Pour it again and forever that I may forget the funerals of my days, the hate I feel from malevolent masses. I am happy. I am happy. vive le vin et l'art. Oh no, I too had dreams of writing verses worth reciting, lines of distant

autumn breezes passing in the fog. It's in this fear of bitter jeers to be a heartful poet, object of scorn, born to be fathomed by only the moonlight and storms girls i drink to you who laugh at my path where sublimity smiles with open arms and above all i drink to you moody proud men who despise me who shall not shake my held out hand while the gloryful heavens are flooded with stars while the psalm now resounds for the spring's next revival i have not cried for the dying of day and i groped forth through my gloomy youth i am happy i am happy hooray for these nights in may and i am madly happy songs the drunkenness could it be that i'm happy with living is my heart finally healed from loving i am happy i am happy clocks now strike, wind smells of night,

and while wine flows in the ray-flinging waves, I am happy, so happy with my booming belly laughs, so happy I fear I will cry. It was part of the pleasure of reading these poems in solitude, of bathing in this melancholy. This is Pascal Brisset, a prophet McGill. de lire ces poèmes-là dans la solitude, de baigner sans doute dans cette mélancolie. This is Pascal Brisset, a prophet McGill. He just said part of the pleasure of reading Émile Nélegant is to do so in solitude and just bathe in the melancholy of it.

Le vaisseau d'or, Émile Nélegant. Ce fut un grand vaisseau taillé dans l'or massif. Ses mâts touchaient l'azur sur des mers inconnues. La cyprine d'amour, cheveux épars, chair nue, s'étalait à sa proue, au soleil excessif. Excuse me, French. Pascal is the author of a scholarly work, Nelligan in All His States. He discovered Nelligan at the right time, while he was still an adolescent himself.

Very important writer for a moody adolescent. still an adolescent himself. Oh, my God. Émile Néligan a été très important pour l'adolescent ténébreux. Very important writer for a moody adolescent. Un peu maudit à sa façon que j'étais. A bit accursed as I was. C'était des poèmes

qu'on lisait pour soi. Cela étant dit, rapidement, ce sont des poèmes également qui incitent à écrire. Poems that you read

for yourself and soon, poems that get you writing. I committed several poems in an elegant style, and I certainly showed these to my young fellows. La solitude était brisée the sharing of young people. The solitude is kind of broken by sharing it with other young people. And Emile Neligan did that too. He was a mopey teenager up in his room,

but he also made friends and took part in public poetry readings. He even won a few loyal fans who really got him. A young, liberal, literary insurgency getting their hands on books from revolutionary France. The works of Victor Hugo and Baudelaire, exactly the people that the Bishop of Montreal had sworn to stop Canadians from reading. We're going to need a better translator for this part.

It was all the youth, not just Nelligan. All these youth who idolized France from afar and had only one goal, to leave for France to spend months at least, or years. Young people who read books, who truly wanted to find themselves and reconnect with French culture. Nelligan's style of writing, very symbolic, It really allows us to reconnect with French culture. Nelligan's style of writing, very symbolic, not too concerned with whether everything makes literal sense, this was following the example of a group of Parisian writers from the recent decades,

Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud being one of the original poets Modi, his elder colleague Paul Verlaine had recently coined the term to praise Rimbaud and a few others. He was doing it to contrast them with the types of writers who go about with society's blessing. Anyway, as Ian Allaby tells me, Emile was... To a certain extent, imitating his French poetry heroes. There's a story of a Parisian critic who, I guess, had come over here. He must have been in Montreal. And what's the story there? Demarchi. His breakdown in 1899

is often portrayed as stemming from a bad review he got in a Monde d'Illustre from a critic who went by the name of Demarchi. Now, there's not much known about Demarchi and it has even been claimed that it was a nom de plume of somebody else, somebody who might even have known Nelligan. But all of that speculation, like around Nelligan, there's a lot of speculation. We think this guy was French? French from Paris. French from Paris. That's right. Which would be

one of the things that would wound Nelligan deeply because his great ambition was to produce a book of poetry in Paris. That was what he was focused on really for much of his poetic existence. Demarchi thought, or at least wrote, that Nelligan was a mediocre poet. Nelligan belonged to a club which was called the Literary Club of Montreal. And they had open sessions. The public was invited. That was where Nelligan, for at least half a dozen times, presented his poetry.

And each time, as far as I know, de Marchi gave him a poor review. But anyway, it so happens that in March of 1899, one of de Marchi's bad reviews of Nelligan seemed to cut more deeply than ever and sent Nelligan into a tailspin. And for the subsequent summer,

Nelligan's psychological condition deteriorated. And by August, Nelligan was in an asylum. Was de Marchi right? Was he a mediocre poet? No, time has proven that Nelligan was not mediocre. Damarschi's point was that Nelligan borrowed from here and there. I say he was a teenager, basically. Of course he's borrowing. But that doesn't ruin the poetry at all.

Blaming Emile's mental health breakdown on a snobby, dismissive Parisian critic adds human drama and meaning. It makes it a more satisfying story for why Canada was robbed of the great poems Nelligan might have gone on to write in adulthood. The bad guy who will intern, who will be the cause of this madness or this internment, so it will change. This is Pascal Brissett saying that the bad guy, or the force driving Emile into madness, then locking him away for the rest of his life, this varies with who's telling the story. We tell his story again, but we tell it a little differently,

by playing the role of the bad guy to this one, to that one. So we can read the dominant ideology of an era through the way she spoke of Nelligan. celui-ci à celui-là. Donc on peut lire l'idéologie dominante d'une époque à travers la manière dont elle a parlé de Nelligan. Essentially, you could read the dominant ideology of a time period by looking at how they were telling Nelligan's story and blaming this person or that person for his downfall. And interestingly, Michel Tremblay's opera plot and the movie about Émile Nelligan both came out in 1991, right after the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord, very much in the build-up to the second referendum on Quebec independence. And in both

plots, they pin the blame pretty squarely on Émile's English-speaking dad. Fight me back. Don't you just stand there and fight me back. Arrête, Dave. Je t'en supplie, arrête. Don't touch me. Don't you ever touch me. Emile! The first person in Nelligan's life who will play the role of bad guy, who's going to imprison him, who's going to sign that document committing him, it's the father, the anglophone father. I'm still sleeping.

Don't make me come back when you've found yourself a job as a latrine cleaner, a rubbish collector, a coal man, anything. Don't come back into this house until you've found yourself a job. Old Mr. Nelligan finally loses his patience and he gets Émile locked up in the Saint-Benoît asylum, run by the Brothers of Charity. What you see really is the Anglophone father using the power of the church to put him away

because Émile disturbs him. We are the bad guys. Yeah, you are the bad guys. Again, you... In the myth of Émile Nelligan, the poet becomes a symbol and a martyr. He's not just someone who sacrificed everything for his art. He's not just someone who sacrificed everything for his art. He's somebody who was sacrificed. When talking about Nelligan, his story, and those who locked him up, you're also talking about Quebec's rise, and the sacrifice that was needed to rise, into modernity in literature.

needed to rise into modernity in literature. When the École littéraire turned its back on the orthodox, patriotic, and didactic poetry that defined French-Canadian literature in the last half of the 19th century, it really turned its back on tradition. We're back to Andrea Cebisky and what she was trying to tell me about literature mattering. The École littéraire, in my view, anticipates the arrival onto the scene

of the artistic movement of the 1940s known as les automatistes, the automatists who published a famous manifesto in 1948 known as the Refus Global, translated into English as the Global Refusal. And this manifesto rejected the influence of the Catholic Church not only on art and literature, but also on French-Canadian self-understanding. And one of the lines from the Refus Global that has always stuck in my mind since I first read it

was the line, to hell with holy water and the French-Canadian touc. I can't wear a touc ever since and I can't... All they have against the touc. I know, the poor touc. They're't wear a touque ever since. All they have against the touque. I know, the poor touque. They're rejecting not only the Catholic Church, but traditional imagery on French Canadian self-understanding. And so I see the École littéraire as paving the way for the arrival onto the scene of the 1960s.

Today, Emil Nelligan's story could be symbolic of something else. I mean, this is supposedly one of Canada's quote-unquote most famous poets, and in my social circle anyway, almost no one seems to have heard of him. I mean, I think he should be known from coast to coast. I think one of the reasons he's not known is the two solitudes issue. But there's a lot of French-Canadian stuff that is just not known in English Canada. But English Canada at that time very much oriented towards London, now very much oriented towards LA or New York.

And I think that it might get worse. I don't think that there's a chance that we'll discover French Canadian culture and absorb it. I don't think that'll happen because in English Canada, the demographics are changing and there might

not be that much interest anymore in consulting the Quebec situation. So personally, I'm not optimistic. It would be great if we found a new love for Quebec. Maybe they have to threaten to separate again.

Well, and there is no figure for Quebec, maybe they have to threaten to separate again. Well, yeah. And there is no figure like him in Canadian letters anywhere. And so, yeah, you can understand why he's become such a mythic figure. I think all national literatures need somebody to remind us that, at its heart, poetry is unpredictable, volatile, and he does that. I'd like one more, and then I'm done. I know you're getting probably a little... My fingers are getting cold.

Oh, is that? Okay, okay. I'll do a quick one, okay? Yeah. Glooms. My spirit's sorrow slings her lengthy veils. The cawing of the crows is latent now. I dream that golden ship with all its sails sunk in starry seas were forever spent oh when will i like a crucifix push out between my fingers

the old and dear peace whose voice and song i never hear rise upon this groaning life of doubt. I would like one lengthy dream for my whole soul under a cypress tree to lie in a corner grave my beautiful childhood tomb but I can't. I feel cheerless arms that loom.

They raise me to the real whose torches fumes embrace in the dead of night my freakish glooms. Thanks, Bob. That was fantastic. You are listening to The Passion of Émile Néligan, Canada's saddest poet, by Ideas producer Tom Howell. Thanks to Stéphane Basque at CBC Moncton.

Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast. If you liked the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive. There are 300 past episodes there for you to choose from. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.