On May 31, 1889, a young Belgian lawyer from a wealthy bourgeois family
in Ghent published a book of 33 poems in 155 copies. Maurice
Maeterlinck's legal career was floundering but his road to literary
greatness had begun. Long overshadowed by the plays that later won him
the Nobel Prize, Serres chaudes (Hothouses) nonetheless came to be
widely regarded as one of the cornerstones of literary Modernism after
Baudelaire. While Max Nordau soon seized upon Maeterlinck's--tumult of
images--as symptomatic of a pervasive social malaise, decades later
Antonin Artaud pronounced, "Maeterlinck was the first to introduce the
multiple riches of the subconscious into literature."
Richard Howard's translation of this quietly radical work is the first
to be published in nearly a century, and the first to accurately convey
Maeterlinck's elusive visionary force. The poems, some of them in free
verse (new to Belgium at the time), combine the decadent symbolism and
the language of dislocation that Maeterlinck later perfected in his
dramas. Hothouses reflects the influence not only of French poets
including Verlaine and Rimbaud, but also of Whitman. As for the title,
the author said it was "a natural choice, Ghent . . . abounding in
greenhouses."
The poems, whose English translations appear opposite the French
originals, are accompanied by reproductions of seven woodcuts by Georges
Minne that appeared in the original volume, and by an early prose text
by Maeterlinck imaginatively describing a painting by the
sixteenth-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel.
A feat of daring power extraordinarily immediate and inventive,
Hothouses will appeal to all lovers of poetry, and in particular to
those interested in Modernism. Maeterlinck's enormous fame may have
faded, but twentieth-century writers such as Beckett are still our
masters who testify to its undying influence.
