The Intelligence of Flowers , livre ebook

State University of New York Press - Maurice Maeterlinck ,
traduit par Philip Mosley

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56 pages

English

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Winner of the 2008 Prix de la Traduction Littéraire presented by French Community of Belgium

The second of Maeterlinck's four celebrated nature essays—along with those on the life of the bee, ant, and termite—"The Intelligence of Flowers" (1907) represents his impassioned attempt to popularize scientific knowledge for an international audience. Writing with characteristic eloquence, Maeterlinck asserts that flowers possess the power of thought without knowledge, a capacity that constitutes a form of intelligence. Appearing one hundred years after the first publication, Philip Mosley's new translation of the original French essay, and the related essay "Scents," maintains the verve of Maeterlinck's prose and renders it accessible to the present-day reader. This is a book for those who are excited by creative encounters between literature and science as well as current debates on the relationship of humankind to the natural world.
Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Intelligence of Flowers

Scents

On the Publication History of Maeterlinck’s Botanical Essays

Select Bibliography

Sujets

Philosophy of science

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	05 décembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780791479216
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1498€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Intelligence of Flowers
The Intellingence of Flowers
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
Translated and with an Introduction by Philip Mosley
COVER PHOTOGRAPH : Orchid No. 1 , 2005, ANDREW SOVJANI used by permission
Published by STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS Albany
2008 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS www.sunypress.edu
Production and book design, Laurie Searl Marketing, Susan M. Petrie
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Maeterlinck, Maurice, 1862-1949. [Intelligence des fleurs. English] The intelligence of flowers / Maurice Maeterlinck; translated and introduction by Philip Mosley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7914-7273-6 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7914-7274-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Botany. I. Mosley, Philip. II. Title.
PQ2625.A4I513 2008 844 .8-dc22 2007001782
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I NTRODUCTION
T HE I NTELLIGENCE OF F LOWERS
S CENTS
O N THE P UBLICATION H ISTORY OF M AETERLINCK S B OTANICAL E SSAYS
S ELECT B IBLIOGRAPHY
Acknowledgments
Initial work on the translation was facilitated by a residency at the European College of Literary Translators in Seneffe, Belgium. Thanks are due to Fran oise Wuilmart, director of the college, and to Jean-Luc Outers, Senior Literary Counselor in the Belgian Ministry of the French Community, Brussels. Support for travel to this residency came from the office of Academic Affairs at the Worthington Scranton campus of Penn State University, and from the Office of International Programs at Penn State. Thanks also to Frans De Haes at the Archives and Museum of Literature, Brussels, for his assistance. I am grateful to Elinor Shaffer and Ashton Nichols for their helpful comments on an early draft of the introduction. Finally, thanks to Shu-ching, my wife, who helped in many ways.
Introduction
Relatively neglected since the mid-twentieth century, the Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911, was once one of the most widely read authors in the world. He was appreciated particularly in Britain, the United States, and Germany. Though a writer in French of Flemish origin, he remained rather less influenced by French literature and culture than by those of Germany and Britain, which conformed more closely to his Flemish sensibility and Germanic cast of mind. After the end of World War I he stayed briefly in the limelight, notably touring the United States and spending time in Hollywood. Yet his best work was already well behind him. Another brief spell of public attention accompanied his return to the United States, where he lived from 1940 to 1947, but after his death in 1949 he became for the most part a forgotten figure.
We remember Maeterlinck today as a symbolist pioneer of modern drama and as a poet. His extraordinary literary success came firstly from the innovative and strangely atmospheric plays he wrote in the last decade of the nineteenth century, among them Princess Maleine (1889), The Intruder (1890), and The Blind (1890). Pelleas and Melisande (1892) inspired a famous opera by Claude Debussy (1902) and was also set to music by Gabriel Faur , Jean Sibelius, and Arnold Schoenberg. In the next phase of his career, beginning with the twentieth century, Maeterlinck showed major changes in his artistic interests and personal outlook, while bolstering his dramatic reputation with The Blue Bird (1909), his most enduring theatrical accomplishment.
Maeterlinck s plays won him international acclaim, and he proceeded to cement his fame with The Treasure of the Humble (1896) and Wisdom and Destiny (1898), two collections of philosophical essays, and a hugely successful book-length essay, The Life of the Bee (1901). Maeterlinck proved to be an accomplished essayist, and it was this part of his literary output, rather than his extraordinary plays, that largely maintained his global reputation, fixing him in the hearts and minds of most of his readers to the greatest extent over time. The Life of the Bee , his first extended study of the workings of the natural world, sold over a quarter of a million copies, including translations into many languages. It led to three other studies of its kind: the eponymous essay in The Intelligence of Flowers (1907) that forms the main part of the present translation; The Life of the Termite (1926), which sold eighty thousand copies in two years; and The Life of the Ant (1930), of which seventy thousand copies were printed by its publisher. The Intelligence of Flowers plus a related essay on scents, also translated here, comprise about one-third of an original volume of eleven essays embracing various topics from boxing to immortality. In this respect The Intelligence of Flowers differs from the other three works on nature, each of which is an entire volume on its subject divided into subtitled sections.
Given that Maeterlinck s essays assured him of a vast readership long after his plays had all but faded from public view, it is revealing of current critical judgment that he is not included in a recent one thousand-page encyclopedia of the essay as literary genre. This is all the more surprising, since Maeterlinck owed his Nobel Prize mainly to his essay collections. The Swedish Academy had twice refused Maeterlinck the prize on account of its resistance to the symbolism and fatalism of his early work, but in 1911 it finally recognized his exceptional impact on modern literature.
Maeterlinck s mastery of the essay form corresponded to a great increase in the popularity of this genre in French in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Speculative in the nineteenth-century tradition and imbued with an elegant and idiosyncratic touch, Maeterlinck s free-flowing style of personal expression was ideal for his time. By understanding the essay form as an ideal means of conveying philosophical ideas and specialized knowledge in an appealing way, Maeterlinck conceived The Intelligence of Flowers as an intellectual vulgate presented with the craft and sensitivity of a poet. Balancing the scientific and artistic, emotional and cerebral, specific and general, his essay is a botanical tour de force written in lyrical and accessible prose.

Before introducing The Intelligence of Flowers in more detail, it may be useful to consider briefly the debates on the relationships of literature to science in general and of literature to botany in particular.
Work within the humanities since the 1960s, much of it under the sway of structuralist and poststructuralist theories, has brought fresh insights into the ways in which the sciences and the humanities may interact. Many scholars argue that the gap between scientists and nonscientists has never been quite as wide as has often been suggested. We may see the questioning of objectivity in quantum physics by scientists, for instance, as concurrent with the questioning of the nature of scientific enquiry by philosophers, historians, literary critics, and art critics in the light of new propositions about meaning, discourse, and textuality. These scholars look askance at a highly polarized model, recognizing instead a continuing exchange and encounter in the movements across artistic and scientific fields as well as in the construction of their respective discourses.
The emergence of several new critical methods may help to regenerate interest in Maeterlinck s work on nature. Stimulated by the liberal tenor of much poststructuralist theory, ecocriticism (or green criticism) is an interdisciplinary methodology that has burgeoned since the late 1980s. Broadly concerned with interconnections between nature and culture, ecocriticism has spawned in turn a literary subdivision known as ecoromanticism, which studies Romantic writers views of the natural world. Ecoromanticism is relevant to the study of Maeterlinck s nature writing in view of the great influence on him of Romantic philosophy. An alternative view that challenges relativistic approaches to science and the humanities has come from sociobiologists, who believe that art has a biological basis. A literary subdivision of this school of thought, known as biopoetics (or Darwinian criticism), shares this belief.
For the literary scholar seeking further evidence of interdisciplinary fruitfulness there are several other good starting points: the evolution of science fiction, or the reconnection of literature and medicine within the medical humanities, or the successful communication of scientific knowledge in sophisticated journalism and in mass-market books by figures such as Edward O. Wilson, Stephen Hawking, and Stephen Jay Gould. This popular dissemination of science-a phenomenon referred to as the Third Culture-represents in many respects the survival of a nineteenth-century tradition of popularized knowledge of a kind that Maeterlinck recast in his own essays on insects and plants.

If we trace botanical science to its origins in ancient Greek philosophical discourse, we find that Theophrastus and Dioscorides established the first taxonomies, while Plato attributed desires to plants in a foreshadowing of Arthur Schopenhauer s theory of will in nature. In Roman times Virgil and Lucretius were among the earliest literary figures to utilize the imagery of plants and