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.