I finally tracked down a book of Rollinat's poetry that is translated into English:
Rollinat: A Hundred Poems from Les Nevroses translated by Philip Higson. Ligotti cited Rollinat as one of the Decadent authors whose work he enjoyed. He also translated a few of his poems for small press horror zines. I checked
Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism and
Twentieth Century Literary Criticism published by Gale Research (where TL used to work) and I couldn't find Rollinat in either series. Perhaps Tom tried to make a case for his inclusion but was unsuccessful. (Pure speculation, of course.)
b. 12/29/1846 Chateauroux - d. 10/20/1903
A pianist, an actor, and a poet, Rollinat often put his poetry to music, singing them to groups of friends and sometimes large audiences.
On Rollinat performing. (from the introductory material of
Rollinat: A Hundred Poems from Les Nevroses translated and compiled by Dr. Philip Higson)
"I have rarely seen an artist as earnest and sincere as Rollinat or exteriorizing themselves as he did. Whether it was in a salon in front of a hundred people or at home in the company of one or two friends, once he had taken his seat at the piano nothing else existed for him any more. He was completely taken over by his works and sang no longer for others but for himself, with all his inspiration, all his art, all his being.
And it was not one, two or three items that he performed, but ten or fifteen, without stopping, without noticing anyone, singing always from memory, and sometimes improvising when the spirit moved him. And he could keep that up untiringly for hours. As for us, we would listen, silent, motionless, stirred and shaken, till the moment when at length he chose to stop. Then he would look at us, as if emerging from a dream and almost surprised to find us there. No-one uttered a word to him, least of all a compliment, but people shook his hand and then everyone went home. Nothing could ever obliterate such impressions."
The poet's friend, Haraucourt, another Hydrophobe, draws us still closer to the experience of a Rollinat performance:
"In his habitué of hell escaped from Dante or the Kingdom of Darkness. Everything reveals the agony of an obsession: his pale mask with clean finely-drawn features framed in the halo of a dark mane which shook as if buffeted repeatedly by fitful shudders, his electrifying pupils, his contorted mouth with which he frightened even himself...
Seated before the commonplace piano, beneath his fingers, became a lyre from another world, he twisted round and looked at you as he sang: the excruciating fear that filled him flowed forth in magnetic emanations which entered into you, and the most immoderate sceptics and jesters, when their eyes had encountered his, forgot for a whole evening how to laugh, and took home with them the terrors of a mysterious beyond..."
"This psychic contagion worked all the better for not being deliberate; far from playing with a force, he was as much a plaything as the rest of the company. It only overpowered the others so effectively because it possessed him too, and completely so; a demon dwelt in him to which he was perpetually a prey, and he carried it through the city, through the fields, always, like an errant Prometheus sauntering with his internal eagle and setting men's hair on end when he happened to raise his cloak and let them glimpse the drama of his wound."
The death of his wife from rabies made him lose his mind. He attempted suicide several times before being committed to an asylum until his death from cancer. He is buried in the Saint-Denis cemetery in Chateauroux.
Les Nevroses is divided into five sections:
SOULS
DESIRES
REFUGES
SPECTRES
SHADOWS
It is impossible to judge a poet from translation so I won't even try, but the majority of poems in the first three chapters of this book were not to my taste. Apparently George Sand, a friend of Rollinat, advised him to 'lighten up' if he wanted to find a more receptive audience.
Les Nevroses was only his second book of poetry. Judging by other comments in various articles I have read , his poetry got darker in later volumes. I did enjoy the last two chapters of the book. The earlier posted poem "The Somnabulist", translated by Ligotti, came from the chapter SPECTRES.
Here are a couple of poems that I like from
Les Nevroses .
The Portrait
To Fernand Desmoulin
She sucked life at a beggar-woman's breast
From when first nursed, she quaffed with ghastly zest
Sanguinolent and all but poisonous whey.
Chill air of a foul slum with walls soot-grey
Coarsened the lungs her freezing frame within;
Through the sparse harrowing showcase of her skin,
Her mother could count each poor little bone.
And yet she grew: those sorriest spindles known,
Her limbs, by fever stunted and devoured,
Hardened with a goat' s nimbleness were dowered.
The shoulders broadened and the wasted bust
Forth above hips of steel was slimly thrust;
The tears grew sharp till clothes tensed at their tips,
And her green face that bore such pallid lips
Gained the vague stupor and harsh eeriness
Of a dejected spectral loveliness.
From her thin cranium where afflictions swarm
Burst forth weird hair in an unbridled storm,
Massed ebony, dense twisted, wild, that glints
By turns with diapered, bluish, violet tints,
Imbued with tremors to mere earth quite strange,
An ultramundane mane where mysteries range.
And her eyes, kept by horror opened wide,
Luminous sapphires, where moist sorrows bide,
Each dying of ennui in its bistre ring,
Her eyes are sinisterly ravishing!
Gas Jets
To Jules Levy
Gas jets that in grim alleys glow
Tinge pick-pockets of ragged guise
And figures that soliloquize
As, saffron-yellowed, on they go
Abettors of each lean-faced foe
Who hunts the gold-hung Gents as prize,
Gas jets that in grim alleys glow
Tinge pick-pockets of ragged guise
And blow of fist, and dagger-blow,
Blown whistles and ambiguous cries,
Dread specrtes and outlandish spies,
All as their mystery's witness know
Gas jets that in grim alleys glow
