Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau

For the editor of the Lettres, Michel Biron, "de Saint-Denys Garneau is proving to be a remarkable letter-writer, both in terms of the quality and the quantity of letters written in barely a dozen years". In 2020, we discover "a fascinating letter writer who puts the best of himself into his letters, but also a complex, funny and endearing character" writes Biron, "so different from the character frozen in the role of victim that [we] attributed to him, also so different from an austere and sad Garneau [...]". His letters are “both a sort of novel […] and a form of essay". They tell "the story of a life with an intensity, a lucidity and an acuity superior to anything that Garneau's friends or commentators on his work have attempted to do" and this life, "vibrates everywhere.".

Garneau's poetry has also been translated into Spanish by Luis Vicente de Aguinaga, and was published in 2007 as Todos y cada uno.

On September 8, 2003, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the National Library of Canada, Canada Post released a special commemorative series, "The Writers of Canada", with a design by Katalina Kovats, featuring two English-Canadian and two French-Canadian stamps. Three million stamps were issued. The two French-Canadian authors chosen were De Saint-Denys Garneau and his cousin, Anne Hébert.

The distinction between writings intended for publication and private writings hardly works in the case of Garneau: the Works brought together in a first edition of 1,320 pages in 1971 had moreover not been published during the author's lifetime, whether it is the "found" poems, the Journal or the Letters. Biron remarks: "Almost all of Garneau's writings, this is an exceptional fact in the history of modern literature, escapes the public sphere.". For François Hébert, de Saint-Denys Garneau “was able to say the essential in a few words, with a terrifying and admirable authenticity” then, “shut it up, to let us find it again. ».

Also in 1962, the Canadian poet F. R. Scott translated ten of Garneau's poems into English for his book, Saint-Denys Garneau and Anne Hebert. Glassco published his translated Complete Poems of Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau in 1975. Glassco's book won the Canada Council Award for translation that year.

After Garneau's death, his unpublished poems were collected by Élie under the title Les Solitudes, and published in 1949 together with Regards... as Poésies complètes: Regards et jeux dans l'espace, Les solitudes. Garneau's "influence only became apparent after the publication of his Poésies complètes in 1949," says the Dictionary of Literary Biography. "Since that time the number of studies on his life and work has multiplied considerably.". No writer has been the object of so much publications in Quebec. Nowaday Garneau is considered the precursor of contemporary French-Canadian literature.

Yvon Rivard observes: “De Saint-Denys Garneau died at the age of thirty-one, in 1943. Since his death, he has known a long purgatory from which he has been slowly emerging for several years [...] Most writers Québécois preferred to De Saint-Denys Garneau's 'bad poor' (cf. Œuvres in prose, p. 623.) works of revolt, liberation, affirmation. [...] It is understandable that many turned away from this poet who refused all the subterfuges and all the consolations that literature, religion or the nation offered him. De Saint-Denys Garneau does not write to affirm his singularity, he writes to try to find an answer to the only question that matters [...] When he stops publishing, it is not out of revolt or disappointment, it is that silence appeared to him as the only way to be. ".

Garneau wrote poetry prolifically between 1934 and 1937; on one day alone (October 22, 1937), he reportedly wrote 13 poems. In his lifetime, though, he published only one slim volume, the 28-poem Regards et jeux dans l'espace. "Radical in its form, with its unrhymed lines of various lengths, its lack of punctuation and its broken syntax.".

Regards et Jeux dans l'espace was published in March 1937 and received a rather cold reception from critics, which (we like to believe,) would have deeply shaken the author. However "contrary to what has been said, Garneau is in no way discouraged by the critical reception: What is to be feared here is the silence he wrote. Also, a month after the publication, "he even undertook, which is completely surprising on his part, an advertising 'campaign' to publicize his book and even then, Garneau did not foresee any particular difficulty in terms of critical reception".

Garneau's 1935-39 diary was published in Montréal in 1954 under the title Journal, edited by Élie and Le Moyne and with a preface by Gilles Marcotte. Glassco published his translation, The Journal of Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, in 1962.

In 1934, Garneau developed a rheumatic heart problem and discontinued his studies. He then devoted his time to writing poems, painting and music. In 1937, Regards et jeux dans l'espace, his collection of poems, was published. [...] he died in 1943 of a heart attack, after canoeing alone."

De Saint-Denys Garneau lived intensely, especially in the period from 1929 to 1938, during which he threw himself headlong into writing. Although the influence of short studies in philosophy is felt in his articles and essays (Œuvres en prose), his Journal 1929–1939 and his many Letters, "all his studies would be nothing if de Saint-Denys Garneau had done no work of personal training. For him, the "intellectual" quest is based on the ontological quest [that is to say, on a "search for being"], which embraces the spiritual and artistic adventure" writes the editor of the Works in prose Giselle Huot. Also, "his work cannot be "understood" or [worse] "explained" without giving a large part to the ontological adventure, which is, at least as far as de Saint-Denys Garneau is concerned, the alpha and the omega.".

Between 1929 and 1939, perhaps later, de Saint-Denys Garneau kept his "Journal" consisting of about seven notebooks. According to François Dumont: "The complete edition of the Journal 1929–1939 raised various obstacles until 2012, in particular censorship and the desire of friends to prune and classify the texts according to their aesthetic principles", while de Saint-Denys Garneau himself would have immediately looked for a disorder in his texts. He adds that: "The diversity of the genres practiced and the literary dimension of several of them mean that the word 'diary' does not reflect its particular nature". In attempting to characterize the forms that de Saint-Denys Garneau experimented with in the notebooks that have come down to us—from self-examination, fiction and the letter, to meditations on art, and poetry: "It emerges from this examination that Garneau progressively linked reflective discourse with the openings offered by poetry and fiction: a dynamic develops between the life summary and the sketch, leading to a form of writing that incorporates various aspects of his Diary”.

In 1925, Garneau studied painting at Montreal's Collège des beaux-arts with Paul-Emile Borduas, Jean Palardy, Marjorie Smith and Jean-Paul Lemieux. He won a bronze medal and second prize for a work of art. In 1934, he exhibited some paintings at the Galerie des Arts in Montréal and, in 1937, he presented his painting "Sky Fall" at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Garneau moved to Montréal with his parents in 1923. There, he studied the classics at three Jesuit colleges: Sainte-Marie, Jean de Brebeuf and Loyola.

Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau was the grandson of the poet Alfred Garneau and great-grandson of the historian Francois-Xavier Garneau. He spent his early years at his family's ancestral manor (which his mother had purchased) in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault (now Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier), Quebec, where his cousin Anne Hébert was born in 1916.

Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau (June 13, 1912 – October 24, 1943) was a French Canadian poet and painter, who "was posthumously hailed as a herald of the Quebec literary renaissance of the 1950s". He has been called Quebec's "first truly modern poet".