Synopsis
The Bells of Bruges is a study of obsessive love which is steeped in the melancholy beauty of Bruges.
There are three loves in the life of Joris Borluut, the town carillonneur of Bruges. He marries the fiery Barbara, whose dark beauty is a reminder of Belgium's Spanish heritage. Repelled by her harshness and violence, he starts an affair with her sister, the gentle, soulful, fair-haired Godelieve. When her sister discovers their affair, Godelieve enters a Beguine convent and Joris devotes himself to his first love, the old city of Bruges.
'Rodenbach's contribution to the fin-de-siecle imaginary was the dead city. In poetry and in prose, in his short stories and journalism, it is the dead city - and Bruges above all - that he dramatizes and celebrates… The language question occurs in The Bells of Bruges, along with an unexpectedly wide range of other social, political and economic issues. The novel appeared in 1897, five years after Rodenbach's hugely successful Bruges-la-morte. Where Bruges-la-morte was a short, poetic psycho-drama of death and eroticism, The Bells of Bruges (given here in Mike Mitchell’s nuanced but unfussy translation) is a long and crowded novel that touches on everything from nineteenth-century obsessions with progress and decline, to tourism and town planning… There are intertwined plots as there are in Bruges-la-morte. Borluut is caught between two women, the dark, fiery Barbara and the ethereal, pale Godelieve. Between them they represent, on the one hand, the earthy, Latin side of Belgian culture (Barbara is more than once referred to as a Spanish beauty, an allusion to Flander's history as a Spanish colony), and its Nordic, mystical side, Rodenbach's obsessive symmetry is such that he provides Borluut with bells that also represent this: a small, clear, tuneful bell and a large, dark bell inlaid with obscene orgiastic images, a 'bronze dress' up which he loses himself. Sex and death are never far away in Rodenbach, either from each other or from the surface of the story. As the novel's extraordinary climax shows, The Bells of Bruges, is no exception.'
Patrick McGuinness in The Times Literary Supplement
About the Authors
Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898) born in Tournai, spent most of his time in Ghent and later Paris where like his childhood friend and Flemish compatriot Emile Verhaeren, he rubbed shoulders with all the main players of the symbolist fin de siecle. But Rodenbach is forever associated with Bruges, the location for his most celebrated and enduring work. He also wrote a number of collections of poetry of which ‘Le Règne du silence’ from 1891 in many ways prefigures Bruges-La-Morte and The Bells of Bruges his prose masterpieces.
For many years an academic with a special interest in Austrian literature and culture, Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995.
He has published 100 translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink's 5 novels and The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy. His translation of Rosendorfer's Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years.
His translations have been shortlisted 4 times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize: including his translation of The Bells of Bruges.
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