Joseph Delteil

Joseph Delteil (French pronunciation: [ʒozɛf dɛltɛj]; 20 April 1894 – 16 April 1978) was a 20th-century French writer and poet.

Biography

Joseph Delteil was born on the farm of La Pradeille, from a woodcutter-charcoal father and a "buissonnière" mother. Joseph Delteil spent the first four years of his childhood at the Borie (construction of dry stones) of Guillamau, 30 kilometres south of Carcassonne, in the Val de Dagne. Of this hovel, today there remain only stumps of walls, which one can always see while hiking on the "Path in poetry" at the entrance of which one reads "Here the time goes on foot" created by Magalie Arnaud, mayor of Villar-en-Val, and her friends to honour the memory of the poet.

In 1898, his father purchased a vineyard plot at Pieusse (30 kilometres further on the side of Limoux). This was, according to Delteil, his "native village", in the heart of the land of the Blanquette de Limoux, "where the landscape grows, from the forest to the sun, from Occitan to French ". He remained there until his Certificat d'études primaires (1907), then he joined the Saint-Louis school in Limoux. He was then a student at the Collège Saint-Stanislas (small seminary) in Carcassonne.

The publication in 1922 of his first novel Sur le fleuve Amour attracted the attention of Louis Aragon and Andre Breton for whom this work "compensated for so many devils to the body."¹ Delteil collaborated with the magazine Literature and participated in the drafting of the pamphlet Un cadavre written in response to the national funeral of Anatole France (October 1924). Breton quotes him in his Surrealist Manifesto as one of those who have done "an act of absolute surrealism."²

On 24 May 1924, at the "Soirée du Claridge" where the former Russian Page Corps was giving a charity ball, a fashion show with costumes by Sonia Delaunay illustrated a poem by Joseph Delteil . "The appearance of this group raised the applause of the social gathering".