Münchausen or poetry of the absurd

Sometimes Literature grabs a real person and offers a fictionalized version so tasty that little by little, in the collective imagination, fiction supplants reality. In France, the Cyrano de Rostand obscures the real Cyrano de Bergerac! Well, the German literature, too, experienced this phenomenon in the person of Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Baron Munchausen. Born in 1720, died in 1797, this eccentric noble fought in the Russian army as a mercenary against the Turks from 1740 to 1750 before returning to Germany where he resolved to tell his adventures soldier in Russia. Collected by Rudolf Erich Raspe a rich and diverse stories, these exploits first appeared in a Berlin humor magazine, in 1781, then reworked in English in 1785, before the poet Gottfried August Bürger does this translate into German English text, adding to a solid passing personal touch and a healthy dose of satire, so the Munchausen Bürger is ultimately a crazy and poetic extrapolation of real Baron Munchausen. But it is this highly scenic version of the character that is passed to posterity!

Released in 1786, this book is a free translation which did not hesitate to redraft the original fantasy. One could even say that was inspired by the Bürger Raspe text as a single ground on which embroider, but when the result is as pleasant, why complain? The story is as autobiographical account of the adventures of Baron Munchausen, we meet when he takes the path of Russia, horseback in midwinter. The first sentence might suggest that embarks on a realistic narrative and then zou, from the second page, is poured into another dimension on which one hesitates to put a name. Humor? Farce? Wonderful? Fantastic? Onirisme? Surrealism? Poetry? Fabrications of a pathological braggart? All this at a time? Anyway, soon we find ourselves in a totally offbeat, irrational, unlikely, canularesque paradoxical, yet governed by a kind of absurd logic. Obviously, this is a strange universe, so fundamentally singular, which some may find difficult to enter, like Kafka's universe, in another genre, much darker, can be disconcerting. But if we accept this strangeness, so what amazing journey that this book and what a great character that completely crazy Baron that straddles the cannonballs fly with ducks, "ignites" the skull of a general, transforms a deer Cherry, is walking on the moon, on a galloping horse in half, killing a crocodile with a lion dance a jig in the stomach of a fish, you name it and best!

Munchausen is it a precursor of the famous Tartarin Daudet? Yes and no. Tartarin is mostly amalgam character of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. That said, it's true, the adventures of Baron sometimes have an air of tartarinade, but they are buttressed tartarinades nonsense, nonsense that prefigures, casually, Monty Python, which explains without probably why this book seduced Terry Gilliam developed Méliès- -after he wanted to make a film. In any case, these marvelously unbridled adventures are more than two centuries after their release, one of the most amazing UFO in history Literature. It seems that later on the real Baron Munchausen, embittered and ill, complained that those pages might give him an outrageously extravagant image. And yet it is this extravagance that is worth to him today to appear in the pantheon of great literary myths!