From Publishers Weekly
Like writers as diverse as William S. Burroughs and Graham Greene, the French novelist and essayist Yourcenar (1903-1987) was fascinated enough by dreams to publish a diary of hers, which has now been translated some 60 years after its French edition and expanded with her partial notes for an intended revised version. Taken from the period when she was writing her novel A Coin in Nine Hands, Yourcenar's meticulous explorations of her dream life read like prose poems, unencumbered by either Freudian interpretative rigidity or Surrealist dream idolatry. The dreams' phantasmally evocative landscapes and details are as eerie as anything in a Coleridge poem, David Lynch film or Grimm fairy tale: the stagnant pond of her oldest nightmare portending suicide, a basket she discovers containing still-beating human hearts, or a lover wrapped like a mummy in strips of cloth inscribed in indecipherable letters. Prof. Friedman's accumulation of material for a revised edition suggests that Yourcenar's half-finished personal philosophy of dreams would have encompassed color symbolism and oneiric sensuality. Her original "authenticated nocturnal adventures" are as rigorously composed as her essays, more lushly written than her fiction and underscore her work from the lucidly hallucinatory essay "The Dark Brain of Piranesi" to her nightmarish medieval novel, The Abyss. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Instead of a biography, this dream journal is Yourcenar's last work to be translated. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
The great novelist tells us what she dreams about. Between 1930 and 1936 Marguerite Yourcenar conscientiously recorded her dreams when she woke up in the morning. In 1938 she published them in France. Why? Certain obvious reasons come to mind, but they are wrong: she is not a Freudian or Jungian dream interpreter, and she thinks little of the surrealists' enthusiasm for dreams. Yourcenar, a supremely autonomous intellectual, was seeking to explore the dreamlife on her own, without help from orthodox schools of thought. What interested her was not the universalcommon to all dreamers (therefore conventional sex dreams are excluded)but the highly individual. Consequently, one could take this book as a skeleton key to the writer's inner self, though it might be more appropriate simply to take the book at face value. It collects a person's nocturnal adventures. But it does so in remarkably beautiful and acute prose: ``I do not, however, draw near him; I consider his solitude as a form of nudity that I have no right to spy on in secret.'' ``He picks up the telephone receiver and gets ready to lie the way a virtuoso prepares to play.'' The pleasure of reading her strange dreams is highly literary in a way that is simultaneously sensual and intellectual. And she proposes the idea that dreams are related more closely to the processes of memory than of the imagination. This new, first-ever English translation includes not only the 1938 publication in its entirety but also Yourcenar's substantial set of notes, mostly from the 1970s, which she made toward a planned sequel that never came to be. These notes, fragmentary as they are, are also highly engaging. The translator's preface is verbosely academic, but the high quality of his translation redeems him. This fine and unique book could help wrest our dreamlives from the Freudians and Jungians who have colonized them: ``It is not the symbol that will instruct us about man's secrets, but what we know about the man that determines the meaning of the symbols.'' -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
Dreams and Destinies, the Rosetta Stone of Marguerite Yourcenar's canon, is an intimate journal of her dreams. In Dreams and Destinies Yourcenar has provided us with the most daring, yet least conventional form of autobiography, a form that allows the reader to view her life refracted through the poetic sensibility of her own sleeping mind. In recording her dream life, Yourcenar wanders through a picture gallery of the soul, pausing before ruined cathedrals filled with candles, dark ravines that hold dead bodies, and still reflecting pools located deep inside soaring gothic churches. Her dreams are populated by men, women, and children as well as animals and mythical creatures. Available for the first time in English in the way that she intended upon her death, Dreams and Destinies is a reminder from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century that the dreams we create are with us forever.



Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French


From the Publisher
"In 1938, Dreams and Destinies made what was intended as an initial sounding of Yourcenar's oneiric strata. It is a revealing investigation of a realm not so reflectively explored since Freud's great analysis a century ago. Never reprinted, and never continued, this early probe is both lock and key of this astonishing writer's sensibility, lyrical and scholarly at once, as we have come to expect from the lucid dreamer of Hadrian's memoirs and her own." --Richard Howard


About the Author
Marguerite Yourcenar is the author of many books including Memoirs of Hadrian and The Abyss. She was the first woman ever elected to the Académie Française.

Donald Flanell Friedman is a professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at Winthrop University. He lives in South Carolina.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Dreams and Destinies, the Rosetta stone of Marguerite Yourcenar's canon, is an intimate journal of her dreams. In this book, Yourcenar writes in a daring yet unconventional autobiographical form that allows the reader to view her life as it is refracted through the poetic sensibility of her own sleeping mind. Men, women, children, animals, and mythical creatures populate her dreams as Yourcenar wanders through a picture gallery of the soul, pausing before ruined cathedrals filled with candles, dark ravines that hold dead bodies, and still reflecting pools located deep inside soaring gothic churches. Revised to include changes that she requested before her death, and now available for the first time in English, Dreams and Destinies is a reminder from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century that the dreams we create are with us forever.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Like writers as diverse as William S. Burroughs and Graham Greene, the French novelist and essayist Yourcenar (1903-1987) was fascinated enough by dreams to publish a diary of hers, which has now been translated some 60 years after its French edition and expanded with her partial notes for an intended revised version. Taken from the period when she was writing her novel A Coin in Nine Hands, Yourcenar's meticulous explorations of her dream life read like prose poems, unencumbered by either Freudian interpretative rigidity or Surrealist dream idolatry. The dreams' phantasmally evocative landscapes and details are as eerie as anything in a Coleridge poem, David Lynch film or Grimm fairy tale: the stagnant pond of her oldest nightmare portending suicide, a basket she discovers containing still-beating human hearts, or a lover wrapped like a mummy in strips of cloth inscribed in indecipherable letters. Prof. Friedman's accumulation of material for a revised edition suggests that Yourcenar's half-finished personal philosophy of dreams would have encompassed color symbolism and oneiric sensuality. Her original "authenticated nocturnal adventures" are as rigorously composed as her essays, more lushly written than her fiction and underscore her work from the lucidly hallucinatory essay "The Dark Brain of Piranesi" to her nightmarish medieval novel, The Abyss. (Dec.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Instead of a biography, this dream journal is Yourcenar's last work to be translated. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Yourcenar (1904-87) was the first woman every elected to the French Academy. In 1938 she published , a diary of her dreams as an alternative to conventional autobiography. Later she corrected and added some of the commentary and expressed a wish to have passages from two of her well know novels included in a future edition. Here it is, available for the first time in English. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews

The great novelist tells us what she dreams about. Between 1930 and 1936 Marguerite Yourcenar conscientiously recorded her dreams when she woke up in the morning. In 1938 she published them in France. Why? Certain obvious reasons come to mind, but they are wrong: she is not a Freudian or Jungian dream interpreter, and she thinks little of the surrealists' enthusiasm for dreams. Yourcenar, a supremely autonomous intellectual, was seeking to explore the dreamlife on her own, without help from orthodox schools of thought. What interested her was not the universal—common to all dreamers (therefore conventional sex dreams are excluded)—but the highly individual. Consequently, one could take this book as a skeleton key to the writer's inner self, though it might be more appropriate simply to take the book at face value. It collects a person's nocturnal adventures. But it does so in remarkably beautiful and acute prose: "I do not, however, draw near him; I consider his solitude as a form of nudity that I have no right to spy on in secret." "He picks up the telephone receiver and gets ready to lie the way a virtuoso prepares to play." The pleasure of reading her strange dreams is highly literary in a way that is simultaneously sensual and intellectual. And she proposes the idea that dreams are related more closely to the processes of memory than of the imagination. This new, first-ever English translation includes not only the 1938 publication in its entirety but also Yourcenar's substantial set of notes, mostly from the 1970s, which she made toward a planned sequel that never came to be. These notes, fragmentary as they are, are also highly engaging. The translator's prefaceis verbosely academic, but the high quality of his translation redeems him. This fine and unique book could help wrest our dreamlives from the Freudians and Jungians who have colonized them: "It is not the symbol that will instruct us about man's secrets, but what we know about the man that determines the meaning of the symbols."