Schmid, Ferdinand

Ludwig Ferdinand Schmid ( German: Ludwig Ferdinand Schmid ; July 22, 1823 , Muri-Bern - March 17, 1888 , Bern ) is a Swiss poet, diplomat and businessman of German descent, who became famous under the pseudonym Dranmore and lived throughout many years in Brazil and Paris .

He moved to Switzerland from Germany in 1840 due to the death of his father; originally settled in Basel , where he became an assistant businessman. At eighteen, he wrote the first poem. Since 1843 he settled in Brazil, where he worked as a Swiss reseller, first in Santos , then in Rio de Janeiro ; He worked actively in the Deutsche Zeitung he founded in Rio de Janeiro. In Brazil, managed to get rich, traveled to North America and St. Helena.

In 1851 he made a tour of Europe. In 1860, his first work, Poetische Fragmente, went unnoticed. In 1865, he married a Frenchwoman from Rouen and in 1868 moved with her to Paris, where his poems Kaiser Maximilian (1868) and Requiem (1869) were published; but only "Gesammelte Dichtungen" (1873) made the name of Dranmore known to a wide audience. In 1874, for financial reasons, Schmid returned to Brazil, but could no longer be as successful in commercial matters as before; as a result, he returned to Switzerland in 1887 as a poor man and settled in Bern, where he died a year later, but was awarded a solemn funeral.

His philosophical poetry, colored by joyless pessimism (he was called the "singer of death"), approached the prevailing mood and, both with its motives and the perfection of form, impressed society, especially young people, and at the same time influenced German lyrics. In Russia, Dranmore was translated by P. Weinberg (“Domestic Notes”, 1876, No. 2, with a note about Dranmore), Mikhalovsky (“Domestic Notes”, 1875 and “Collection of Poems”) and other poets.