Michel Deguy (Rome, June 2009) PHOTO COURTESY OF MICHEL DEGUY Gisants: Poèmes III BY Michel Deguy (Gallimard, 1985)

What interests me today is not strictly called either “literature” or “philosophy.” — Jacques Derrida Philosophy’s shadow: poetry. Poetry’s shadow: philosophy. — Jeffrey Yang Plato’s expulsion of the poet from his perfected philosophic kingdom indicates an assumption of dysfunction between two modes of apprehension. Post-Platonic modernist theoreticians, however, are inclined to seize upon this separation as a source of illumination, rather than a hindrance to the pursuit of philosophic truth. Jacques Derrida’s argument in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” that the “discourse of truth is, of necessity, rooted in the structure of difference (différance) — the opening of a time line through a dynamic interspacing-and-temporalization wherein visible and sayable intersect,” is a brief for a poetics that permits or supports philosophical inquiry, an approach exemplified by the French poet Michel Deguy, Derrida’s contemporary (both born in 1930), who was among the first to recognize Derrida’s accomplishments in an article for Critique in 1963. …poems that juxtapose eros and thanatos in a unique fusion of lyric vibrancy and philosphic gravity in an attempt to reach a reconciliation of disparate modes. Deguy is described by his primary translator to English, Wilson Baldridge, as working “precisely in dialogue with this (that is, Derrida’s) tradition of thought,” which “examines the medium of difference itself, the element of this ‘grammar’ which is that of the written language, the form of speech in which Plato, Rousseau, et. al, root their thinking as philosophers.” In a detailed foreword, he explains the close correlation between Derrida’s thought and Deguy’s writing, citing Derrida’s assertion that “the thing itself” — the essence of philosophical discourse — is produced by “the grammar, the structure, of the language in which the philosophies are couched.” This is the fundamental impetus for his translation of Deguy’s Recumbents, described by Pierre Joris as “possibly the single most outstanding volume by Deguy to date,” and a work exemplary of the union or fusion of poetic perception and philosophic speculation.

Recumbents
BY Michel Deguy
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
BY Wilson Baldridge
(Wesleyan University Press, 2005)

Deguy initially published Recumbents in 1985 under the title Gisants : Poèmes. Baldridge explains that the adjective gisant describes “a person lying down,” and notes the unabridged Webster definition of a gisant as “a recumbent sculpture of a deceased person,” while adding that in Deguy’s poetry, the term gisants “refers to lovers lying down,” as well as “spaces or places of abode.” In Recumbents, there are “seven individual poems with a variety of connotations (that) echo the book’s overall title,” which is reflective of the poet’s response to his mother’s death in 1980, and his father’s suicide in 1984. Deguy’s “Convoi” (“Procession”), the poem at the origin of Recumbents, is an elegaic response to “the circumstances of bereavement,” followed by poems that juxtapose eros and thanatos in a unique fusion of lyric vibrancy and philosphic gravity in an attempt to reach a reconciliation of disparate modes. The 1985 edition was the winner of the Mallarmé Academy’s Grand Prize, and The Writer’s Association of France gave Deguy their Grand Prize in 2000 celebrating the publication of Gisants : Poèmes III, also as a tribute to the entirety of Deguy’s work. Baldridge’s translation of Recumbents was named as the 2006 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation choice, and won the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work in that year. Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck stated that “One could not have hoped for a more sure-footed, attentive, and refined rendering of Deguy’s exacting poetry,” while the PEN citation by Joris praised Baldridge’s “accurate ear for the complex music of the French original,” noting his “exquisitely balancing poetic sensibility and philosophical insight,” which has resulted in “everything a poetic translation should be.”

Donnant donnant
(Given/Giving)
BY Michel Deguy
(Gallimard, 1981)

Deguy has published forty volumes in France, and other than Clayton Eshelman’s translation of Given/Giving, his work has been, the jacket notes, “largely inaccesible to English language readers.” To open a path of access in English, a translator must be responsive to the ways, Baldridge asserts in his foreword, “Deguy develops a poetics of the phenomenal structure, a poetics in the interspace betwixt and among positions represented by phenomenology, structuralism, semiotics and deconstruction,” elements not often identified with a poetic sensibility by poets writing in English. To be able to convey the depth of inquiry that is one of the singular characteristics of Deguy’s poetry — what he calls poetic reason (passages on rhetoric) — without losing what Baldridge identifies as the “process of transference, translation or meta-phor, wherein being is borne over into saying,” is a task of sufficient difficulty to make Baldridge’s ambitious endeavor impressive for even attempting the “balancing” that PEN cited, and Cardonne-Arylck’s praise is not misplaced. The essence of Baldridge’s task is encapsulated by Nicolas Boileau’s observation that “Descartes has cut the throat of poetry,” and it is not in any way an underestimation of Baldridge, or his work, to offer some qualification to the claim that it is “everything a poetic translation should be.” I do not mean it as criticism to say that I hear, in French, the voice of a lyric poet sometimes constrained in English by the rudiments of a non-poetic, philosophic mode of discourse. The number of separate works in Recumbents required Baldridge to devote a significant amount of time to the translation, perhaps at some cost to the creation of a poetry in English that resonates with the range of music that twentieth-century American poetry has offered.

As an illustrative example of what might be missing, and the difficulties that Baldridge had to confront, the first stanza of the recurring title Gisants, in its second appearance in the section L’effacement, begins;

Treuil de la paume qui te lève
Pelvienne ce trente mai
Ton visage passe tout près
Méat de syllabes votives
Tu sèmes trois cierges avant
Que nous passions en revue la Seine

Baldridge translates this as:

Winch of the palm that lifts you
Pelvic this thirtieth of May
Your face closely passes by
Meatus of votive syllables
You scatter three tapers before
We pass in review the Seine

The unusual construction of the first line, which presents an image of a hand as a semi-mechanical device, is continued by the location of the seat of power as a central part of the body. The abrupt shift to observation after action in the view of the face of the person accompanying the speaker, however, is distorted by the fourth line with the word “Meatus,” a word removed even from esoteric English usage, so that the idea of a corporeal rendition of devotion is compromised by the strangeness of the term. Baldridge has chosen “Meatus” as a correspondence with the Latin meatus, from meare — to pass — which leads towards the “nous passions” (“we pass”) of the sixth line while recollecting the “pass” of the third line. The logic of the choice is evident, and its ingenuity characteristic of Baldridge’s technique. Nonetheless, as a poetic equivalence, it is a questionable imposition. To retain Deguy’s focus on the physical, while advancing the relationship between the observer and observed — “treuil,” literally a winch, but since the palm’s motion is like a turning — might lead to this version:

Turn of the palm that lifts you
Pelvic this thirtieth of May
Brings your face very near
Echoing worshipful words
You scatter three candles before
We pass on, re-viewing the Seine

with the word “candles” rather than “tapers” for the alliterative resonance with “scatter” which has some of the sonic qualities of “sèmes trois cierges.” An imaginative reconception, somewhat in the spirit of Ezra Pound’s translations (or recreations) of works like “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” could be supported (or is almost required?) by the sense of meatus as a passage within the body, such as “the opening of the ear” as defined by The American Heritage Dictionary, a site where there is a kind of resonating (or echoing) within the ear canal. And the line “Que nous passions en revue la Seine” presents particular problems since “passions” is an unusual construction of “to pass,” insinuating a degree of passion while in this context invoking a memory of (as in “re-viewing” in the sense of recalling or reseeing) previous passages along the river.

Individual words are often dependent on the taste and instinct of a translator, and are not usually as crucial as the transposition of form. The syntax that Deguy depends on proposes a greater challenge in the second stanza of the poem:

Bottes collants dépecés bain
Le jusant te découvre
Tes bas pèlent ton bas fait l’équilibre
Une autre fois j’ai bu à ton nadir
T’amenant à plus être peut-être

Baldridge writes:

Boots hose shredded bath
The ebb discloses you
Your bottoms peel off your bottom keeps the balance
Another time I drank from your nadir
Maybe brings you to heightened being

The first line is a flash of imagery, although the idea of a “shredded bath” attempts an engagement of fundamentally disparate substances. The strained synecdoche of “The ebb discloses you,” the somewhat bizarre surreality of “bottoms peel off,” the misplaced comicality of drinking “from your nadir” and the perplexity of how this “brings you to a heightened being” make this stanza unsatisfactory in English, more like a literal transcription than a translation of a poem.

Deguy frequently uses a reflexive doubling, so that “être peut-être” can be seen as central to the meaning and feeling of the lines, leading to an aural correspondence, as utter/être. “Collants” can be taken as “tight,” “jusant” suggests an ebbing, but is more directly a low tide, so to bring the stanza somewhat closer to a recognizeable syntax:

Tight boots removed for bathing
Low tide reveals you
Layer after layer, body still balanced,
Realizing again the time I tasted
The utter essence of your being.

Deguy practically never uses any internal punctuation, but the introduction of the comma emphasizes the rhythmic pulses required by the English syntax, which is a small addition compared to the demands of the last two lines of the stanza.

An exploration of two other poems, one tending toward a traditional lyric, and one which is an illustration of Deguy’s “poetic reason” (poems incorporating “passages on rhetoric” in Baldridge’s explanation) provide further possibilities for approaches to Deguy’s work. Amidst the Gisants, Deguy offers atmospheric conjectures which reflect his life in Paris. “Aphrodite collègue,” reminiscent of Charles Baudelaire’s observations in Le Spleen de Paris, is a quick glimpse that leaves a lingering impression:

Moderne anadyomène des VC belle
la botticellienne dans un grand bruit de chasse
s’encadre sur la porte verte rajustant blonde
à l’électricité la tresse l’onde
et d’une manche glabre de pull
tire sur la jupe au niveau de l’iliaque

The fusion of the classical beauty and the contemporary setting sets the mood for the poem, juxtaposing the mythic with the mundane. A literal version of the title would be “Aphrodite Colleague,” with the implication of a pause after the name of the Goddess, with both words having equal stress. “Anadyomene” could be reproduced exactly (Baldridge’s choice), but a slight modernization to Aphroditian is also appropriate. “VC” might be a little too close to slang in English, while “powder room” has a knowing euphemistic quality that captures Deguy’s bemused fascination, while Baldridge’s “great flushing noise” might be more mechanical than Deguy’s description. The strong “blonde/l’onde” rhyme encourages the “wave/sleeve” parallel, while the closing image typically expresses Deguy’s propensity for anatomical terminology, which could be better served with a less clinical reproduction.

Modern Aphroditian of the powder room
beautiful Botticellian in a great surge of sound
she is framed by a green door, shaping
her golden tress in an electric wave,
and with a smooth sweater sleeve
pulls her skirt up to her abdomen

“Forme” is one of Deguy’s most ambitious poems, and one in which the philosophical discourse is extremely skillfully blended with an evocative lyric voice. It uses Arthur Rimbaud’s lucious Le Bateau ivre, a signature poem written when Rimbaud was seventeen, as a means of examining the paradox of the necessity for poetic form in a poem that resists the strictures of formal constraint while demonstrating how effectively a fusion of form and feeling can be employed. Deguy assumes that his audience is familiar with Rimbaud, and sets as an epigraph Rimbaud’s overwhelming expression of heart’s desire, “Oh que ma quille éclate Oh que j’aille à la mer […].” Baldridge phrases this in a familiar fashion, “O let my keel snap O let me go to sea,” a certainly satisfactory translation. However, the sense of a dual perspective — form and a resistance to form — could be carried through the poem in terms of a splitting, while the second part of Rimbaud’s desire to overcome resistance might be placed in the subjunctive mode, as:

“O let my keel split O that I could go to sea […]”

or perhaps as

“Oh let my keel split
Oh that I could go to sea […]”

with the parenthetical extension implying the familiar content of Rimbaud’s carefully composed quatrains. Deguy’s poem, like many of the “passages on rhetoric,” is shaped like a prose paragraph:

“Oh que ma quille éclate Oh que j’aille à la mer […]”

C’est un poème qui nous le dit, poème qui reprend le topo de la navigation poétique, de l’éloge du nautonier, de la fragilité de l’esquif poème. Or le bateau, pour être ivre, doit ne pas faire eau de toute part ; doit demeurer distinct de l’élément qu’il affront, parcourt, invente : demeurer bien assemblé, pour affronter selon sa loi le parcours dans l’étrange. Et en l’occurrence rimbaldienne dont le vœu d’éclatement ne détruit pas la membrure du poème, celui-ci demeurait ajointé en lames bien parallèles, en lisse de quatrains dodécasyllabiques…

Baldridge’s translation:

“O let my keel snap O let me go to the sea […]”

A poem tells us so, a poem that sums up the topic of poetic navigation, of praise for the coxswain, of the poem skiff’s fragility. Now the boat, though drunken, must not spring leaks all around; must remain distinct from the element it braves, crosses, invents: remain well assembled, to brave according to its law the journey into strangeness. And in the case of Rimbaud whose wish to snap into pieces does not destroy the ribs of the poem, this latter remained jointed in fully parallel strips, in ribbands of dodecasyllabic quatrains…

Baldridge begins “A poem tells us so,” an effective declarative assertion, but Deguy is attempting to examine the ways in which the poem tells, while showing how it tells, so one might begin, “This is a poem that says it,” and then “a poem that recaptures the concept of poetic navigation” as a way of establishing the rhymic figure that Deguy sets with the “topo/poètique” resonance. Baldridge translates “de l’éloge du nautonier” as “praise for the coxswain,” suggesting reasonably that the poet is calling a cadence, but in a larger sense, “the skills of the sailor” are required to manage “the fragility of poetic craft,” a more metaphoric statement than Baldridge’s “the poem skiff’s fragility:”

This is a poem that says it, a poem that recaptures the concept of poetic navigation,
the skills of the sailor, the fragility of poetic craft.

Then Deguy turns to the challenges of handling poetic craft, recalling Rimbaud’s title “Or le bateau, pour être ivre,” which Baldridge has as “Now the boat, though drunken.” Deguy is reaching for a sense of a continuing experience that carries Rimbaud’s nautical voyage as a journey through poetic creation, which might see “pour être ivre” as “still drunken” to more directly retain a process of motion. The poem then, if it were set in a more conventional English arrangement, with the admittedly questionable transposition here of “sailor” to “singer” as further metaphoric extension:

Deguy might regard the reconstruction of “Forme” into another “Form” as inimical to his purposes, while I would like to propose the possibility of this rearrangement as a commentary in the spirit of Deguy’s comments on Rimbaud’s philosophy of composition. To follow Deguy’s single-paragraph setup would arguably work as well. With respect to specific verbal choices, while Baldridge has “braves, crosses, invents” from Deguy’s “affronte, parcourt, invente,” there is a closer sonic correspondence with “confronts, crosses, creates” while “confront” is a more personal involvement than “brave.” The process through which “coxswain” is replaced by “sailor” which is stretched toward “singer” is clearer in the explanation than in the translation. Perhaps it operates as an effective selection in the totality of the poem. I offer this not as a claim that it is a “better” version than the one which Baldridge has made, but as another way of seeing (and “hearing”) Deguy in an American English.

…the idea of a voiceless verse is exactly the kind of conundrum that philosophy is designed to address; the inherent paradox reaching back toward Plato’s preference for reason over emotion, precisely the problem that Deguy’s work seeks to explore. The problem for the translator of his poetry, then, is to keep both components in action, to hold them continuously in a mental construct.

In an essay on the life and thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, Claudia Roth Pierpont declares, “A translator’s work is meant to be transparent, providing access to a text without agenda or interpretation,” a plausible position but not entirely applicable when the original work, like Deguy’s, is intricately involved with an interpretive agenda as a part of its purpose. As Boileau’s reported quip about Descartes having “cut the throat of poetry” implies, the idea of a voiceless verse is exactly the kind of conundrum that philosophy is designed to address; the inherent paradox reaching back toward Plato’s preference for reason over emotion, precisely the problem that Deguy’s work seeks to explore. The problem for the translator of his poetry, then, is to keep both components in action, to hold them continuously in a mental construct. Baldridge has done this admirably. The full measure of the difficulty that this task presented, as well as the fascination that it has for the poet and translator, might be approached from Gregory Rabassa’s contention that a shift from one language to another involves access to a different part of the brain, so that the translator literally becomes a different “self” — perhaps paralleling the continuing shifting in terms of the emphasis between emotion and reason. If that is so, then the translator is especially equipped to travel along this continuum, and to use two languages in tandem toward an exploration of the poetic reason that is the essence of Deguy’s writing. Seen that way, other translators could be considered a welcome, if not a necessary part of the process, bringing a different “self,” a different location on the continuum, in their responses to the task.