Reading Valéry in English

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BY Tony Brinkley
Le cimetière marin

Le cimetière marin
BY Paul Valéry
(Emile-Paul Frères, 1920)
PHOTO: Artcurial

Poem

The translator would like to dedicate this work to Harold Bloom.

Translator’s Note

If a painter does a portrait of Socrates and a passer-by recognizes Plato, all the creator’s explanations, protests, and excuses will not change this immediate recognition. The dispute will amuse eternity.

— Paul Valéry, Commentaries on “Charmes”

In 1955, near the end of his life, Wallace Stevens recalled that in the months and days preceding Rilke’s death (December 1926), Rilke had been translating Valéry. For Rilke this was a project that had begun more than five years earlier — in spring 1921 — when he first read, then translated “Le Cimetière marin” (the poem was first published in the June 1920 issue of Nouvelle Revue Française; Rilke discovered the poem — and Valéry — while turning through NRF a year later).[1] Soon after came the ecstatic days in 1922 when Rilke completed the Duino Elegies and composed the Sonnets to Orpheus. Translations of Valéry were Rilke’s last, major creative project, and perhaps it was with Rilke in mind, that in Stevens’ death poem “Of Mere Being,” Stevens also turned to Valéry — not only to “Palme,” whose angel, together with Rilke’s, had already influenced Stevens’ “necessary angel of the earth” — but to “Anne,” the penultimate poem in Valéry’s 1920 volume, Album de vers ancien. Here are the first stanzas from “Of Mere Being”:

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze deecor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

And here is the last stanza of Valéry’s poem:

Mais suave, de l’arbre extérieur, la palme
Vaporeuse remue au delà du remords,
Et dans le feu, parmi trois feuilles, l’oiseau calme
Commence le chant seul qui réprime les morts.

Perhaps reading Stevens with Valéry in mind can be one way that a translator can begin to find Valéry in English.
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REFERENCES

  1. Rilke later recalled, “I was alone, I was waiting, my whole work was waiting. One day I read Valéry; I knew that my waiting was at an end.”
 

Biography

Né en 1871, PAUL VALÉRY est mort en 1945, quelques mois après la fin de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Sa vie, comme son œuvre, est marquée d’une intégrité généreuse. Il refusa à collaborer avec quelque fascisme que ce soit de cette époque jusqu’à la fin de sa vie — et avec des risques considérables — avec le gouvernement de Vichy. Joachim Gasquet témoigna d’une conversation avec Paul Cézanne dans laquelle le peintre disait : « Je tiens mon motif… (Il joint les mains.) Un motif, voyez-vous, c’est ça… (Il refait son geste, écarte ses mains, les dix doigts ouverts, les rapproche lentement, lentement, puis les joint, les serre, les crispe, les fait pénétrer l’une dans l’autre.) Voilà ce qu’il faut atteindre… ». La vie de Valéry fût comme ce geste. Après la Première Guerre mondiale, il écrivit : « Rendre purement possible ce qui existe ; réduire ce qui se voit au purement visible, telle est l’œuvre profonde. » De 1917 à 1922, il publia trois petits livres de poésie qui devinrent puis tard les points de repères de la littérature française et même mondiale : La Jeune Parque (1917), Album des vers anciens (1920) et Charmes (1922).

Born in 1871, PAUL VALÉRY died in 1945, a few months after the end of World War II. His life, like his work, was characterized by a generous integrity. He refused to collaborate with any fascism of his era or toward the end of his life — and at considerable risk — with the Vichy regime. Joachim Gasquet reports a conversation with Paul Cézanne in which Cézanne the painter said, “A motif is this,” and then joined his hands, “There you have it; that’s what one must attain;” then Cezanne “repeat[ed] his gesture.” In many ways Valéry’s life was like this gesture. In the aftermath of World War I, he wrote that “the deep, the hidden work” was “to return what exists to pure possibility” by “reduc[ing] what is seen to pure visibility.” From 1917 to 1922, he published three short volumes of poetry that later became the landmarks of French and world literature: La Jeune Parque (1917), Album des vers anciens (1920) and Charmes (1922).

TONY BRINKLEY‘s poetry has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, The New Review of Literature, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat and Poetry Salzburg Review. His translations have appeared in Shofar, Beloit Poetry Journal, The New Review of Literature, Cerise Press, May Day, and World Literature Today. A contributing editor of Cerise Press, he is the author of Stalin’s Eyes (Puckerbrush Press, 2002) and co-editor with Keith Hanley of Romantic Revisions (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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