The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry

Lot of capital-P Poetry in Paul Valéry. Here’s a stanza from The Idea of Perfection, a new translation (by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody) of Valéry’s collected verse and a bit of his prose. This is from an early poem called “Semiramis’s Aria,” though, as I’ll explain later, Valéry’s early poetry is not exactly his early poetry:

Dare the abyss!…Cross one last bridge of roses!
I’m coming, danger! Irritated pride!
These ants are mine, these cities are my possessions,
These roads the strokes of my authority!

Pretty dramatic. Is it all like this? Let’s turn forward 250 pages. Here’s another, later, stanza. Smack dab in “The Cemetery by the Sea”:

Splendid dog, drive off the idolator!
When with a shepherd’s smile, slow and alone,
I put to pasture this mysterious herd
Of white-fleeced sheep, my peaceful tombs,
Keep far from them the prudent doves,
The empty dreams, the curious angels!

Two more lines, two less exclamation points. But still, parachute jump into the mind! Would you believe that this is actually a tidy and direct translation? Here’s C. Day Lewis’ translation of the same passage in the New Directions Selected Writings from 1950:

Keep off the idolaters, bright watch-dog, while—
A solitary with the shepherd’s smile—
I pasture long my sheep, my mysteries,
My snow-white flock of undisturbed graves!
Drive far away from here the careful doves,
The vain daydreams, the angels’ questioning eyes!

It’s clear that Rudavsky-Brody has brought the verse forward without losing the scathing ecstasy (I do love the outmodedness of “I pasture long my sheep”). But my big question, starting Rudavsky-Brody’s translation was, “Can the contemporary reader deal with this sort of thing?” Vague, overdramatic symbols? I don’t mean as intellectual history, I mean as poetry.

We have ways of accessing Valéry’s masters—Mallarmé and Rimbaud—but Valéry was writing like this through the end of the 1920s, a full decade after the specificity of Modernism took over. If Mallarmé is the great theorist of Symbolism, and Rimbaud the one who actually lived out its mission, what do we do with Valéry, who outlived its time? There’s the famous quote of Eliot’s—FSG puts it on the flyleaf—that Valery was “the representative poet, the symbol of the poet, of the first half of the twentieth century.” And in some ways, he’s still there, waving at us from a century ago, locked in a stuffy box like Poe, rather than being found again and again like Verlaine or Baudelaire.

Here’s what I mean. For those of us weaned on the realism of most contemporary North American poetry, Valéry’s symbols instantly annoy. Lotta cawing birds, spear tips, ships crashing. It’s like he’s just making it up! (Think about that.) Here’s a short poem, “Her Seeming Death,” from Charms, Valéry’s last major book of poetry, from 1921:

Humble and tender, on the charming tomb,
Unfeeling monument
Composed of shadows, surrenders, offered love
By your exhausted grace,
I fall, dying against you, dying—yet,

No sooner fallen across the low grave
Whose lawn, littered with ashes, summons me,
Life reawakens in her seeming death;
She shakes, reopens lambent eyes, and bites,
And wrenches from my chest another death
Dearer than life.

Fin-de-siecle poets loved the undead maiden—the perfect symbol of their own confusion around verse. Valéry was no different. One of the most interesting features of his poetry is that he was a constant editor of his previous work. His own poetry was un-dead to him, always being fussed with, revised, returned to, and re-visioned. He doesn’t really understand his own symbols, though he feels like he should. He makes this imprecision part of his verse.

The most egregious example: there’s two poems back to back called “Fantasy” and “Same Fantasy” that describe the same scene while lightly changing the poet’s response. The first two stanzas are basically identical—a maiden at moonlight, near swans grazing in the reeds, plucks petals from a rose. The last two stanzas are different:

From Fantasy:

Is this a life?…O desert, languid spell
Where lappings of the silvered water die
Away, and wear away the crystal echoes…

The roses’ soft, uncertain flesh begins
To quiver, when a fatal diamond cry
Dispels the vision with a crack of day.

From Same Fantasy:

Sweet solitude, deserted languor, when
The water’s eddies, silvered by the moon,
Count up their crystal echoes endlessly,

What heart could bear the irresistible charm
Of the night’s splendor in the fateful sky,
And not release a pure, explosive cry?

It’s almost like reading two translations of the same poem but, of course, these are Valéry’s translations of his own imagination. This was part of Valéry’s conception of verse—the poem was simply the work of a mind constantly returning to itself, trying to find a statement of existence.

It wasn’t just in his verse, Valéry’s conception of the imaginative mind was part of his prose as well. Much has been made of how Rudavsky-Brody’s edition includes, in addition to the poetry, sample selections of Valéry’s Notebooks. Begun in 1894, Valéry wrote in his notebooks each morning, performing a daily ritual of meditative journaling. He believed these notebooks to be his real work, but there’s so much of them, no one really knows what to do with them; they’ve only been published in French in two big, still-incomplete volumes. There’s a five-volume English version, but you’ll need some moolah for those, and it’s still just a selection of the two-volume French version. Rudavsky-Brody includes twenty-five pages or so between each book of poetry, culled from the years Valéry was working on the poetry in each section. Ballpark eighty pages total. For me, it’s the weakest part of the book.

My read is that Rudavsky-Brody, because he’s translating the poems, selected excerpts from the Notebooks that seem the most like poems. Not prose poems: just seem like. Or maybe he wanted to legitimize the poetry with prose? Either way, the problem is, of course, that if the short poems are already kind of grating to the contemporary reader, duller, prose-ier versions aren’t going to liven things up at all. I’m hesitant to quote from this—eventually, I’m gonna tell you that part of the book is worth your time—but you deserve a chance to judge one of these selections for yourself:

I saw a fly caught in a spider’s web, struggling desperately. But the spider was dead and nothing approached on the abandoned web. The fly, unable to free itself, cried: Come, O Spider, come! It preferred the spider’s bite to this long and inextricable/struggling/death in silk.

¡ay ay ay! It’d be one thing if you were reading all gajillion pages of the Notebooks. There’s bound to be stinkers. But I don’t know why you’d select something like this. Though the Notebooks haven’t been published in total, Valéry did pull from them to make short books of aphorisms. These are all of varying quality, and I could cherry pick them to make him sound wise or sophomoric or anything in between. A good one though, to wash out the taste of that last one. His performance of self-knowledge is the real star of this side of his work:

A “deep thought” is a thought of the same caliber as the clang of a gong in a vaulted room. It makes us aware of “volumes” in which we seem to sense the existence of things we do not see and which perhaps do not exist at all; nevertheless the massive resonance forces us to believe in them. If the room in question were not finite the clang would die away without reverberations; thus “depth” has no connection with any “Infinite.”

For me, this quote makes clear the difference between Valéry’s poetry and the Modernists. Eliot, HD, Pound, even Stein, clang gongs that point directly to some infinite they take to be real: God, myth, Chinese political notions, language, and on and on. For Valéry, and maybe the Symbolists and the Decadents more broadly, there is belief, but they are never sure where that belief comes from. Valéry says, like the Geto Boys, “My mind’s playing tricks on me.”

Blame Darwin, industrialization, and the growth of cities. Suddenly, there were the poor, dying. If Modernism attempted to find solidity in a wrecked Europe between the world wars, those like Valéry, living through world war but writing from the perspective of a generation or two before, were trying to find solidity in the astounding and horrific realization of progress. For them, the world was only beginning to break under ideas that allowed new and wonderful objects of art and misery. Art responded by looking away (think of the Pre-Raphaelites), looking at (think Baudelaire), or looking in (Rimbaud—and then our boy Valéry).

But there’s an autobiographical reason for this indecision as well: Valéry’s famous retirement from poetry. On October 4^th, 1892, when he was twenty-one or so, Valéry suffered an intellectual crisis. Rudavsky-Brody quotes Valéry’s description of what happened from a letter thirty years on:

I thought I was going mad there, in 1892…One particular sleepless night,—white with lightning, that I passed sitting on my bed hoping to be struck. (It seems I wasn’t worthy.) Nothing but high frequency—in my head as well as in the sky. I was endeavoring to break down all my first ideas, or Idols; and to break with a self that was incapable of achieving what it wanted, and did not want what is [sic] was capable of…

And then, just like that, Valéry took twenty years off from writing poetry. (I wish more people did this.) The Album of Early Verse was only really finalized when he was in his early forties. In 1912 Valéry’s buddy, Andre Gide, typed up a rough version of a book of Valéry’s early poems taken from magazines in an attempt to force the poet to publish the poems as a book. But Valéry wasn’t the same person he had been, and so revisions were begun. It’s unclear to me how much changed—Rudavsky-Brody punts in his translator’s note:

The poems here often bear little resemblance to their original versions; some have been completely refigured, and their sensitivity and lyricism belong as much to the poet’s maturity as to his youth. Yet youth, for all their revisions is what they represent. Either way, the revisions took eight years. The book finally came out in 1920.

But is the poetry worth your time? The answer is, “kind of.” As I said before, Valéry’s symbols are so vague that reading his shorter verse is a bit of a chore. Which poem had the “azure heights,” which the “overbrimming clouds,” and which the “harmonious gold walls of a shrine?” Who’s to say?

And what are they about anyways? I have no idea. I tried reading James Lawler’s The Poet as Analyst: Essays on Paul Valéry, one of those sexy close reading academic books from the mid-1970s, but it’s filled with exposition like this:

The opening lines, a reprise of the others, show the technique of multiple images that compose a series of levels of meaning—flame, shadow, curtain, ardor, dance, death—although the phrasing is far from definitive…

Then the point of view is modified: instead of the vital thrust of the sensibility surging upwards from a secret center, the second quatrain proposes the weight of a liquid force that overcomes the body with a pathos beyond tears.

Lawler does an admirable job—his analysis isn’t wrong—but you can see how the poems reduce the critic to just…rephrasing the poems. This isn’t all that weird for poetry of that era. Think about all your favorite Baudelaire poems and how you’d describe them. “Baudelaire takes a lady on a date, and sees a carrion.” “Baudelaire imagines himself frolicking amongst gigantic breasts.” But again, with Valéry, the symbols are so gilded that his poetry, to misquote Lawler, “is far from definitive.”

But! Something strange happens when the poems get longer than a few pages. Where the fault of the short poems is that they provide the reader with just one kind of boring and cliché symbol, the longer poems—being longer—overwhelm the mind with boring and cliché symbols that suddenly become ebullient, shimmering objects. The closest thing in poetry I can compare it to is reading Ovid, but instead of story opening into story into story, it’s abstract object into abstract object into abstract object. A better comparison might be watching the post-modern opera of Philip Glass or Robert Ashley, where, as the audience member is lulled by repetitive, droning music, staged images slowly morph until, suddenly and without really understanding how or why, someone on stage has a gun and the train-car is a bedroom.

So, when I say the poetry is “kind of” worth reading, I mean that Valéry’s masterpiece of a long poem, The Young Fate, is worth reading, and that the rest works as warm-up and cool down. What’s The Young Fate, you ask? Working on the revisions for his early verse led Valéry back to poetry, and in four years he’d written The Young Fate. 512 lines of alexandrine couplets. Twenty pages.

Rudavsky-Brody, as with his other translations, doesn’t imitate Valéry’s line and rhymes, though he does write with a syllable count to keep the translations formal-ish. The poem is a monologue from the perspective of one of the Roman Parcae, a group of three Fates, and it’s the youngest one who’s talking. “I saw me gazing on my winding self, / and gilded with my gaze my deep forests” ends the first section. To get the feeling of what I’m trying to get across, I wish I could quote the whole thing at you, twenty pages of intensity set at the sea, near rocks, in the stars, in the sky, but I’ll have to settle for this snippet:

And I alive, and standing,
Secretly girded with my emptiness,
Yet with my cheeks on fire as if from love,
My nostril seeking out the orange tree,
I give the day a stranger’s look, no more…
Oh! In my curious night, the secret part
Of my divided heart can grow so large,
My art, from dark endeavors, so profound…
Far from the pure surroundings, I am captive
And overcome by vanishing perfumes,
I feel my statue shiver in the sunbeams,
Its marble rippling with the gold’s caprice.
I know, however, what my lost gaze sees,
My black eye opens on infernal eyes!

You’re probably rolling your infernal eyes, but read the full thing and see what happens. The mind tumbling with discursive energy. Phrases like “girded with emptiness,” “vanishing perfumes,” “my statue shiver,” show Valéry’s insistence on the quivering object. What’s clearly there isn’t there. During our long century of the photographic image, we lost the power of this poem. If the mind tumbles in poetry now, it is through collage or irony or historical interpretation. In the other corner, the statement of fact. But the symbol in Valéry isn’t naïve—he presents the life of the mind as a series of intersected symbols that never resolve. I wish there was an option to buy The Young Fate as a chapbook.