Poet's Dance: On "The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry"

Paul Valéry; transl. Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody| The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry; A Bilingual Edition | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2020 | 400 Pages

image by Angelo Maneage

Poetry and prose were, for Paul Valéry, nearly incommensurable. Prose was language in its unreflective mode—utilitarian and interchangeable, moving toward some goal, language that “perishes once it is understood, and because it is understood.” In poetry, by contrast, language could become an end in itself. Prose, for him, was walking, or running; poetry was dance.

“Le Cimetière marin,” probably his most famous poem, began, as he recounted it, with a form: “a French line… of ten syllables, divided into four and six… Gradually a few hovering words settled in it, and my labor (a very long labor) was before me.” Today such a rationalization seems perhaps difficult to accept—even in Valéry’s time it must have seemed unpoetic, perhaps anachronistic. Nevertheless, it’s enough to read his poem to find the evidence for it. The line Valéry describes appears throughout “Le Cimetière marin,” structuring it down to its most memorable and apparently natural lines:

Ce toit tranquille, | où marchent des colombes,

Entre les pins palpite, | entre les tombes ;

Midi le juste | y compose de feux

La mer, la mer, | toujours recommencée !

This peaceful roof of milling doves

Shimmers between the pines, between the tombs;

Judicious noon composes there, with fire,

The sea, the ever-recommencing sea…

—and, near the end, the famous line:

Le vent se lève !… Il faut tenter de vivre !

The wind is rising… We must try to live!

The formal exactness of these lines is typical for Valéry—his most celebrated poetry contains hardly a single unrhymed or unmetered line. La Jeune parque,the long poem that made him a celebrity in France, likewise consists of 512 strict alexandrines, rhymed in perfect couplets and composed over some four years, during which, he wrote, “‘Time’ cost me nothing, it did not count.”

Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody is in many ways sensitive to these concerns, in The Idea of Perfection, his translation of Valéry’s poetry and prose released last year by FSG, writing of Valéry’s commitment to “attention, precision, patience, literature as exercise.” In all, the selection includes Valéry’s three central volumes of poetry, the late prose poem The Angel, and, importantly, a selection from Valéry’s private notebooks, which he worked at from 1894 until the end of his life.

Indeed, Valéry’s main poetic output was almost comically small. Born in 1871 and raised in Montpellier, he wrote and published a great number of poems in his youth, and befriended writers like André Gide, Pierre Louÿs, and Stéphane Mallarmé. After an existential crisis in 1892, however, he stopped writing poetry for some twenty years. Finally, in 1912, a request from his friends Gide and Gallimard to publish his early poems prodded him into the “exercise” that would become La jeune parque (1917). In the following years, already famous, he published a revision of his early work under the title Album des vers anciens, 1890-1900 (1920) and the collection Charmes (1922), his last major book of poems, which included pieces like “Palme,” “Ébauche d’un serpent,” and “Le Cimetière marin,” often lauded as masterpieces of the language.

The vast majority of Valéry’s output was, on the other hand, in prose—in the form of essays, lectures, and the more than 28,000 pages of notebooks, his daily preoccupation, which he once described in a letter as his “true oeuvre.” The notebooks show Valéry in his ground state, namely, thinking. “I admit that I took the affairs of my mind very seriously,” he wrote. “I was occupied with its salvation as others are with that of their soul.”

The contrast between the notebooks and the poems is stark: images and ideas intertwine in the prose of the notebooks with a looseness and freedom they never have in the poems. In the poems, everything is measured, considered, balanced—subject to laws of poetic form that go far beyond easy constraints of meter and rhyme. In poetry, he wrote, it is “the form alone which commands and survives. It is the sound, the rhythm, the physical proximity of words, their effects of induction or their mutual influences which dominate…”

He recounted approvingly a story of two friends, the painter Edgar Degas and his onetime mentor Stéphane Mallarmé:

Degas occasionally wrote verses, and some of those he left were delightful. But he often found great difficulty in this work accessory to his painting… One day he said to Mallarmé: “Yours is a hellish craft. I can’t manage to say what I want, and yet I’m full of ideas….” And Mallarmé answered: “My dear Degas, one does not make poetry with ideas, but with words.”

For Valéry, too, the poem was made, above all, of words. Like his forebears in the symbolist movement, he insisted on poetry as an art aspiring to the condition of music—a poem was, he said, a “machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.” It was an artifact regulated by its own laws, not a communication but an object, a system of effects, a fabrication—a product of what he referred to as the poet’s “verbal materialism.”

It’s unsurprising, then, to read the images Valéry uses for his composition of “Le Cimetière marin”—the “hovering words” that “settle in” to the as-yet empty structure. In his insistence on an organic method in even the strictest forms, Valéry’s conception recalls another account of poetic composition written a few years later by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and quoted by Seamus Heaney, imagining Dante at work on his Divine Comedy:

We must try to imagine, therefore, how bees might have worked at this thirteen-thousand-faceted form, bees endowed with the brilliant stereometric instinct… Their cooperation expands and grows more complicated as they participate in the process of forming the combs, by means of which space virtually emerges out of itself.

Indeed, for all their intricacy and artifice, Valéry’s poems hardly ever appear unwieldy or contrived—often they project a quality of ease. Among the paradoxes of his style is its near-constant oscillation between obscurity and clarity: in “Le Cimetière marin,” pages of dense images and reflections cascade over one another until, in the poem’s final stanza, the speaker lands on a line of perfect (not to say simple) clarity, an exhortation to life linked with an image—“Le vent se lève!… Il faut tenter de vivre!”—that conforms by a sort of miracle to the syllabic scheme Valéry has devised for himself.

Nearly all of Valéry’s poems feature such moments of clarity. La Jeune parque, characterized by a density and philosophical difficulty uncommon even for him, begins with a piercingly clear image:

Qui pleure là, sinon le vent simple, à cette heure

Seule, avec diamants extrêmes ?… Mais qui pleure,

Si proche de moi-même au moment de pleurer ?

If not the wind, then who is crying there

At this lone hour with farthest diamonds?… Who

Is crying, so near me at the moment of tears ?

The early poem “Un Feu distinct” (“A Clear Fire”), included in the Album des vers anciens, closes with the lines

Le doute—sur le bord d’une extrême merveille,

Si je suis, si je fus, si je dors ou je veille ? 

Doubt—on the brink of greatest wonder, whether

I am or was, am sleeping or awake?

—in which the rhyme, the rhythm, and the compulsive repetition of the last line’s French combine to conclusive effect.

To read Valéry’s notebooks is, on the other hand, to be immersed not in his poetics but in his thinking. Valéry is an often impressive prose stylist, but the project of his prose is altogether different than of his poetry. In the passages included in The Idea of Perfection, we see him observing his surroundings, in an associative prose now imagistic or melancholy, now speculative and analytic.

Valéry’s thought often tended in arcane and unpredictable directions. “Valéry’s conversation throws me into this frightful alternative,” his friend Gide wrote in his journal, “either consider everything he says absurd or else consider absurd everything I am doing.” Taken as a whole, the notebooks cover an astonishing range of topics, from mathematics and science to history and philosophy, and include much that defies categorization. The selection in The Idea of Perfection comes, as Rudavsky-Brody notes, primarily from Michel Jarrety’s 2009 selection Poésie perdue, which mines the notebooks for its “prose poems.” The more clearly analytic and abstruse areas of the text are thus absent.

The Idea of Perfection is, as a result, a relatively awkward book, at once hampered in its approach to Valéry’s poems and unwilling to include the diversity of his thought. Having chosen to set his translations of the poems in regular meter, in part to “experienc[e] a similar set of formal constraints, of exercise, as characterized Valéry’s work,” Rudavsky-Brody produces versions plagued by inaccuracies of padding or complication, writing to formal specifications that, beyond being constraints at all, bear a questionable resemblance to Valéry’s own.

On occasion Rudavsky-Brody’s licenses are clarifying—as when he renders Valéry’s line “Ce toit tranquille où picoraient les focs !” at the end of “Le Cimetière marin” as “This peaceful roof where sailboats dipped like doves!”—thereby emphasizing the line’s inversion of the poem’s first line (“This peaceful roof of milling doves”). More often, however, the translation muddies moments that are in Valéry clear and refreshing. Near the end of the poem “Poésie,” we read

Des cieux même tu me sèvre,

Par quel injuste retour ?

Que seras-tu sans mes lèvres ?

Que serai-je sans amour ?

The last two lines in particular crystallize the poem’s concerns, and speak with an unshakable directness. Rudavsky-Brody chops the parallelism and rearranges the syntax, resulting in a much duller and rougher

Why this unjust refusal?

You estrange me from the skies,

But what are you without

My lips, and I without love?

Valéry’s French is, of course, generally untranslatable (Rilke: “if only someone could convince us otherwise!”)—and in the field of available translations, Rudavsky-Brody’s are far from unusable.

More limiting, however, are the bounds placed on the volume’s prose selection. For a book that sells itself as “The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry,” The Idea of Perfection contains remarkably little prose. Of the almost 30,000 pages of the notebooks, The Idea of Perfection includes just over fifty, virtually all classifiable under the heading of “prose poetry.” Nothing appears from Valéry’s vast body of public prose—his essays and introductions, his Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci, his An Evening with Monsieur Teste, his lectures and Socratic dialogues and commentaries and extensive self-analyses—not to mention the analytic portions of the notebooks—much of which is written with a warmth, acuity, and humor nearly absent from this volume.

What emerges is, as a result, a unidimensional and unduly conventional portrait of a writer whose habits were anything but conventional. “I believe in all sincerity,” Valéry wrote, “that if each man were not able to live a number of other lives besides his own, he would not be able to live his own life.” It is this other abundance of other lives that remains absent from this book.