The best French books of my year - Flaubert, Baudelaire, Sophocles, the usual stuff

My study of French has shifted my reading.  The point of reading in French is to learn French, so it hardly matters what I am reading as long as it is hard enough, yet the point – a point – of learning French is to read in French, so I sometimes indulge.  Meaning, gimme the good stuff.

I had wanted to get to the point where I could read Ubu Roi (1896).  And I did.  Similarly, Flaubert.  And thus Alfred Jarry’s muck-smeared puppet travesty and Flaubert’s Trois Contes (1877) – especially, of course, “A Simple Heart” – are among the best things I read all year.

My reading in French is poor, full of errors in understanding that would bother me if I only knew what they were.  Ubu Roi is built out of all kinds of abuses of language, while “A Simple Heart” is an example of something close to perfection.  Was reading them in the original language better than reading a translation?  I don’t know.  Different.  But how well did I read them, really?

Sometimes my eyes were bigger than my stomach, so to speak.  Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Country, 1939), the poet’s angry poetic investigation of his experiences when he returned to Martinique from Paris, founding text of Négritude, would likely be one of the best books I read this year, but it was too hard for me.  I suspect it is not so easy in translation, either.  All right, next time.

Another special case was Oedipe roi by Sophocle, or as I would normally say, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, except that I read it in French, in the translation of Didier Lamaison.  I also read Oedipe roi by Didier Lamaison (1994), a transformation of the play into a detective novel, a polar.  It does not take much transforming.  King Oedipus is not what you would call a great detective, but he sure gets his man.

Any year I read a Sophocles play it will go on my Best of the Year list.  The detective novel was pretty good, too.

I should include Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), Paul Verlaine’s Romances sans Paroles (Songs without Words, very funny, 1874), some but not all of the Molière plays I read – maybe Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman, 1670) – keeping in mind that I have not quite dared the really good ones.

Jacques Prévert’s Paroles (1946) was at times like the Césaire book, and otherwise the opposite.  Prévert wrote a spray of playful little lyric poems many of which are readable and enjoyable by people with elementary French.  I knew about those.  I was looking for those.  His famous first book has scores of them.  But they surround giant blocks of prosy, slangy satirical poems that made me work.  Well, this is how we learn.

I read several short Louis Aragon books, Feu de joie (Fire of Joy, 1920) from the early days of Surrealism and a couple of later volumes with some wartime poems, Le Crève-Cœur (The Heartbreak, 1941) and Le Nouveau Crève-Cœur (The New Heartbreak, 1948), the former so playful, the latter so sad.  Some of the war poems are available in English in the Poetry magazine archive.  Not much else, though.  Maybe I should try to write a bit about Aragon next year.

I have an idea that next year I might write something about a number of the books I have read in French.  I read all kinds of surprising things, most of which were not among the best books of the year.

Some books I read in French

What did I read when I was, in French terms, 9 years-old?  Just some examples, aside from Le Petit Prince and Petit Nicolas and Asterix and Tintin.

My first great discovery was a series of poetry collections for children of poems not written for children.  Please see them here.  I read the collections of Victor Hugo, Max Jacob, and Louis Aragon.  Other writers in the series include warhorses like Baudelaire and Rimbaud through difficult avant-gardists like Jean Cocteau and Henri Michaux.  Michaux for children!  In English, Michaux was difficult enough.  These are, again, not collections of poems written for children, but poems appropriate for children, which presumably means, in part, subject matter but as far as I could tell mostly meant reading level, which is just what I needed.

At some point I “graduated” to complete books by French poets, but these were great.  Yes, in France Baudelaire and Rimbaud are poets suitable for tiny little children.  If you poke around at that link, you might find Dadaïstes et surréalistes for children.

Is it true – an aside – that there is not even a selected poems of Louis Aragon in English?  What is wrong with us?

Once I discovered that I was reading at the junior high level, and that French junior high students read good, good, good books, I just read what they read.  Or might read.  The days of the universal French curriculum are long gone, but aside from some conversation with Book Around the Corner, I do not really know what goes on in the French classroom.  This Gallimard website suggests, at least, what might be read.

I loved the Folioplus classiques editions.  They were like Norton Critical Editions for junior high students operating at the university level.  Or is all of that supplementary material for the teacher?  Every edition includes, for example, a ten page essay about the cover art!  The fundamental basis of analysis was historical, literature as literary history, art as art history.  But again, I don’t know what is actually taught.

I could observe, occasionally.  Standing in line at a bookstore to buy an annotated edition of Charles Perrault’s Contes – Bluebeard and Cinderella and so on – I saw that the girl behind me was buying Michel Tournier’s Vendredi ou la vie sauvage (Friday, or the Savage Life, 1971), which I was reading, and carrying with me, at the time.  Evidence!

Tournier’s first novel was a Robinson Crusoe rewrite, Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (Friday, or the Limbs of the Pacific, 1967), available in English as Friday.  For some reason he wrote a shorter, simpler version – not a children’s version, he insisted – and the result is that the simple one is assigned in junior high and the more complex one in high school.  It is like a literary pedagogical experiment.  The simple one is quite good.

Molière is assigned incessantly, beginning with the short prose farce Les Fourberies de Scapin (1670) and advancing year after year to the complex verse masterpieces like Tartuffe.  I just read the simple stuff, like The Flying Doctor and The Doctor against Himself, culminating, to my surprise, in George Dandin or Le Mari confondu (George Dandin, or the Confused Husband, 1668), which inverted the standard jokes of the farces by the writerly magic trick of making the central characters real.  What was funny when they were cardboard becomes pathetic, perhaps even tragic, when they are real people. Even though I know full well that they are not real real people – what a trick, what a genius.  A local theater put on the play in March – what luck – and Emma wrote about it.

I could just keep going.  I will, tomorrow.

Endless thanks to the Lyon public library, my home away from home away from home, for all of these books.

Paris Peasant - Louis Aragon wanders around - A laudable error. But a delectable folly.

Paris Peasant, Louis Aragon, 1926, translated by Simon Watson Taylor.  A Surrealist novel, in some sense, although I do not understand what use there might be in calling this a novel.  The book contains a short preface that I did not understand; a hundred-page tour of the shops in a covered passage, destroyed just after Aragon wrote the piece, that is a classic of Paris flaneuring; another bit of wandering in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, this time at night, and accompanied by André Breton; and a final manifesto-like piece that I did not understand.

The root of Surrealism (“offspring of frenzy and darkness,” p. 65 of the 1994 Exact Change edition) is realism, right?  Aragon is at one of the hairdressers in the Passage de l’Opera.  He is rhapsodizing on the subject of blond hair:

What is blonder than the froth of moss?  I have often though I saw champagne on the floor of forests.  And chanterelles!  And agaric!  Darting hares!  The moons of fingernails!  The colour pink!  The blood of plants!  The eyes of bitches!  Memory: memory is truly blond.  (p. 40)

Twaddle, perhaps, but glorious twaddle, imaginatively free twaddle.  Aragon has provided himself with a form that is both rigid – a passage, a straight line – and endlessly free and digressive, with room for poems and a little play (“Man Converses with His Faculties”) and essays on anything.  Plus lots of signage and typography, which I suppose I could scan.  Maybe it’s on the internet somewhere.  The drink menu of the Certa café is reproduced.  There is a Dada Cocktail for four francs.  Aragon did not pick the Passage de l’Opera at random – it is packed with Surreal history, “the last traces of the Dada movement” (92):

What memories, what revulsions linger around these hash houses: the man eating in this one has the impression he is chewing the table rather than a steak, and becomes irritated by his common, noisy table companions, ugly, stupid girls, and a gentleman flaunting his second-rate subconscious and the whole unedifying mess of his lamentable existence; while, in another one, a man wobbles on his chair’s badly squared legs, and concentrates his impatience and his rancours upon the broken clock…  The whole scene – sweaty walls, people, stodgy food – is like a smear of candle grease.  (92-3)

The book is well written and well observed when Aragon wants it to be.  A classic of urban writing.  A classic of looking around.

What was I up to?  Let me put it like this: I thought I was prodding metaphysics forward an inch or two.  A laudable error.  But a delectable folly.  (184-5)

Not so far, really, from how I think about art.