Gautier's poems about Spain - Ruins of vanished races sleep

I have most appreciated Norman Shapiro bringing a readable version of Gautier’s Enamels and Cameos into English, but his Selected Lyrics volume also includes many more Gautier poems dating as far back as 1830, when the poet was 19.  I found Gautier’s verse more conventional as he grew younger (the book is organized backwards ), but how could I resist “The Hippopotamus”?

Javanese jungle-denizen,
Big-bellied hippopotamus
Snuffles from deep within his den
Mid monsters, some undreamt by us.

And so on.  T. S. Eliot, the goof, published a knockoff of this poem in 1917.  There cannot be too many comical poems about the hippopotamus.

Still, more pleasurable, and all new to me, are the thirty poems selected from the 1845 España, covering Spanish landscapes, history, music, painting, and whatever else caught his imagination.  The poems are more conventional than the Enamels and Cameos in that they feature some of the usual Romantic Spanish exoticism.  I note that Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen was published he same year.  But Gautier’s powers of observation usually ground him.  This is from “L’Escurial,” in which the poet see the massive, abandoned Escorial palace complex from a distance and compares it to the pyramids:

Everything would seem dead but for the flights
Of swallows, from their niches’ cornice-heights –
Kings’ statue-hands – swarming on pediments,
With fluttering wings, chirping their ecstasy
To wake him from dreams of eternity:
This giant, slumbering now, and ages hence…  (ellipses in original)

I guess the poet has gotten closer as the poem went on if he can see the hands of the statues.  I don’t know what the translator excluded, but this poem feels like it is part of a sequence in which the poet clambers around the Spanish mountains:

Ruins of vanished races sleep.  The ground,
Swept by great waves – biblical world long drowned,
Behemoth and Leviathan of stones –
Reveals a graveyard vast, tomb upon tomb,
Monster concealed deep in its rockbound womb,
Whose blocks of granite are the Titans’ bones.  (from “Higher I Climbed…”)

Spain is portrayed as a ruin, or as a graveyard, which it is, in a sense, as is every country:

Passing by a Cemetery
What is the tomb?...  Soul’s costume studios
Where, as they leave the theater, roles now done,
Actors – men, women, children, every one! –
Stop to return their rented acting-clothes!  (ellipses in original)

But this is exactly the kind of attitude a Romantic poet brings with him rather than an aspect of Spain.  In the opening poem, “Leave-taking” – amusing title; the leave-taking is from civilization, meaning Paris – travels to combat ennui, but learns hard lessons:

[Travel] proves to us that in the hearts most sure,
Most dear, forgetfulness holds sway; it shows –
O sadness next to none!  O bitter throes
Of misery supreme! – that one day you
Will be the victim of oblivion too!
Poor atom!  Mere minuscule nothing, cast
Aside and lost, lonely speck in the vast
Expanse…  (ellipses mine)

One might suspect parody.  But the interest of these poems comes from the contrast between the character’s mopiness and his clear interest in what he sees.

Slopes in the sun, flowerless, cheerless; rock
Granite-cliff, deep ravines carved in the chalk;  (“On the Way to the Miraflores Charterhouse”)

Or maybe it is something else.  There is a poem, “The Oleander of Generalife,” in which the poet makes out with a flower:

My laurel love, that shrub.  Each night I would
Take my ease by it, reveling in my bliss,
Kissing a moist, red flower-mouth! – Oh, could
It be?...  I pressed my eager lips, and stood
Awed, as I felt the flower return my kiss!...  (ellipses in original)

Now I want to read a complete translation of España.

A Gautier translation worskhop - Salut, yeux bleus! bonsoir, flots verts!

I am going to look at the end of a Gautier poem from Enamels and Cameos titled “Sadness at Sea,” a combination of sea description and overwrought Romantic sentiment.  The poet, aboard a ship to England, thinks about hopping into the ocean as a cure for despair, but stops when he catches the attention of a potential sexual conquest.

These are the final two stanzas.  The last is actually an exact repetition of the beginning of the poem.

Dans ce regard, à ma détresse
La Sympathie aux bras ouverts
Parle et sourit, soeur ou maîtresse.
Salut, yeux bleus! bonsoir, flots verts!

Les mouettes volent et jouent;
Et les blancs coursiers de la mer,
Cabrés sur les vagues, secouent
Leurs crins échevelés dans l’air.

***

And in that glance, arms beckoning me,
A Kindred Soul speaks to my plight
And smiles…  Sister?  Or mistress, she?...
Blue eyes, good day!  Green waves, good night!

The seagulls, playing, fly about;
And the white stallions of the sea,
Backs arched over the waves, shake out
Their tousled, windswept manes, blown free.

I like this quite a bit, both in French and in English, but it is also a good passage to see what the translator, Norman Shapiro, is doing.

1.  Shapiro includes everything.  The 1903 translation omits and adds, which to me are great sins.  Shapiro moves the content over with some efficiency.   The entire package of the fine image of the waves is intact.

2.  “And the white stallions of the sea” is an exact translation.

3.  “The seagulls, playing, fly about” is not.  “The seagulls fly and play” is easy enough, and “play” is a promising word for later rhymes, but the line is two syllables short.

4.  Gautier rhymes two strong verbs, “jouent” and “secouent.”  Shapiro rhymes two weak prepositions, neither of which are strictly in the original.  They are there to add syllables and to supply a rhyme.

This is my only real criticism of Shapiro’s method.  He has chosen to rhyme when Gautier rhymes, but to forego slant rhymes, which means that in practice he too often uses conjunctions and prepositions as rhyme words, which Gautier does not do.  At its worst, the practice leads to distracting enjambments.  I will go to “Symphony in White Major” for an example:

Dove’s feathers, white down that appears
To snow on manor rooftops?  Or
The ice stalactite dripping tears
Of white on the dark cavern’s floor?

Gautier ends lines with nouns and verbs and vivid adjectives, so each line of the quatrain, or each pair, works as a unit, and there is never anything like that break in the middle after “Or.”

My preferred solution would be to allow slant rhymes, but Gautier does not use them, so my preference is really just to replace one violation with another.  If we are trying to judge what is truer to the tone of Gautier, it is important to remember that my French is terrible, while Shapiro’s is expert.

5.  Even an easy rhyme guarantees nothing.  I will bet Shapiro had “distress / mistress” (“détresse / maîtresse) in the first and many subsequent drafts before he felt he had to give it up to solve some other problem.

6.  No translation that keeps the sense will capture anything close to the music of “Salut, yeux bleus! bonsoir, flots verts!”  This is the kind of line that caught the attention of later poets like Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé.  Would it be possible to compose entire poems with this kind of music?  Yes, it is, but not without a lot more luck or work.

Where stifled art might breathe again - Gautier's Enamels and Cameos

Théophile Gautier’s Selected Lyrics in Norman R. Shapiro’s translation is a book from 2011 that I did not read until recently.  I was waiting for the hype to die down.

Well, there should have been some hype.  Among the lyrics Shapiro “selected” is the entirety of Gautier’s 1852 Enamels and Cameos, one of the great books of French poetry of the 19th century, and what a century for French poetry.  A previous translation, from 1903, existed, but it is so bad that when I wroteabout Gautier five years ago I resorted to my own translations.  What desperation!

Shapiro’s might as well be, then, the only translation.  I doubt there will be another in the next 108 years, so this is it.

Enamels and Cameos has a funny place in English literature.  In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Dorian picks the book up just after he has committed a murder.  He is disquieted by a poem about a murderer’s severed hand (“Study in Hands”), then comforted when he turns the page to “Variations on the Carnival of Venice”.  Some of the lines about Venice are included in Wilde’s novel, in French, of course, making Gautier perhaps the French poet most read by English-language readers, if I take “read” to mean “grumblingly skipped.”

As the title suggests, Gautier’s poems are little, hand-crafted objects with little portraits carved on them, deliberately small and even trivial, beautiful rather than sublime.  They are perhaps partly a response to Victor Hugo’s poems, small Romanticism set beside his big, ambitious stuff.  They are also a reaction to the chaos of 1848, as he suggests in the opening lines:

Goethe wrote West’s Divan as men
Waged war to cannons’ blare and boom:
A cool oasis in the gloom,
Where stifled art might breathe again.  (“Preface”)

You can see here what Shapiro does throughout the book.  He keeps the rhymes in their place, no matter what he has to break to do it; he keeps the quatrains; he mimics Gautier’s eight syllable lines with quadrameters.  This pretty well takes care of the whole book (although the above poem is actually a sonnet).

The subjects of the poems vary as in any collection of miniatures.  Seasons, sculptures, women, their breasts, Christmas, the sea, “The Little Dead Girl’s Toys”:

On carpet and on table, there
Lies childhood wealth to others left:
Poor puppet, with his doleful air,
Arms dangling, sprawling, strength bereft.

Or the inexplicable “Symphony in White Major”:

Was it the milk-white drops astride
The winter sky’s azure blue dome?
Silver-pulped lily? Or the tide
Rolling beneath a froth-white foam?

White marble?  Cold, pale flesh, wherein
Dwell the divinities of White?
Silver unburnished?  Opaline
Glimmers flecked with brief bursts of light?

I seem to have found the statues, or the women, or both.  I think of all of these poems as miniatures, but this one is 72 lines and impossible to excerpt in a way that makes any sense.  But you can hear the tone of the thing, which is the tone of most of Enamels and Cameos, and which is also, to my sorry ears, pretty close to the tone of the real thing, Émaux et Camées, which is an achievement.

A generous chunk of the book is available as a PDF for some reason.  I think I’ll spend a couple more days with Gautier’s poems.

I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. - Théophile Gautier and his friend Gérard de Nerval

The biographer Richard Holmes has put together a volume of Théophile Gautier stories called My Fantoms. It's an odd little thing, six short stories and a biographical elegy, retitled and reordered, in the hopes of making a thematic argument, which I think it does.

I suspect most readers would enjoy this book quite a bit more than Mademoiselle de Maupin. Four of the stories are about ghost women and the men who love them. One steps out of a tapestry, another is a vampire, a third appears in an opium dream, the fourth haunts Pompeii. The tone varies a lot. The story with the tapestry ghost is a sex comedy (last line: "And then again, I am no longer quite such a good-looking young fellow that tapestries leap off the wall in my honour"). The vampire story is more of a real horror story, with a wistful tinge. The Pompeii story is an effective evocation of Roman vitality.

There's also an excellent E. T. A. Hoffmann knockoff about a mad painter ("Onuphrius Wphly, ou Les Vexations fantastiques d'un admirateur d'Hoffmann"), and a clever tale of what happens when an actor fails to play Goethe's Mephistopheles to the satisfaction of the devil himself. The writing, in general, is light, elegant, dashing.

So those are the Fantoms, or all but one. Why My? In a couple of the tales, Gautier, or "Gautier," is the narrator - he's the teenager seduced by the tapestry ghost. And the phantoms are all his creation, so they're phantoms of his imagination. There's one other thing, though.

Holmes renames all of the stories - "The Priest," "The Tourist," and so on. That long "Onuphrius etc." title becomes "The Painter." The actual titles are in a bibliographical note, so Holmes isn't doing any damage. The final fantom in the book, written in 1867, is "The Poet." It's real title is "Gérard de Nerval:"


"It is now almost twelve years since the drear morning in January, when a sinister rumour first began to spread through Paris. In the uncertain light of that cold, grey dawn, a body had been found hanging from the bars of a wall ventilator in the rue de Vieille Lanterne, opposite the iron grille of a street sewer, halfway up a flight of steps. It was a place frequented by a familiar crow, who used to hop ominously about, seeming to croak like the raven in Edgar Allan Poe: 'Never, oh! nevermore!' The body was that of my childhood friend and schoolfellow, Gérard de Nerval, my collaborator on the newspaper La Presse and the faithful companion of my brightest - and above all - my darkest days."

This final fantom is a real one.

Gautier sketches out his schooldays with Nerval, and their Bohemian life in Paris, their newspaper work, their famous battle against the Classical fogies over Hugo's Hernani. The whole piece is only twenty-three pages, so the movement is rapid, from Nerval's difficult obsessions with women to his strange travels in the Near East to the symptoms of his madness, with key, pungent details suggesting larger things.

"He could not conceive why doctors should be concerned if he happened to walk in the gardens of the Palais Royal leading a live lobster on the end of a blue silk ribbon.

'Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog?' he used to ask quietly, 'or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don't bark, and they don't gnaw upon one's monadic privacy like dogs do. And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn't mad.'"

Gautier ends the piece with an incisive appreciation of Nerval's writings, particularly the account of his madness, Aurélia. I'm going to try to write about Nerval's work myself, soon. Maybe the week after next - a break from Weird France is in order.

I don't actually believe that all art is perfectly useless, although I have been nodding along with Wilde and Gautier. I don't think they believed it, either. Just read Gautier's fine tribute to Gérard de Nerval.

The photo of Gautier is of course by Nadar, from 1854 or 1855. The drawing of Nerval's suicide is by Gustave Doré.

I, I have made enamels and cameos - Théophile Gautier's beautiful, useless poems

"When he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at the title-page of the book. It was Gautier's Émaux et Camées, Charpentier's Japanese-paper edition, with the Jacquemart etching. The binding was of citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates... As he turned over the pages, his eye fell on the poem about the hand of Lacenaire, the cold yellow hand 'du supplice encore mal laveé,' with its downy red hairs and its 'doigts de faune.' He glanced at his own white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in spite of himself, and passed on, till he came to those lovely stanzas upon Venice:"

And at this point Oscar Wilde (we're in Chapter XIV of The Picture of Dorian Gray) inserts three stanzas of a Gautier poem, from the second of four short verses on the subject of Venice. In the novel, the stanzas are in French. I'll get a dictionary and ma femme and try to translate a stanza very literally (please feel free to correct me), the one Dorian finds particularly evocative of Venice:


The skiff lands and disembarks me,
Throwing its rope around the pillar,
In front of a pink facade,
On the marble stairs.

L'esquif aborde et me dépose,
Jetant son amarre au pilier,
Devant une façade rose,
Sur le marbre d'un escalier.

Delicate, not too complex looking, not too exciting in English. Hard to see what Dorian is getting from them, exactly. The joke, such as it is, is that he has just murdered a friend, and is looking for distraction from Gautier's volume of exquisitely crafted miniatures, the enamels and cameos of the title. Dorian is finding a use for the useless. In the first poem, the "Préface," Gautier says he is like Goethe, who wrote his East-West Divan against the noise of the cannons; without worrying about the hurricane that whipped his windows shut, "I, I have made Enamels and Cameos," decorative, useless things.

About that hand of Lacenaire. Gautier wrote two "Studies of Hands," the first about a clay woman's hand, a sculptor's model - Gautier has this, let's call it a thing, about preferring sculptures of women to actual women - the second, "Pour contraste," about the severed hand of a murderer, still unwashed:


Mummified and all yellow,
Like the hand of a pharaoh,
It stretched its animal-like fingers
Frozen by temptation.

So I see why Dorian did not want to linger over this poem.

The problem is that Gautier's poems are too lyrical, too simple-seeming (but not actually simple) - whatever magic they might have is ineffable. All of Gautier's poems are like this. Here we have a complete Englishing of Émaux et Camées from 1903 which I have read in its entirety, and which, I have concluded, is basically terrible (the 1903 New York Times agrees!). The insertions of extraneous matter, the bizarre choices of rhyme words, the occasional total abandonment of English grammar, what a mess. It's the only complete Enamels and Cameos I have found. I need to find a better translation. These poems can't be harder to translate than Charles Baudelaire, and the Richard Howard Flowers of Evil I'm reading is fantastic.

And here, by the way, is the lovely 1887 Émaux et Camées, the source of the images, yours for free.

No, fools, no, goitrous cretins that you are, a book does not make gelatine soup - but what, M. Gautier, about books of gelatine soup recipes?

I mean, I know the book does not actually make the soup, but having the recipe* helps, non?

Mademoiselle de Maupin begins with a long preface, in which Théophile Gautier stabs, hacks, batters, and mocks every critic ("eunuchs," "lice") in France, to really fine effect. The preface is better than the novel, and more influential, too.

On the prurient critics, for example: "If there is any nakedness in a picture or a book they go straight to it, like swine to the mire, without troubling themselves about the full-blown flowers, or the beautiful golden fruit which hang in every direction." Gautier has special praise for a virtuous theater critic "who has pushed this morality so far as to say 'I will not go to see his drama with my mistress.'"

To the extent Gautier makes an argument here, it is that the critics are self-serving hypocrites, and that the novels and plays of his day are no smuttier or bloodier than Voltaire or Molière, "where the husband is duly deceived in the fifth act, fortunate if he has not been so from the first."

In a preface to a moderately smutty novel, this preface might itself seem too self-interested, but, as with almost every aspect of Mademoiselle de Maupin, the arguments for immorality are misdirection. Gautier's real argument is aesthetic. He's practically John Milton, arguing for the absolute freedom of the writer. The moralists are worth a laugh, but it's the utilitarians who are the real problem (long, but worth it):

"No, fools, no, goitrous cretins that you are, a book does not make gelatine soup; a novel is not a pair of seamless boots; a sonnet, a syringe with a continuous jet; or a drama, a railway - all things which are essentially civilising and adapted to advance humanity on its path of progress...

A novel has two uses - one material and the other spiritual - if we may employ such an expression in reference to a novel. Its material use means first of all some thousands of francs which find their way into the author's pocket, and ballast him in such a fashion that neither devil nor wind can carry him off; to the bookseller, it means a fine thoroughbred horse, pawing and prancing with its cabriolet of steel, as Figaro says; to the paper maker, another mill beside some stream or other, and often means the spoiling of a fine site; to the printers, some tons of logwood for the weekly staining of their throats; to the circulating library, some piles of pence covered with very proletarian verdigris, and a quantity of fat which, it if were properly collected and utilised, would render whale-fishing superfluous. Its spiritual use is that when reading novels we sleep, and do not read useful, virtuous, and progressive journals, or other similarly indigestible and stupefying drugs."

Worth it, yes? Those horrible, greasy pennies, the early eco-criticism, the conversion of paper into wine. I've read Mademoiselle for Maupin twice, although not for a couple of years, but I recently read a couple of his other books. I reread the M. de M. preface this morning, and think it's the best thing he ever wrote. I haven't even mentioned Gautier's five-act tragedy, in which the hero "throws himself into the water-closet," or the fulsome praise for Charles Fourier, "a madman, a great genius, an idiot, a divine poet far above Lamartine, Hugo, and Byron." The novel is almost superfluous, a mechanical working-out of his ideas with some spicy seasoning mixed in.

If any of this sounds suspiciously like the one page preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), where "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written," and "All art is quite useless," that's because Oscar Wilde's preface is directly summarizing the preface of Mademoiselle de Maupin. Except for the thing about Caliban looking in the mirror; that's not Gautier. The Picture of Dorian Gray has numerous direct references to Gautier, because it, too, is in part a novelistic demonstration of an aesthetic theory.

So I'm wrong, the theory is insufficient. Gautier had to create the beautiful, ridiculous, useless thing itself. Gautier actually worked as a journalist and critic for the remaining forty years of his life, intermittently creating beautiful, useless things. Over the next two days, I'll spend some time with a few of them.

* In the same book, be sure to see, at the very least, Ch. XIV, "Count Rumford's Cookery and Cheap Dinners," and Ch. XV, "Count Rumford's Substitute for Tea and Coffee." As the Trollope heroine says, "Yummo!"

Out of consideration for the reader, whom we do not wish to humiliate and discourage, we shall not carry this description too far

Which of these books looks more interesting? On the left, "The adventures of a woman who sets out to discover men, and discovers them thoroughly" - boy, that does not sound like the sort of thing I read. And what's up with the perspective of those balconies?

On the right, what's that? Maybe it's a Surrealist novel, or some Weimar decadence. How does Penguin describe it? "An influential novelist's shocking tale of sexual deception draws readers into the bedrooms and boudoirs of a French château in a compelling exploration of desire and sexual intrigue." Wow, how dull (and, it turns out, inaccurate). I'll go back to the first one.


The punchline is obivous, right, that they're the same novel, Théophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), written at the age of 24 by that dandified Bohemian on the left. It's a dirty-book classic, in at least two scenes actually kind of steamy. There's some fairly direct Lesbian stuff. One of the women is disguised as the world's most beautiful man, but the reader knows the score. I mean, it's not Zane, but Mademoiselle de Maupin is one of the reasons "French literature" became associated with dirty books.

How about Chapter IX, from a letter by the novel's hero, D'Albert, which begins:

"It is so. I love a man, Silvio. I long sought to delude myself; I gave a different name to the feeling that I experienced; I clothed it in the garment of pure and disinterested friendship... but I now recognize the profound and terrible road to which I am pledged."

By the end of the letter D'Albert has realized that the man he loves is actually a woman in disguise, so Gautier does not pursue the idea all the way to it's end. But still, 1835! The obscenity trials of Madame Bovary and The Flowers of Evil are more than twenty years later. Mademoiselle de Maupin never ran into that sort of trouble.

One reason why: the entire novel is an elaborate gag, an explication of an aesthetic theory. None of its surface is meant to be taken quite seriously. It's, I say, it's a joke, son, a funny. I'll try to write about that tomorrow.

Maybe I should include one of the naughty bits, just to prove my case, for the purposes of literary science. We're near the end of Chapter XVI, and the end of the book:

"Still, one lesson, no matter how intelligent one may be, cannot suffice; D'Albert gave her a second, then a third. Out of consideration for the reader, whom we do not wish to humiliate and discourage, we shall not carry this description too far.

Our fair reader would possibly pout at her lover if we revealed to her the sum total of the lessons imparted by D'Albert's love, assisted by Rosalind's curiosity. Let her recall the best occupied and most charming of her nights, the night which would be remembered a hundred thousand days, did not death come before; let her lay her book aside and compute on the tips of her pretty white fingers how many times she was loved by him who loved her most, and thus fill up the void left by us in this glorious history."

Is the whole novel written like this? Yes. Is that Rosalind related to the cross-dressing heroine of As You Like It? Yes, a performance of the Shakespeare play is part of the novel's plot. Isn't Gautier sort of forcing the male reader into a cross-dressing role in that last paragraph? Yes, definitely, and on purpose - "the tips of her pretty white fingers"! The more I look at that passage the dirtier it seems. I'd better stop looking.

Quotations from the 1944 Heritage Press edition, translated by It Don't Say.