The Modern French poets of the 19th century - “Read me, to learn to love me.”

One good reason that these posts do not get written is that I start poking around in the texts themselves, and since I now want to race through post-Romantic French poetry, I find myself a bit crushed.  Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé – it is all so wonderful.  And those are just the giants of the period.

In his “Épigraphe pour un livre condamné” (“Epigraph for a condemned book”), Baudelaire urges his “quiet” and “sober” readers to throw away his book Les Fleurs du mal, leaving it to those who know how to plunge their eyes into the gulfs.  “Lis-moi, pour apprendre à m'aimer” – “Read me, to learn to love me.”

Well, we sure did, even many of us who have never read him. Baudelaire and Les Fleurs du mal (1857) are the beginning, or the beginning of the end if you think it was a wrong turn.  It is because of Baudelaire that Modernism is Modern.

There are many aspects to Baudelaire, even within Les Fleurs du mal; I guess my preferred Baudelaire is the one who brought Romantic ideas about nature to the city.  Romantic in theory, since the young French Romantics have a pretty darn tenuous relationship with actual living nature.  They are awful citified.  Baudelaire is really looking around and writing about what he sees.  If he lived in Jura and wrote about bird’s nests and yeast, he would have been a Romantic, but he lived in Paris and wrote about apartment buildings, which is Modern.

Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie
N'a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs.  (from “Le Cygne”)

Paris changes! but nothing in my melancholy
has moved! new palaces, scaffolding, blocks,
Old neighborhoods, for me it all becomes allegory
And my memories are heavier than the rocks.  (from “The Swan”)

I read Les Fleurs du mal in French about a year ago, so I can sympathize with the French students clawing through it for the Bac.  It is pretty hard in places.  Mallarmé is probably still too hard for me, I mean if I am trying to understand him.  Tristan Corbière is too hard, the language too crazy.  Jules Laforgue looks about right.  Arthur Rimbaud is clearly within my level.

The easy one is Paul Verlaine.  Much of his best work, entire (miniature) books, are readable by someone with a semester of French, a real beginner.  The beauty of his sound is audible.  He generally does not use too many words.  They are often such an obstacle to the language-learner, the words.  Verlaine felt like a reward.  When I could not read very much, I could read him.  I have read his first four books in French – “books,” they are such little things – and will keep going someday.

Anyway.  It’s all a marvel.  A rupture.  The beginning of “make it new,” the beginning of  poetic tradition that has stretched with real continuity until – I am not sure.  Possibly not today.  Poetry has a large place in French culture; contemporary poetry, maybe not much at all.  Who knows what will happen.  Meanwhile, French high school students will spend this spring cramming Hugo, Baudelaire, and Apollinaire.  Good luck.

but . . . one has never been able to find out what--satin--hat explodes - Stéphane Mallarmé is kinda hard to decipher

When I claimed that Samuel Butler, in Erewhon, or Anatole France in Penguin Island* are hard to pin down, a little hard to understand, what I mean is that they are dedicated ironists, committed to not quite saying exactly what they mean.  It can be difficult to understand their stance, or tell when they are joking or when they are merely joking (they are always joking).

I had been reading Stéphane Mallarmé alongside Butler and France, as if to remind myself what true difficulty looks like.  Mallarmé challenges me to decipher individual sentences, or the use of specific words, words I understand in non-Mallarméan texts.  And that’s in his prose that follows the usual rules of punctuation and paragraphing.  What to do with this:

An excerpt from The Book, is what that is, from the 2001 Mallarmé in Prose, New Directions, pp 132-3.  This particular piece is translated by Richard Sieburth, a champion of the more baffling side of Mallarmé.  The title of this post can be found in the lower right-hand corner.  Click to enlarge, I hope.

Mallarmé is constructing a text in a way that creates multiple meanings.  The sentences can be read across, or down, or I can follow the lines.  I can insert or omit phrases.  The meaning of any particular section remains obscure, and the layering of possibilities only adds to my confusion.  The effect overwhelms the sense.  I see that Sieburth has written an article on this text – on the whole thing, 72 manuscript sheets – titled “Discard or Masterpiece? Mallarmé’s Le Livre.”

The only other time I have written about Mallarmé, I did the same thing I am doing here, scanning pages of the wildest things I could find.  Mallarmé’s texts mostly do not look like this.  His poems look like sonnets, his fashion writing looks like fashion writing.  The sense is rarely much clearer, though.

Mallarmé’s writing – his prose as much as his verse – is essentially musical, with words chosen for their sound:

Whereas there was, when language reigned, a first attunement to the origin, in order for an august sense to be produced: in Verse, the dispenser and organizer of pages, master of the book.  Visibly, whether it appears in the integrality among the margins and blanks, or dissimulates itself, call it Prose, but it’s still there if there’s any secret pursuit of music within the storehouse of Discourse.  (“Displays,” Divagations, 1897, tr. Barbara Johnson)

The “secret pursuit of music” – in English, I have to take that on faith.  Or, I can mouth the French here (bottom paragraph), and continue to scratch my poor head.

I mentioned the fashion writing, yes?  Mallarmé wrote and published several issues of a fasion magazine, La Dernière Mode (The Latest Fashion) using a number of pseudonyms – Margeurite de Ponty, Miss Satin, A Reader from Alsace – in which he advises that the bustle is dead, but cameos are coming back into fashion, and bicycle pants should be partly covered by short skirts – “such a dazzle melts me, knocks me over, and pierces me” (M. in Prose, p. 95).  He recommends perfumed soaps, by brand, and “the deliciously-named product Snow Cream.”  He provides a recipe for mulligatawny, and ideas for the decoration of Christmas trees that would meet the approval of Martha Stewart (gilded walnuts!).

This glorious nonsense is drawn from the few pages of La Dernière Mode translated in Mallarmé in Prose.  Why the whole thing, every issue, has not been translated is beyond me.  I am not entirely sure of Mallarmé’s stance about fabrics and perfumes and top hats, either, but if I had to take my own stand, I would say that he means it, every word.

* Next week is Anatole France week!  It is as if I am determined drive off my readers.  Come back, come back!  France is not so bad!

as far as one place fuses with beyond

Now, Stéphane Mallarmé.  Here we have a challenge.  He aspired to the condition of music, and perhaps reached it.  With Mallarmé, and with Jules Laforgue, even more than with Rimbaud or Corbière, I may have reached a stopping point in my rampage through French poetry.  For now, for now.

Still.  "Dice Thrown Will Never Annul Chance" (1895).  A page of it is up above, the final page below.  The translation, by Brian Coffey, is from the essential Selected Poetry and Prose, 1982, New Directions, edited by Mary Ann Caws.  The poem consists of nine and a half of these pages.  I am tempted to photocopy each page and arrange them from northwest to southeast, to see the full extent of the constellation of words. 

Or the entire score.  I have seen jazz compositions that look not unlike Mallarmé's poem.  Which mental instrument should the reader assign to the giant, timpanic CHANCE, or to the reedy, italicized

worse

             nor

                         more nor less

                                                  indifferently but as much

or to the perfectly ordinary

evidence of a tot of the sum however little one

                                MIGHT IT ILLUMINE

I think violins followed by brass.  Assuming one reads the words in order.  Mallarmé allows the reader to follow the size of the words, or the spacing; to read across the page, or down it.  The trick, actually, is to try to juggle two or three meanings at a time.  A story emerges - a sea captain, at risk of shipwreck, rolls dice - or doesn't.  I splash through the jumble of words, or simply look at the stars

What am I talking about?  Click on the images to make them a bit bigger.