26
POETRY
I
By Jonas Berry
t’s easy to fall in love with early twentiethcentury Paris, which as Denis de Rougemont once pointed out, “was the geometric
locus of the modern adventure”. You can attach
a seismically important name to every letter of
the alphabet twice over – Apollinaire, Breton,
Char, Diaghilev, Éluard, Follain, Gide – then
spend a lifetime reading issues from the first
three decades of the Nouvelle Revue Française
and never shake the feeling you were at the
heart of the ferment. Although Paris had long
ceased to be an open-air laboratory by the time
John Ashbery lived there – from 1958 to 65,
having previously been a Fulbright scholar in
Montpellier and Rennes from 1955 to 57 –
Americans were still so uninformed about how
the artistic landscape had been dramatically
and irrevocably broadened, that Ashbery
had his work cut out for him. He took to it
seriously, ferrying those innovations back
across the Atlantic to eager converts. These
two volumes of Ashbery’s Collected French
Translations are the summation of seven
decades of Francophilia and resoundingly confirm Ashbery’s reputation as a master translator.
For all the emphasis on modernism – only
three of Ashbery’s forty authors were born
before the mid- nineteenth century – the Prose
volume opens with a charming and hugely
entertaining fable by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (1650–1705). “The White Cat” affords a
window onto Ashbery’s penchant for verbal
playfulness. The typical boy-meets-girlbreaks-spell-they-live-happily-ever-after plot
is merely a vessel for thirty pages of deliciously
entertaining digressions. An old king who
refuses to abdicate in favour of any of his three
sons instead decides to send them on three
pointless errands, promising them that whoever
triumphs will inherit the realm, although he has
absolutely no intention of keeping his word.
The princes’ three quests are to find: “the most
beautiful little dog”, “a piece of cloth so fine that
it would pass through the eye of a Venetian lacemaker’s needle” and “the most beautiful
maiden”. Not long after setting off on his first
adventure, the youngest prince chances on a
castle with a golden gate whose walls are made
of translucent porcelain. The castle is ruled by
“the most beautiful White Cat that ever was or
T
alking Vrouz, the second collection of
Valérie Rouzeau’s poems to be translated by Susan Wicks (who was
awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize for the
earlier work) is another tour de force in which
the translations succeed in being faithful to the
letter (mostly) and generous spirit of Rouzeau’s French poems, while being perfectly
capable of standing – no, dancing – on their
own as English poems. Clearly, these two
poet-translators (Rouzeau has translated Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams) were meant to team up – or they
were extraordinarily lucky.
Rouzeau (b. 1967 ) has published more than
a dozen volumes in French, including Vrouz
(2012), a collection of short self-portraits (as
indicated by the title: VRouzeau) that won
France’s venerable Apollinaire Prize. Talking
Vrouz contains a selection of poems from Rouzeau’s earlier collection, Quand Je me deux
(2009), and fifty-eight of the 161 sonnets, or
fourteen-liners, that compose Vrouz. Readers
of Wicks’s English versions will find all Rouzeau’s exhuberant linguistic playfulness, a
ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY
John Ashbery
COLLECTED FRENCH
TRANSLATIONS
Prose
424pp. 978 1 84777 235 0
COLLECTED FRENCH
TRANSLATIONS
Poetry
460pp. 978 1 84777 234 3
Edited by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie.
Carcanet. Paperback, £19.95 each (US, Farrar,
Straus and Giroux. $35 each)
ever will be”. Charmed by the young prince’s
kindness and manners – who says nice guys finish last? – the White Cat handily provides him
with everything he needs to please his father.
While everyone’s favourites will be different, there are sufficient gems studded throughout this two-volume set to keep any reader
coming back. The range is refreshingly wide:
from fables and prose poems to lyrics, critical
essays (Michel Leiris on Raymond Roussel is
not to be missed) and excerpts from novels –
and even mock-dialogues, including Alfred
Jarry’s “Fear Visits Love”’:
FEAR: Your clock has three hands. Why?
LOVE: It’s the custom here.
FEAR: Oh dear, why those three hands? I’m so
upset . . .
LOVE: Nothing could be more simple, more natural. Calm yourself. The first marks the hour, the
second draws along the minutes, and the third,
always motionless, eternalizes my indifference.
Or, say, a ten-month correspondence
between Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) and Jacques Rivière (1886–1925), which begins with
Rivière writing, “Sir, I regret not being able to
publish your poem . . .” and ends with him
affirming “How shall we distinguish our intellectual or moral mechanisms, if we are not temporarily deprived of them?” The list could go
on. The Poetry volume features twenty-
five poets, while the Prose has seventeen
writers, with only two authors overlapping.
Of particular interest are Ashbery’s takes on
Yves Bonnefoy, Stéphane Mallarmé, Pierre
Reverdy, Pierre Martory (arguably his closest
confrère) and, of course, Roussel.
Perhaps one of the highlights – or one of my
favourites, at any rate – is the generous selection of Max Jacob’s prose poems, from Le Cornet à dés/The Dice-Cup. This alone would
justify at least half the set. Here is “The Beggar
Woman of Naples”:
When I lived in Naples, there was always a beggar woman at the gate of my palace, to whom I
would toss some coins before climbing into my
carriage. One day, surprised at never being
thanked, I looked at the beggar woman. Now, as
I looked at her, I saw what I had taken for a beggar
woman was a wooden case painted green which
contained some red earth and a few half-rotten
bananas.
As Ashbery is so inventive in his own poetry,
one might naively expect him to exercise an
unnecessarily free hand, but he is actually a
remarkably faithful translator. Although space
constraints make this impossible with the
Prose, the Poetry features the originals en face.
An examination of “La Mendiante de Naples”
will show how Ashbery’s version is pitch-perfect and exacting, employing precisely as many
words as the original (or rather three more, but
only because “beggar woman” must count as
two words). Usually, Ashbery favours AngloSaxon words over Latinate ones, felt choices
over rigorously correct. Opting for the latter
over the former tends to produce a turgid foreignese rather than an accurate “mirror image”,
which is why Ashbery’s kind of sensibility
seems to me the mark of a true translator.
Collected French Translations was assembled by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene
Richie, who have done a sterling job. Their
commendable introduction treats the reader to
not a few interesting stories, for example how
Ashbery – or rather, his alter ego, “Jonas
Berry”, a phonetic rendering of the French mis-
At top speed
BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC
Valérie Rouzeau
TALKING VROUZ
Translated by Susan Wicks
142 pp. Arc. £13.99 (paperback, £10.99).
978 1908376 17 6
willingness to follow where sound leads (“paradise / Or spaghettini spiced / With pesto portuguaise”); sudden changes of direction and
omissions that wink at the ponderous pace of
step-by-step logic; and an eclectic focus on the
everyday. Events and thoughts that might, at
first glance, seem banal or childlike reveal, on
closer examination, depths expressed with
poignancy, humour and freshness. There is
narrative, often subliminal or fragmentary,
and self-portrayal. The reader is beckoned into
an ongoing conversation about love affairs,
owls and snowflakes, the domestic: “Don’t
rent a lorry I can move your stuff / I’ve got a
little van your things will fit in fine / Smile
you’re just moving house you’re off to better
days / New love who knows / And everything
to live for both arms all your teeth . . .”. Lists
figure in many poems, in a variety of registers.
Punctuation is employed sparingly, but
Rouzeau and Wicks are expert at constructing
lines so that the absence of punctuation feels
natural, all the more so as the poems seem as
much spoken as written – snippets of conversation with loose ends and swerves: “This may
not be exactly what we mean / By poem but I
was wondering why I’d whisked this cloth
away / From grandma’s wardrobe yesterday
when she died / The pattern isn’t daisies but
two ducks / Two big fat ducks twelve oranges
/. . . . Among the pelicans the cranes the Père
Ubus / And everything mislaid with my loose
screws”. Here,Wicks has slyly contrived to
TLS OCTOBER 3 2014
pronunciation of his name – translating two
pulp detective novels to earn money during his
Parisian sojourn, spiced them up with “some
soft-core sexy passages”.
It has become rather fashionable to display
at least a passing interest in translation. There
may be a commercial aspect to this: poems, like
all truly globalized goods, must either transcend local markets or perish in a puddle. To
remain stubbornly monocultural now seems
shamefully provincial, and this is no bad thing
as long as it represents an actual, long-term
engagement – but the poet who spends the
entirety of his or her creative life in communion
with a language other than the one he or she
writes in is still as rare as a unicorn. Ashbery has
often been described as a French surrealist camouflaged as an American poet, but ultimately
one may say of him that he is no more French
than American (and vice versa), and, adapting
what Jacques Dupin said of Giacometti (in
“Texts for an Approach”, which is included in
the Prose), that we cannot separate his poems
from his translations – or, in Giacometti’s case,
his paintings from his sculpture – because “the
two means of expression are . . . but the tools of
the same research and the same experiment.
They complete each other, support each
other mutually; the exchanges between them
are constant and each advance in one has immediate repercussions on the other”.
On April 3 this year, exactly sixty years after
his first appearance there, Ashbery regaled the
crowd at the New York 92nd St Y with excerpts
from this Collected as well as poems from his
forthcoming new collection. In one of the latter,
Ashbery referred to himself as “the custodian of
sang froid”. He’s not wrong: it takes a steady,
audacious hand to move past the five senses into
the uncertain area in which we could be either
the makers of our own experiences or the receptacles of otherworldly revelations. In this, Ashbery manages to be absolutely modern in the
way Rimbaud demanded. While fans of his Illuminations, or The Landscapist, his indispensable selection from Martory, may baulk at the
pricetag, Collected French Translations, like
anything by Ashbery, is worth owning and
rereading; we should be grateful for this monument to the riches that his level of dedication can
yield.
keep the final rhyming couplet of the original
stanza (though there are no “screws” in it but
“ubus . . . plus”), and she has done so while
hewing to the original sense. Elsewhere
(“Vain Poem”) Wicks, challenged to translate
the wordplay of “élégants gants”, rises to the
occasion with “glovely gloves”. The polysemy of “Les rues sales leurs noms propres”
proved trickier, however, and I sympathized
with Wicks’s (projected) annoyance at having
to make do with “The sordid streets their very
proper names”. Here is the octet of a “Vrouz”:
“I’m good for this or nothing / Never learnt to
swim can’t dance can’t drive / A single car not
even one that’s small / Can’t sew can’t count
can’t fight can’t fuck / Can’t master how to eat
or cook / (I’ll ask someone to scramble me an
egg) / And as for drinking that’s a real dead loss
/ But dying is impossible right now. . .”. Emotionally and perceptually charged, Valérie
Rouzeau’s poems are also down-to-earth,
shape-shifting and witty. They dart off on their
errands at top speed, and we run to keep up.
They are a delight in both French and English.
Chapeau!