Stèles

by Victor Segalen, Timothy Billings (Translator), Christopher Bush (Translator)

Winner of the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for an Outstanding Translation of a Literary Work (2008)

Victor Segalen has come to be widely recognized in recent years as one of the luminaries of French modernism. Trained as a surgeon and Chinese interpreter, he wrote prolifically in a variety of genres. With this highly original collection of prose poems in French and Chinese, Segalen invented a new genre--the "stele-poem"--in imitation of the tall stone tablets with formal inscriptions that he saw in China. His wry persona declaims these inscriptions like an emperor struggling to command his personal empire, drawing from a vast range of Chinese texts to explore themes of friendship, love, desire, gender roles, violence, exoticism, otherness, and selfhood. The result is a linguistically and culturally hybrid modernist poetics that is often ironic and at times haunting. Segalen's bilingual masterwork is presented here fully translated, in the most extensively annotated critical edition ever produced. It includes unpublished manuscript material, newly identified sources, commentaries on the Chinese, and a facsimile of the original edition as printed in Beijing in 1914. Volume 2 of this work is available online at www.wesleyan.edu/wespress/segalen2 and www.steles.org.

Genres: Poetry, France, China, French Literature, Classics

Paperback

First published August 1, 1912

About the author

Victor Segalen was a French naval doctor, ethnographer, archeologist, writer, poet, explorer, art-theorist, linguist and literary critic.

He was born in Brest. He studied naval medicine in Bordeaux. He traveled and lived in Polynesia (1903–1905) and China (1909–1914 and 1917). He died by accident in a forest in Huelgoat, France ('under mysterious circumstances' and reputedly with an open copy of Hamlet by his side).

In 1934, the French state inscribed his name on the walls of the Panthéon because of his sacrifice for his country during World War I.

He gave his name to the Victor Segalen Bordeaux 2 University of medicine, literature and social sciences in Bordeaux under the Academy of Bordeaux where he studied, and to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Brest where he was born.

From Wikipedia

Reviews

[Anders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike so many other writers, who have milked a Western fascination with the Exotic to produce one stale, Orientalist pastiche after another, Victor Segalen was a true cross-cultural visionary.
He worked as a Navy doctor in Tahiti and China, among other places, but it was China's ancient civilization that was his most enduring passion. Buoyed by a thorough knowledge of Classical Chinese and inspired by the imposing stone tablets that marked authority throughout the Empire, he created throughout the early 1910s a coherent collection of "stele poems".
These strange works are not quite verse in the usual sense, nor are they merely translations of stele inscriptions. Notions of time, space, and identity mix in fascinating and unexpected ways - as Segalen himself wrote, his mission was to link "the Chinese empire with the empire of the self."

There is a lot of pompous, superficial trash written by Westerners who thought they had grasped China. This unique literary gem defies that and any other categorizations.

[Peter Crofts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, clearly a labour of love for the translators. The French/Chinese originals are actual facsimiles of a first edition. This first edition of Steles was a work of art, with a fan like folding out single sheet of glued pages with covers made of wood. The text itself is set up on the page to resemble Chinese steles.

In addition to Volume 1 there is also Volume 2 which can be downloaded for free from the book's website. If you are fluent in French you can access a full copy of the original poems on the same site. All told it adds up to about 450 pages of essays and notes for the poems which account for only about 180 pages themselves, and that includes the original texts and translations. As I said a labour of love.

The "voice" of the poems is for the most part austere and hermetic. The poems aren't esoteric but they do seem to originate from some strange universe consisting of one person. There is also a carved feel to them, if you are familiar with something like the Confucian Book of Odes you'll understand what I mean. The tone of the poems and the manner in which the text is placed on the page as if it were a stone monument produces a strange feeling, the poems don't seem to be written for anyone at all but carved into rock as some sort of declaration of immortality. That being said, this is clearly the work of a French poet, although one with more in common with Baudelaire and Mallarme than his contemporary Apollinaire. Some of the poems remind me of Cavafy's historical poetry, particularly the question of whom(persona wise) is talking....disembodied voices of those long dead. I could go on for days about the manner in which is it organized, the intense irony of the poet's perspective, the occasional eruptions of claustrophobic panic or the feeling one begins to develop as you travel through this strange mental world marked off by these steles to no one. Dense stuff, and I mean this is the best way, you read them slowly and then end up scratching your head, not because the language is cryptic but because the implications of it are.

I may change my rating after I've traveled (it really does feel that way) through this solipsistic kingdom a few more times. I am hesitant of giving it five stars at this point. I'm still a bit wide eyed before the novelty of the whole enterprise, but novelty wears off doesn't it?

[Leonardo Rodríguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Segalen fue no sólo un poeta viajero sino uno converso o colonizado: ir a China fue para él no tanto una exploración histórica sino una educación sentimental y estética. Encontró una simbología, un tono y unos personajes. Un viaje en busca de máscaras. Mis Estelas favoritas son las de la amistad y las de la guerra. Poesía de la delicadeza y de la furia.

[Craiyon]

Je suis incapable de mettre une note à ce truc...
Par contre je suis capable de dire que si je tombe dessus à l'exam, je suis fichue.

(edit : j'ai raté mon exam...)

[Camille Carrico · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un recueil assez atypique mais que j’ai trouvé dans l’ensemble bien trop obscur. J’apprécie l’édition commentée qui permet de mieux comprendre chaque poème directement après la lecture. Mais la nécessité de produire une édition comme celle-ci est assez révélatrice de la limpidité de cette œuvre…

[Ahksaile · Rating 4 out of 5]

C'est SUPER (en plus j'ai eu 17 sur mon commentaire hihi)

[Elisa Barroso · Rating 4 out of 5]

j’ai kiffé

[thesee 🚪 · Rating 3 out of 5]

J’ai pas compris ce livre. Mais j’ai bien réfléchi. La forme veut nous tromper. La Chine n’est qu’un masque pour nous détourner du sujet, de la dimension introspective.
Savez-vous que ces idéogrammes sont des remarques qui n’ont parfois rien à voir avec le poème ? Fascinant à quel point Segalen se joue de notre obscurité.
Ce n’est pas funéraire, c’est triste.

[david-baptiste · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wont begin to really start writing on this book as if i did it would become an essay as each time i read it the thoughts whih it provokes are more profound and also more mysterious, more elusive, as they should be--
Steles is not the dierct translations of inscriptions on stones by roadsies in China--but ones imagined as being found by this french writer living in China--patterning them after Chinese styles which are knwon from--translations, fragments of originals?--are they works "After" not so much one author ("After Lorca") but a great many, anonymous/known both--become fictional yet real--transposed--and is this an investigation into or an example of Orientalism?--a development of a commentary on it--as Segalen had originally gone to the East in the path of Gauguin--arriving just after the painter had died--so now what to do with this legacy of "exoticism" and "Voyage en Orient" (de Nerval)? A very comlex multi leveled layered book which was written during roughly the same era as Pound and Fenollasa were working on The Chinese Written Character as medium for Poetry--a fascinating work--something creating a space for itself, neither nhoa nor homage, but something other--a culture in a sense which exists only in this book?--the voyages of exterior travel, travels through languages and the bridges of translations, and the voayges of the being within the questions posed to oneself as "riddles" found on stele that one has created as coming from another culture--
all these voyages--voyaging among and with each other in this deceptively "simple" book--so beautifully and peacefully written--

[Paullafarge · Rating 4 out of 5]

False translations of Chinese stone inscriptions, published in Beijing by a French naval interpreter. Yes, truly. The story of the book is wonderful & this edition comes with scrupulous commentary and what sound to my ear like stiff translations of the French. I am wondering what previous trans. of the book are like -- apparently there's one by Nathaniel Tarn, who my informants tell me is some kind of poet.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the stranger volumes of poetry written in the 20th century...

[Lonely Panda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un poète intéressant. J'ai beaucoup aimé l'organisation du recueil.