An Anthology

by Paul Valéry, James R. Lawler (Editor)

it was Monsieur Teste, the arch cynic, who knew well that the mind which consents to fame is a mind flawed. Valery's own ambition at twenty, as at forty, was to avoid this error, to safeguard his secrets, to choose anonymity.

Genres: Poetry, Philosophy, Essays

364 pages, Paperback

First published December 19, 1976

About the author

Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath. In addition to his fiction (poetry, drama and dialogues), he also wrote many essays and aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events.

Valéry is best known as a poet, and is sometimes considered to be the last of the French Symbolists. But he published fewer than a hundred poems, and none that drew much attention. On the night of 4 October 1892, during a heavy storm, Paul Valéry entered an existential crisis, which made a big impact on his writing career. Around 1898, his writing activity even came to a near-standstill, due partly to the death of his mentor Stéphane Mallarmé and for nearly twenty years from that time on, Valery did not publish a single word until 1917, when he finally broke this 'Great Silence' with the publication of La Jeune Parque at forty-six years of age. This obscure but superbly musical masterpiece, of 512 alexandrine lines in rhyming pairs, had taken him four years to complete, and immediately secured his fame. It is esteemed by many in France as the greatest French poem of the 20th century.

Reviews

[Dr. Carl Ludwig Dorsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I note here together the volumes "Poems (Collected Works of Paul Valery, Vol. 1)" and "Paul Valery: An Anthology," only because both at the moment must be returned to their owners. I confess to being unfamiliar with Valéry and that these texts (along with some few critical essays) are my only introduction. Regrettably I find that these alone lead me to little more than a vague impression of either Valéry in general or of the writing here reproduced or excerpted.

The bulk of my trouble is simply that the French of the verse is far beyond me and ultimately, I suspect, largely untranslatable, at least by the methods employed here by Mr. Lawler, who seems usually more intent on creating an honest record than making or recreating poems. Valéry himself says, in another context: "If a verse produces an exact meaning, one that can be translated by another expression, this meaning destroys it."

But even limited to the prose pieces included (some selections from the Notebooks and from 'Monsieur Teste,' the 'Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci,' 'Poetry and Abstract Thought,' etc., which constitute only a fraction of these two volumes) I remain at a loss.

Given Valéry's famously obsessive self examination (his Notebooks were published in 1961 in 29 volumes of some 30,000 pages) it is easy to read the prose here as little more than Valéry reflecting on Valéry -- Valéry as da Vinci, Valéry as M. Teste, etc. -- a claim I can more readily imagine Valéry minutely qualifying than ever denying.

But if Valéry's self examination was obsessive, it was not wholly naïve. He is patently an experienced traveler in his phenomenological world, well provisioned with cigarettes and coffee, and his account is often absorbing if only, as in the selections from the Cahiers, in postcard form.

In 'Poetry and Abstract Thought' though, we have a longer more coherent report, even if the landscape is still largely Valéry, and I'll leave off my comment by noting a figure Valéry uses in that essay, a figure which while represented by its author as an actual dispatch from the interior, resonates with me as something more akin to fable or parable:

Valéry speaks (as he often does) of two sorts of language:

"One of them tends to bring about the complete negation of language itself. I speak to you, and if you have understood my words, those very words are abolished. If you have understood, it means the words have vanished from your mind and are replaced by their counterpart, by images, relationships, impulses; so that you have within you the means to retransmit these ideas and images in a language that may be very different from the one you received. Understanding consists in the more or less rapid replacement of a system of sounds, intervals, and signs by something quite different, which is, in short, a modification or interior reorganization of the person to whom one is speaking. And here is the counterproof of this proposition: the person who does not understand repeats the words, or has them repeated to him."

Some pages later he repeats himself:

"…utilitarian language…the language I use to express my design, my desire, my command, my opinion; this language, when it has served its purpose, evaporates almost as it is heard. I have given it forth to perish, to be radically transformed into something else in your mind; and I shall know that I was understood by the remarkable fact that my speech no longer exists: it has been completely replaced by its meaning -- that is, by images, impulses, reactions, or acts that belong to you: in short, by an interior modification in you."

Poetry then, is obviously that language which does not find its completion in self destruction but which "become(s) endlessly what it has just been."

I will not argue any of this: if this is how language necessarily functions, if there is indeed a meaningful distinction between "utilitarian" language and something otherwise, etc., but only repeat how this "demonstration" somehow strikes me with the force of fable, of parable; with the sense of something hidden, something with the power of a poem perhaps, something I can not quite put into (other) words, something which will not go away.

Elsewhere in 'Poetry and Abstract Thought' Valéry writes: "The mind is terribly variable, deceptive and self-deceiving, fertile in soluble problems and illusory solutions." I am glad for the small bits of witness gleaned here, and regret that the verse, whatever its nature, remains inaccessible.

[Peter Crofts]

Odds are you've never read any Valery. Well, maybe a poem or two, in anthologies. The Bollingen translations seem to be about all there is out there, and they're priced to ensure no one but academics go anywhere near them. Hat's off to Princeton. I lucked out myself, finding a cheap copy, in a used bookstore, priced with no idea as to its worth.

I simply do not get Valery's poetry, I can't get anywhere near it, to rate it would be silly.

Valery's too rich for me, too elusive; finely chiseled and very much the work of a certain type of French poet. I guess he's seen by some as a Symbolist, though he insisted that was not the case. I find Mallarme close to impenetrable, and Valery's poems are equally of stone. In both cases it's a music that occasionally comes into focus but, to these ears, it's in a weird key, the tempo is off, and the emotional tone is puzzling. Part of it may simply be the declamatory nature of a lot of French verse, supposedly that's the shadow of Racine, which gives it a classical feel, that of a staged soliloquy, but, as time moves on, of increasing obscurity.

That's probably a good way to approach Valery, he is working deeply within the tradition, and is deeply respectful of it, but able to somehow speak/sing to the babble without being overwhelmed by it. Look at something like his "La Jeune Parque" and Apollinaire's "Zone", two completely different responses to the growing mechanical roar. The former seeks to preserve something, that applies to both form and content, whereas in the latter's case form is thrown out the window and content is quick and shifting, in order to celebrate the immediate world's rude vitality.

There's several essays here of great interest. Valery's poems are lucid in imagery, yet completely opaque in import. The essays offer the same lucidity and are far more approachable. There are two, "Poetry and Abstract Thought" and "The Crisis of Verse", in which he presents his method. That in itself is worth giving the book a look. Inspiration is nowhere to be found, it is not needed, poetry will be produced by looking at the world in a certain way. So, though the poems themselves are of a chiseled distance there is no muse, there is no grace, and the poetry makes no claim from being anywhere else than here.

Perhaps, and I go through this hair pulling all the time, I shouldn't have bothered with yet another translated poet. I can hobble along in French, with the translations as cribs, but either way Valery just goes totally over my head.

So, in sum, if you're interested in French poetry you might want to give it a look. I imagine that if Valery is your type of poet this anthology would be of great interest.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This anthology, in addition to a selection of poems, includes essays, two dialogues, and two selections from Monsieur Teste. The essays are perhaps the most accessible of all the selections. But all of Valery's prose and poetry is stunning and warrants rereading to approach a basic level of understanding.

I was most fascinated with his essay on "The Method of Leonardo". As he put it, he attempted to "go beyond indiscriminate admiration", but it would seem at least in part a form of hubris to be too critical in the case of Leonardo. He struggles to encompass the mind of Leonardo and determine the balance between art and science.

In "The Crisis of the Mind", written in 1919 in response to the Great War we find Valery saying, "And we now see that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life." (p 94) With observations of equal profundity and sufficient poetry to tantalize the reader, this is a volume to be recommended.

[Graychin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s impossible to judge poetry in translation, and I’m not a great poetry reader, but there’s plenty of prose to enjoy in this fine collection of Valery. I think it might have been better if they had included the dialogue Eupalinos, or The Architect (probably my favorite thing written by Valery), but at least they had Dance and the Soul.