The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry: A Bilingual Edition

by Paul Valéry, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody (Translator)

A fresh look into the monumental work of Paul Valéry, one of the major French literary figures of the twentieth century.

Heir to Mallarmé and the symbolists, godfather to the modernists, Paul Valéry was a poet with thousands of readers and few followers, great resonance and little echo. Along with Rilke and Eliot, he stands as a bridge between the tradition of the nineteenth century and the novelty of the twentieth. His reputation as a poet rests on three slim volumes published in a span of only ten years. Yet these poems, it turns out, are inseparable from another, much vaster intellectual and artistic enterprise: the Notebooks.

Behind the published works, behind the uneventful life of the almost forgotten and then exceedingly famous poet, there hides another story, a private life of the mind, that has its record in 28,000 pages of notes revealed in their entirety only after his death. Their existence had been hinted at, evoked in rumors and literary asides; but once made public it took years for their significance to be fully appreciated. It turned out that the prose fragments published in Valéry's lifetime were not the after-the-fact musings of an accomplished poet, nor his occasional sketchbook, nor excerpts from his private journal. They were a disfigured glimpse of a vast and fragmentary "exercise of thought," a restless intellectual quest as unguided and yet as persistent, as rigorous, and as uncontainable as the sea that is so often their subject.

The Idea of Perfection shows both sides of Valéry: the craftsman of sublimely refined verse, and the fervent investigator of the limits of human intellect and expression. It intersperses his three essential poetic works--Album of Early Verse, The Young Fate, and Charms--with incisive selections from the Notebooks and finishes with the prose poem "The Angel." Masterfully translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, with careful attention to form and a natural yet metrical contemporary poetic voice, The Idea of Perfection breathes new life into poems that are among the most beautiful in the French language and the most influential of the twentieth century.

Genres: Poetry, France, Philosophy, Fiction, Literature, Essays

400 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2020

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

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

It pleased me to add this volume to my library. It has seven section, four from volumes of verse, three from notebooks. My interest gravitated to the notebooks as I did not find Rudavsky-Brody's translations particularly adept (see pp. xxxv-xxxvix) though his rehearsal of commentators and other translators, including Valery himself, offer interesting insights into his problems.

Poetry/ Notebooks

album of early verse, 1890-1900/ 1894-1914
The Young Fate, 1918/ 1915-1921
Charms, 1921/ 1922-1945
The Angel. 1945

There is a section, "Rewriting the Past," a commentary on the early verse (pp. 339-48), followed by two indexes, French titles and first lines, then English titles and first lines. A quick perusal of these last might give a reader a taste of the translations.

(Incomplete 1/1/21)

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Perfection destroys itself.”
Untitled notebook [XXII, 291], 1939

Perfection. Is it simply doing things over and over until one gets it right? A mental challenge? Never happy with what we have accomplished? Or is all just an idea?

Take the French poet Paul Valéry. In his youth, he published poems in the Symbolist style and was take in the circle of the great poet Mallarmé. This was 1890 to 1900. His poems were an obsessive work. Often he continued to make edits until they were published, and sometimes, even after their publications.

A theme that runs through his poetic life was on narcissism. In the poem, “Narcisse Parle“ (Narcissus Speaks), written in 1891, the narrator is obsessed with himself. The poem has a feeling of loss, impending doom. Love is gone, hope is gone, we must bid adieu. Farewell.

Valéry was the talk of the town and then he disappeared. Literally. He wouldn’t publish again until 1918.

“The universe is only an enveloping gesture, and within that gesture —all the stars.”
Untitled notebook [II, 756], 1902-1903

Inspired by his friend André Gide, he produced an epic poem, “La Jeune Parque” (The Young Fate). Clotho, the youngest fate (Latin is parcae/moirai in Greek) spins a person’s fate, while her two sisters measure and cut the thread. Our young fate examines her life and debates whether she should become human to enjoy love or remain immortal. A very narcissistic thing to do.

“The music that is inside me.
The music that is in silence, in potential
May it come and amaze me.”
D [VI, 292], 1916

In 1921 he published a book of lyric poetry called “Charmes” (Charms) which literally lives up to its title. He even uses the opening line of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a quote, “Deducere carmen (Begin spinning songs). There are poems on the morning dawn, a plane tree, a bee, poetry, a column, a girdle, and of course, “Fragments of Narcissus.” For his good friend, Pierre Louÿs, a Greek tale on the Pythia. Both of these latter poems are much longer and revert back to his earlier symbolist works.

I was quite taken by the fluidity, the simple themes and above all the sheer beauty of these poems. Sure there is the exotic but they just get to the point. Close to perfect, I figure.

“My life was a house whose corner I knew so well. So well, that I hardly saw it anymore.”
T [VIII, 778], 1922

One of the things Valéry did over his life time was to write in his cahiers or notebooks. Some 28,000 pages. Short simple thoughts and reflections. The selection captures the spirit of the poet. A lot of words, written, rewritten. Ideas.

However the last poem sums up this idea of perfection. L’Ange or The Angel was published in 1945, the year before Valéry died. The angel sees a man weeping beside a fountain. Try as the angel can, an angel cannot weep. It examines itself and still cannot do this simple human act. Like the immortal Clotho or the self absorbed Narcissus, they wanted what we humans have, joy, pain, love, happiness, and sadness, to name a few traits. A search for being human.

“Waking beside a sleeping woman, in the half-light, warm and fragrant, breathing in, breathing out in the silence: sitting up, pure, sad, lightened, universal, and rising above life and the misty recollection of love which is distant now across the intervening sleep and the lover’s absence wrapped deep in her unconscious form.
‘Ιωτα [XI, 35], 1925

Valéry seemed to strive for perfection in his art as per the title of this bilingual book. Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody did a fine job in the translations but equally so in the forward that to help us understand this enigmatic poet. Well worth the read.

[James Dempsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

For too long has this book sat dusty and allergy ridden on the virtual shelves of my Books app. I am unfamiliar with Valery but what I do understand of him is that he, like many other modern french authors, had a melancholic mind. A head-in-hands sort of modernist, ruminatory and romantic. I opened this book and scanned the contents. ‘Journals, perfect!’If you truly want to know a man, or an author of old, their journal is the place to go. Working backward from their art - their publishing, their novels, their elementary philosophising - is no good. It is quite a difficult thing to find honesty in art; the honest self and the soul of the creator. I often believe that artists ascend to the art that they create. They fiddle and foible and rehearse and rehash and they try to make themselves, their literal self, be known. But how easily is this ever done? Idealising is always easier. There is always idealisation. You perform it, you write it, you paint it and then you conform to it. If it works - that is, accepted - then you keep it. If not then you move to something new. All good artists are always on the move, looking for something new.

Here are the first lines I read of Valery, his true self.

“O alone. O most alone. All things are close around me, but do not touch me. I look and I breathe. I am and I am not. There is no longer a place for me in the arrangement of things. I am ill at ease in this flesh. My own well-being is become a stranger. I have broken with what exists. Everything is strange to me. I have suffered too much in my soul to recognize anything. Why is there no God? Why, from the summits of distress and the pit of abandonment, do no sure messengers come? No sign, no indication. No one can hear my inner voice. There is no one to speak with me directly, to understand my tears and hold the confidence of my heart.”

- 21st of January, 1922