Paris

by Hope Mirrlees

París: Un poema representa un importante hito en la vanguardia en lengua inglesa. Publicado en 1920 en Hogarth Press, la mítica editorial fundada y dirigida por Leonard y Virginia Woolf, condensó muchos de los postulados del modernismo (el gusto por lo "oculto", la fragmentación, el carácter o el "método mítico", las alusiones literarias, históricas y políticas o la libertad formal) y antecedió en casi tres años a "La tierra baldía", de T. S. Eliot. Una auténtica "joya perdida" de la cual ofrecemos la primera traducción al castellano.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, France, British Literature, 20th Century, Womens, Read For School

60 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1920

About the author

Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) was a British translator, poet and novelist. She published three novels in her lifetime, Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists (1919), The Counterplot (1924) and the fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist (1926); three volumes of poetry, including Paris: A Poem (1919), described by the critic Julia Briggs as "modernism's lost masterpiece"; and A Fly in Amber (1962), a biography of the British antiquarian Sir Robert Bruce Cotton.

Reviews

[Laurent De Maertelaer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wat een ontdekking! Geweldig 600 regels tellend gedicht over de Lichtstad in 1919, voor het eerst uitgegeven door de Woolfs in hun Hogarth Press een jaar later. Het verloren meesterwerk van het modernisme, zo staat dit gedicht bekend, want het beïnvloedde onmiskenbaar Eliots Waste Land. Mirrlees beaamde op haar beurt de invloed van Apollinaire, Mallarmé, Stein en Majakovski (die ze in het Russisch kon lezen, check haar bio). Psychogeografie van de bovenste plank, vrienden.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can be read online here: http://hopemirrlees.com/texts/Paris_H...

Note that it was written and published in 1919/20 - two years prior to the Waste Land but, hey, a woman wrote it so why should we give a shit, right?

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 'lost' long-poem of Modernist poetry which may or may not have influenced The Wasteland. This poem is an assemblage of sensations, slogans, speech, impulses as the narrator, our flâneuse, wanders the mourning cityscape of post-World War I Paris. The year is 1919 and the Seine has flooded: "The dreams have reached my waist." Amongst the (non)ruins of civilisation, the theatre of bodies, the weight of the ancient world, the new spark of electricity, the mass of advertising and its colonial and racial alterity, the cabarets and their sexual and gendered codes of deviance, Mirrlees creates a psychogeographic consciousness of Paris where, to borrow from the Afterword, the "modern city is merely the aggregate of newness destroyed in perpetuity."

[Jaylen]

I have mixed feelings...

Mirrlees' Paris attempts to capture the moment of Paris in 1919 and does so to some success. If one is not a scholar of the period and does not understand all of Mirrlees' allusions to advertisements from the early 20th century, Classical allusions from the ancient world, French, and have an intimate knowledge of France's historical past and what was then in recent memory, the poem can be overwhelmingly confusing and even frustrating to read.

I would argue that Julia Brigg's notes on the poem are the only insight outsiders can get into Mirrlees intentions and the world she has created. That being said, I doubt that Mirrlees anticipated that her poem would be read a century later and that it would have been democratized through extensive notes about both the poem and the period in which she is writing.

I enjoyed the notion of a city being mapped by its writer, an inhabitant of the city - the efforts Mirrlees goes to in order to capture Paris at the time is commendable. I like how playful and new, for the time, her writing is in capturing her city. For example, the (DUBONNET) within the parenthesis attempting to capture the advertising on the inside of the metro tube was interesting, I liked her playing with the written and the visual. Similarly the taxi/taxi/taxi all lined up like real taxis were also an interesting way of committing the visual to writing.

The overall intention of the poem - wanting to condense the city down into a poem or a word (holophrase even) was an interesting project to read. I do think that Mirrlees is somewhat successful in trying to show that Paris as a city is too large (conceptually) and cannot be pinned down to a word or image. The poems discourse surrounding that is fascinating and should be picked apart with Brigg's notes, which offer specific details about art, music, culture, geography, politics and history for the time.

What I find somewhat agitating is how exclusive a project like this becomes in the effort to encaputre the city. Rather than offer readers an insight into the city through poetry, Mirrlees has ultimately alienated readers through her defining her city through these set parameters, allusions and language. Sure, readers not knowing or able to understand are of course not stopped from reading, but these specific references surely add to, enhance and certainly colour our understanding of Mirrlees' Paris.

How much can Mirrlees be faulted though for her exclusivity? The poem was understood and engaged with by its intended readership at the Hogarth Press. Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and their Modernist contemporaries possibly looked to the poem and its offered break from convention and what was though possible in writing and publishing. We are still reading the poem and engaging with it today.

[maddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very confused but loved the ride

[Lulu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can’t say I understood really barely any of it but somehow loved it. A little celebration of booking Eurostar tix to Paris today. Julie I’m coming for you.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

i'd give it five but there's a lot i didn't understand and allusions i didn't get, although what i did understand (not a ton) and allusions i did get (also not a ton) i super enjoyed. fantastic imagery!! the person who recommended this said if you liked the waste land you should read this, and i totally agree with it. seriously this poem is so weird and experimental and just REALLY COOL, i love it so much. i need to go back and read/research/analyze it properly someday because i can tell it's one of the works you enjoy the more deeply you read into it

also, fun fact, mirrlees wrote this when she was approx. 18 years old (she was born 1901, this was written 1919). she also wrote fantasy classic lud-in-the-mist at age ~25. what a badass!! sad that she isn't better known. but yeah fantastic work

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

Better than The Waste Land.

[Airam · Rating 4 out of 5]

like living it

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I hate the Etoile
The Bois bores me:

Tortoises with gem-encrusted carapace

A Roman boy picking a thorn out of his foot

A flock of discalceated Madame Récamiers
Moaning for the Chateaubriand de nos jours.

And yet. . . quite near
Saunters the ancient rue Saint-Honoré
Shabby and indifferent, as a Grand Seigneur from Brit-
tany

An Auvergnat. all the mountains of Auvergne in every chestnut that he sells. . . .

Paris is a huge home-sick peasant.
He carries a thousand villages in his heart.

Hidden courts
With fauns in very low-relief piping among lotuses
And creepers grown on trellises
Are secret valleys where little gods are born.

One often hears a cock
Do do do miii

He cannot sing of towns——
Old Hesiod's ghost with leisure to be melancholy
Amid the timeless idleness of Acheron
Yearning for ‘Works and Days’ ... hark!

The lovely Spirit of the Year
Is stiff and stark

Laid out in acres of brown fields.”
—
“There was a ritual fight for her sweet body
Between two virgins——Mary and the moon

The wicked April moon.

The silence of la grève:

Rain

The Louvre is melting into mist

It will soon be transparent

And through it will glimmer the mysterious island gardens of the Place du Carrousel.

The Seine, old egotist, meanders imperturbably to—wards the sea.”
—
“From the VIIme arrondissement
Night like a vampire
Sucks all colour, all sound.

The winds are sleeping in their Hyperbórean cave ;
The narrow streets bend proudly to the stars :
From time to time a taxi hoots like an owl.

But behind the ramparts of the Louvre
Freud has dredged the river and. grinning horribly. waves his garbage in a glare of electricity.

Taxis,
Taxis.
Taxis,

They moan and yell and squeak
Like a thousand tom-cats in rut.

The whores like lions are seeking their meat from God”

[Luis García Vela · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The first of May
there is no lilly of The Valley”

“They are not like us, who, ghoul-like, bury our friends
a score of times before they’re dead but–

never never will again the Marne
flow between happy banks”


"Pidgeons perch on the statues
and are turned to stone”

[Lou Braibant · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5/5 One-day stroll through Paris where the reader gets lost as one does when they're for their first time in Paris without a map ... then this poem would be the worst map!

[Joanne van der Vlies]

"Verlaine's bed time... Alchemy / absynthe,/ Algerian Tobacco, / talk, talk, talk, / Manuring the white violets of the moon."

[Eliana]

Sorry, what?

Definitely going to need class time to decipher.

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Whatever happens, some day it will look beautiful" (15).

January 2024: Updating my prior rating from college to five stars because I think of this piece often and nothing compares in terms of Mirrlees' modernist sensory voyage and exploration of urban life. This punchy poem is daring, dense with allusions, and achingly beautiful (I mean, "the blue ghosts of king-fishers" and "I wade knee-deep in dreams").

I live this poem every time I ride the métro, and it is a sincere pleasure.

"Cell on cell / Experience / Very slowly / Is forming up / Into something beautiful—awful—huge" (13).

[Michael de Salazar · Rating 5 out of 5]

My God, where has Hope been in all my life? So glad I ran into this masterpiece, she was truly ahead of her time. Extraordinary beautiful!

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

HIGHLY recommended for lovers of Paris and French culture: a pioneering Modernist poem, unjustly forgotten, by Helen Mirrlees (1887-1978). I read in one sitting, then turned to the extensive notes by critic Julia Briggs, an excellent afterword by Sadeep Parmar, before rereading the entire poem again.

“Paris: A Poem” is 600 lines long, 20 pages, ending with a single page of the author’s own notes on allusions (two years before T.S.Eliot did the same in the Waste Land). Leonard and Virginia Woolf printed 175 copies of the poem in 1920. Faber & Faber have done it proud in this centenary edition (2020). I read the Kindle version that is a PDF (hurray!) preserving the formatting, based as closely as possible on the Hogarth Press version.

French words, phrases, sentences abound on every page, taken from signs, advertisements, as well as slangy colloquialisms. Read through it! It’s not daunting show-off stuff like Ezra Pound at his worst. Just tun to the endnotes where Julia Briggs translates and glosses everything very painlessly.

See Wikipedia to learn more about the fascinating life of Helen Mirrlees and her mentor and companion, Jane Ellen Harrison, who taught her at Newnham College, Cambridge, and with whom she lived from 1913 until Harrison’s death in 1928, including some extended stays in Paris. The sights, sounds, and smells of Paris are present on every page, Paris in all its elegance and vulgarity (quite Joycean), but so are other intellectual influences: Harrison’s work on Greek myth, and even references to Russian literature.

[Victor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not an easy read by any standard. But with the context understanding, displaying the French memorial consciousness on the plinth, to which Paris rests on so shortly after the inhumanity of the first world war.

I personally don't understand why there's so many comparisons to T.S.Eliot's ,'The Waste Land', as HM's poem is more akin to the works of Guillaume Apollinaire's surrealism with his automatic writings.
HM was in the presence of GA friends at the very least in Paris with Apollinaire's last production, 'The Breasts of Tiresias' being realised only in 1918 before he died.

Nonetheless, it is a much well loved and crafted book for without it's notes, much would have gone over one's head, as it places each line in situ. Captivating.

[Meera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paris: A Poem, by Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978)

From the Foreword - Deborah Levy, 2020:

“…Virginia and Leonard Woolf, who had set up the Hogarth Press together… publish[ed] Paris in 1920.”

“it’s as if the poem itself is strolling through the May Day demonstrations and street singers”

“My wish for the twenty-six-year-old Mirrlees is that she had been encouraged to fly higher and to continue with some of the innovations she had started to make manifest in Paris. All the same, you now hold in your hands the work of a fiercely independent, young and spirited, flawed and brilliant female writer. Mirrlees set the bar high in Paris and, with athletic grace, jumped over Victorian realism in her skirt and walking shoes, one hand on her hat to keep it from blowing into the Seine.”

[Kaitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very abstract with a lot of references which makes it a little difficult to follow but I enjoyed the use of language and imagery. My favourite line: ‘Paris is a huge home-sick peasant, he carries a thousand villages in his heart. Hidden courts with fauns in very low-relief piping among lotuses And creepers grown on trellises Are secret valleys where little gods are born.’

[Maja Åström · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. Just stunning.

[anna]

i don’t think i speak enough french or know enough about modernist poetry to accurately give this a rating, but i liked how the poem was set up and the notes were really interesting :)

[Isa Kr · Rating 4 out of 5]

The modernist text to end all modernist texts.

[Naomi Mckeown · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I lived in Paris in 1919 I would have loved this. The 100 year gap kinda meant that the beautiful pattern of references weren't easy for me. But the fact this was written by a queer womy before the wasteland was even published is so cool.

[Alyssa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really my cup of tea, but a beautiful edition.

[W · Rating 3 out of 5]

It must be good. I don't know what happened.

[Lisa Tuttle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rarely give a book five stars, but I loved this so much.... The poem itself is a wonderful work of modernism that I had read ABOUT but never read. Thank you to Faber for bringing it out in an affordable edition, and saving me from having to read it on-line! It was like a trip to Paris in 1919...ok, more like a Zoom visit to Paris in 1919, if you can imagine such a thing. The commentary at the end by the late (brilliant scholar) Julia Briggs added another dimension, being a gloss on almost every line. And the biographical/critical essay by Sandeep Parmar gave extra value. This is one of my favourite books of 2020. It looks and feels nice, too. Of course I would love to have one from the first edition, hand-stitched and hand-corrected by the publisher, Virginia Woolf, herself! But even if such a thing magically appeared on my desk, I would be glad to have this edition alongside it.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

This long poem, published in 1920, is a modernist masterpiece that somehow seems to have slipped through the net and avoided being marked a 'classic'.

It is Hope Mirrlees's impressions of Paris, made up of chopped up thoughts, images, smell, and sounds. She uses not the layout and form of the poem as much as words to get across a vivid picture. The past and present intertwine. It is impressionistic. It almost feels like a film montage set into words.

I recommend it. This edition comes with a foreword by Deborah Levy, and an afterword by Sandeep Parmar which combine to help contextualize both the poet and the poem. There are also is also a detailed commentary, written by Julia Briggs for a 2007 edition of the poem, that I recommend reading and then going back to the poem and re-reading. I found that really useful.

I was surprised by this poem in all the best ways.

[June Gillam · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much of Paris and life in this long poem of piquant details. Set out on the page artistically by Virginia Wolff's Hogarth Press, what a find! Highly recommended for its invitation to interpret through Ezra Pound's four ways to study poetry by borrowing language from the Greek: “phanopoeia,” “logopoeia,” “melopoeia,” and “architectonics.”

[Yve]

This poem was originally printed by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1919.

You can read a PDF of it via Hope Mirrlees on the Web.