L’ange

by Paul Valéry

Dans un poème de jeunesse, Klee avait écrit : «Un jour je reposerai nulle part, auprès d’un ange quelconque». En regard du texte méconnu de Paul Valéry – un de ses derniers écrit en 1944, les anges dessinés entre 1939 et 1940 sont-ils seulement de petits espiègles, ou s’agit-il d’une série d’autoportraits tantôt près des morts et tantôt près de ceux qui ne sont pas encore nés ? Par leurs yeux ronds, est-ce le regard du peintre que nous pouvons deviner, ce regard depuis l’enfance si profond, si interrogateur, si troublant par sa force, comme si Klee avait le pouvoir, par-delà la mort, de faire lever en nous des questions essentielles ?

40 pages, Paperback

Published May 10, 2016

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.