Under the Turpentine Tree
Anabasis. By SL-John Perse. Translated by T. S. Eliot. (Faber and Faber, 15s.)
Anabase is so difficult a poem that it is useful to have T. S. Eliot's own account of what he has, translated : 'a series of images of migration, of conquest of vast spaces in Asiatic wastes, of destruction and foundation of cities and civilisa- tions of any races or epochs of the ancient East.' And here no doubt lies part of the difficulty. Images are made to do all the work of this long poem, and its imaginative order as a whole is accordiqgly hard to grasp.
Horsemen bearing letters of alliance, the ambush in the vineyard, forays of robbers in the depths of gorges and manoeuvres over field to ravish a woman, bargain-driving and plots, coupling of beasts in the forests before the eyes of chil- dren, convalescence of prophets in byres, the silent talk of two men under a tree. . . .
The procession of images is unrelated to a personal experience or a conceptual theme—there are none of the usual aids to coherence. The most obvious unifying feature is one of tone : affirmative, rhapsodical, and particularly hard to render in English. It is enough to betray, however, a coherent intention at work. What is being communicated through these images is simply a sense of life as remote as possible from our own : values which are not personal, ways of thinking that are not abstract and speculative, and experience that is not private but communal or racial. The remote barbaric age, Sabean or Seleucid, becomes not a reconstructed past but an intense present; the sense of space and time is enlarged; man is impersonalised, and his in- stincts and animality again exist to be enjoyed. Like the Negro masks of the time (Anabase was published in 1924) or Ezra Pound's 'Seafarer,' the poem evokes from a more primitive world images capable of denying the atrophy of feeling it implies in the present.
Yet it is learned and allusive poetry. Sorting out the multitude of images, one finds dimly recognised anthropological figures, formulae of many religions and the symbols of different mythologies, sciences and cultures. Perse's ver- balised game with this material recalls the later works of James Joyce. It is not the same kind of semantic experiment, for his interest is rather in rhetoric and incantation; but he shares Joyce's dependence on verbal ingenuity for his effect. The value of this curious prose-poetry is perhaps still open to question; though for the French reader it has at least a logical place in the history of symbolism, with antecedents in Rimbaud and Mallarme and the declamatory verset of Claudel; and with affinities both of style and of content in contemporary writing—clearly, for instance, in the prose of Andrd Malraux. But Perse himself describes his work as `chimiquetnent francaise'; it is a kind of poetry more than usually impene- trable by a foreigner, and the main interest of the present edition is in T. S. Eliot's attempt to make it available to us.
The two poets have something in common in their imagery, and tricks of ironic juxtaposition come as naturally to Perse as to Eliot; but it is hardly enough to make Anabasis read like a poem in English. The modest aim is `to assist the English-speaking reader who wishes to approach the French text.' Since it was first published in 1931 both Eliot and Perse have tinkered with it with workmanlike dissatisfaction, and the present is a closer version than the first. It still at moments bewilders both by literalness and licence; a straightforward phrase, 'cc chant de tout un peuple, le plus lyre,' seems doubly confused as `this chant of all a people, the most rapt god- drunken.' The subtlety and freshness of Perse's imagery is conveyed better than his stylised rhetoric, which Eliot attempts to tidy up and `place' with biblical language. The reader is not greatly helped in this edition of seven prefaces by different hands, dating back thirty years or more. Eliot's original introduction is preserved CI am by no means convinced that a poem like Anabase requires a preface at all'). None of these takes account of the strenuous critical attention given recently to Perse in France, nor relates this work to his later development as a poet, perhaps the most valuable aid to understanding it.
ROBERT TAUBMAN
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