Rough diamonds

JOHN FLETCHER

Poems in the Rough Paul Valery translated by Hilary Corke (Routledge and Kegan Paul 84s) Between them Routledge and the Bollingen Foundation have been engaged for the last fourteen years or so in a remarkable exercise in disinterested service publishing—nothing less than the collected works of Paul Valdry in English translation. The edition is expected to consist of fifteen volumes in all, and nine

of these have appeared so far, comprising the plays, dialogues and most of the essays on literature, history and politics. This may seem the wrong end to start with in the case of a writer whose finest achievement was his poetry : the verse poems are still to come, no doubt because the difficulties of translating them into English are proving particularly formidable.

But at least Hilary Corke has given us a foretaste of what is in store. His translation of the prose poems will eventually take its place as the second volume of the series; he calls it Poems in the Rough because, for Valery, verse is to prose as sound is to noise, which makes prose a poor second best: 'Poesie brute' was Valery's own term. In any event, the aim is clear—to draw attention to the rough-hewn nature of the product, which has not been subjected to the endless polishing process which resulted in Le Cimetiere marin and a handful of other verse masterpieces. These poems, in fact, were thought of as pretty rough dia- monds by their creator, though diamonds for all that.

No doubt the metaphor sounds rather precious, but there is something rather precious about Valdry. The diaphanous nature of much of his work, and the fasti- dious recoil from the finished artefact, are characteristic of the man. He told with some self-indulgent pleasure the story of how Riviere snatched Le Cimetiere marin from

him and published it before he considered it complete. It was as if Valery were relieved to have had the decision about when to stop taken out of his hands; but it's not just a flattering story. Mallarrnd, too, whom Val- ery immensely admired, was literally cruci-

fied on the dilemma of where to end—so much so that he never managed to write 'the Work' he dreamed of. Valery is a similar sort of poet. Born in the year of the Commune, he died at the end of the Second World War. In all that time he really produced only a hand- ful of poems, but they are enough to make him one of France's greatest poets.

He is also one of her most classical writers. He steeped himself in the ethos of Greece and Rome, and stuck to traditional verse forms even where he immensely extended their range. And he started always with a certain structure in mind. This is how he

describes the conception of his finest achievement, Le Cimetiere marin: 'A cer- tain stanza of six lines was suggested, and

the idea of a composition founded on the number of three stanzas and strengthened by a diversity of tones and functions to be assigned to them. Between the stanzas, con- trasts or correspondences would be set up'.

The last condition, he says, required the

poem to be a monologue of 'self' which would embrace the major affective and in- tellectual preoccupations of his life. And that was how the characteristic shape and subject of the poem came into being.

Valery was classical, too, in his philosophy of life. The best things, he said, were those which were 'brief, intense and rare', and because he was, like the ancients he admired. at once an intellectual and a hedonist, he made no distinction of value between illumi- nation and orgasm. He dabbled in erotic verse, not only because he enjoyed it, but also because it was immensely difficult to write—the words available were mostly either from the gutter or the consulting- room, he realised, and so didn't exactly lend themselves to poetic use.

In Valery, in fact, many paradoxes co- habit. Was he the archetypal poet, as he believed, or just a very French man of letters burnishing his epigrams and framing them in elegant language? Probably both. He was a leading representative of a tendency in European poetry which also produced Hopkins and Rilke and Eliot, and has since given us Empson and Bonnefoy and Davie:

an intellectual and formal tendency, dia- metrically opposed to the effusions of a

Lawrence or a Durrell. Which you prefer is probably a matter of taste in the last resort; but there's little doubt that if the second ten- dency can lead to flabby sentimentality, the

first can result in vapid elegance. Valery, as you might expect, was capable both of the supremely intelligent beauties of Le Ci171- etiere marin and of the hollow poses of some of the essays.

His collected works in English make it possible for readers in this country to judge

for themselves which aspect predominates.

Each volume is produced to a very high standard, with prefaces by eminent writers like T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. The translators' credentials are impeccable, too. Hilary Corke has made an excellent job of rendering Valery's difficult poetic prose, and

Octave Nadal supplies an intelligent and en- lightening introduction, so that this latest volume compares well with its predecessors. The entire enterprise (edited by Jackson Mathews) deserves to be far better known than it is.