The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry: A Bilingual Edition by Paul Valéry, translated from the French by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody. FSG, 2020. $40

A post-Symbolist, one-time champion of predecessor Stéphane Mallarmé, French poet Paul Valéry (1871–1945) is renowned for the intensity of his emphasis upon a consummate precision of language in his work. Throughout his life, he frequently held off writing — let alone publishing — his poetry over trepidation about whether he possessed the requisite capabilities of achieving his highest goals. In the canon of his poetry, there were to be no brevities of chanced-upon literary magnificence, no substance-infused visions of startling wonder; he most decidedly would have no one-offs. For many contemporary readers, awareness of Valéry’s propensities in this regard generally precede the actual reading of his work. In addition, his poetry is considered a notorious challenge to successfully translate. This makes Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody’s The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry all the more needed and appreciated as it gives unfamiliar Anglophone readers ready access to a significant selection of Valéry’s corpus.

By far, the passages Rudavsky-Brody includes from Valéry’s numerous notebooks (“28,000 pages” worth) are the most startling and awe-striking moments to be found in the gathering. It’s impossible not to be caught up in the immediacy of the personal statements found in them, revealing as they do Valéry’s own sense of his work and place in the world that is anything but confident.  

At 4 o’clock, I was watching the palm tree crowned with a star.
The infinitely gentle calm, the motionless wellspring of day,
Was infinitely close to the wellspring of tears,
And day arrived, slowly shedding light
On so many ruins.
It comes, slowly infusing things which in my eyes are all ruins.

His skepticism and concern over the failure of his work to measure up to his exacting personal standards is laid bare:

Here is your oeuvre—said a voice
And I beheld everything I had not done.
And I saw more clearly than ever that I was not the one who has done what I have done—rather, I was he who has not done what I have not done—What I have not done was therefore perfectly beautiful, in perfect keeping with the impossibility of being done.

Every page of the notebook selections proves fruitful reading — and worthy of re-reading. They stand in stark contrast to the insular and rather privately codified poetry. Remarking upon this contrast, Rudavsky-Brody contends: 

‘The notebooks are my real oeuvre,’ Valéry wrote to his friend Paul Souday. If so, they were an impossible one, whose form was their very formlessness. They are the opposite of the concrete oeuvre of his collected Poésies, so carefully composed, almost a closed system.

Confronted with the “sense of necessary arbitrariness and arbitrary necessity” he sees as undergirding this “concrete oeuvre,” Rudavsky-Brody chose to translate Valéry’s poetry utilizing blank verse composed in “regular English meter” of stressed and unstressed syllables. His contention being that “regular English meter has as much to do with experiencing a similar set of formal constraints, of exercise, as characterized Valéry’s work, as with re-creating a semblance of their complex rhythms”. While arguably an admirable self-constraint in terms of emulating Valéry’s own notions, and no doubt a worthwhile “exercise,” this does lead to some odd results that more often than not fail to convince. The wish to avoid the difficulties of attempting to reproduce Valéry’s own rhyme and scansion is understandable, but replacing them with another set of procedural impositions doesn’t necessarily allow the translation to do justice to the original. The ensuing effect too often lodges the translation at yet a further remove from it.

Consider the opening stanza of “Poésie”:

Par la surprise saisie,
Une bouche qui buvait
Au sein de la Poésie
En sépare son duvet:

Assumedly due to his chosen constraints, Rudavsky-Brody is forced to reshuffle lines, moving the first down to the third, thus bringing the second up to the opening and the third up to the second:  

A mouth that had been drinking
At the breast of Poetry
Is taken by surprise,
And lifts its downy cheek:

The forceful and striking opening line, full of the immediate “surprise” of the event, disappears. The action of the poem becomes laconic. Perhaps Valéry’s poetry sounds just as dull in French as these English versions manage to be, yet this seems unlikely. Rudavsky-Brody himself refers to how “the joy of Valéry’s poetry, so consciously, mindfully crafted” results in “a dense texture of assonance, internal rhyme, double meanings and shifting images”. Yet his versions of the poems only befuddle Valéry’s intent even as elucidation of the very strengths Rudavsky-Brody describes remains his stated goal. In another instance, take the opening line of “Aurore”: “La confusion morose” here given as “The murky disarray”. A literal translation of the line is fairly obvious, something like “the confused gloominess,” yet how “disarray” serves to properly convey “confusion” in this instance, or how “murky” justifiably carries the dark weight of “morose,” is anything but apparent. 

Rudavsky-Brody’s renditions of Valéry’s poems offer nothing close to the “magia rhythmica” that Fernando Pessoa celebrates in his readings of Milton’s work. Thankfully, once again, there are the selections from Valéry’s notebooks to turn to. Interlaced chronologically throughout the volume, between selections from the poetry, these passages are endlessly compelling. Nearly any page taken at random offers up something engaging. Here’s one from 1910, a spontaneous-seeming stream of consciousness portrait of Genoa, Italy:

Genoa, city of cats. Dark corners.
  We are witness to its continuous construction—From the 13th to the 20th.
  This entirely visible city—continuously present to itself, familiar with its sea, its rock, its slate, its brick, its marble; perpetually working against its mountain—American since Columbus.
  The prodigious boredom of Works of Art—less in Genoa.
  Conical hills, topped off with sanctuaries—dark green.
  Pink baby-rattles, small bright teeth, tiny inset houses.
  45° slopes, cones.
  Beyond, Mount Fascia, the overall pinkish color of an elephant.
  Alleys. Countless children at play around the whores. There is an elementary kind of prostitution here; analogous to the small shops. They sell their bodies as their neighbor does her chestnuts, her figs, her huge golden pies—chickpea flatbreads.
  Walking through the close, thick life of these deep lanes is like entering the sea, at the dark bottom of a strangely populated ocean.
  A feeling of the Arabian Nights. Concentrated odors—Quick passersby over marble slabs streaked by the chisel. Toward the heights, the alleys crawl upward and deck themselves out in ribbons of brick and flat stones—Cypresses, miniscule domes, friars.
  —Odorous kitchens—Those gigantic pies, chickpea flour, unfamiliar combinations, sardines in oil, hard-boiled eggs baked in the crust, spinach pies, fried fish—A very old cuisine—
  A slate quarry.
  The tartane of Lavagna.
  The navicelli. 

Such indelible evocation of the city’s endearing Gothic Quarter, huddled on the sloping hillside rising up from the bay, should leave even the greatest of travel writers struck with envy. Valéry’s lucid mastery is ever apparent. His opening designation “city of cats” feels immediately genuine and intimate. It is followed by a swift survey of the city’s history — including its major claim to fame as the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, who in 1479 launched from its harbor waters upon his eventual voyage to the New World.  After that, he describes the streets — a public urinal stands on a side street just inside the gates to the quarter — as “the dark bottom of a strangely populated ocean,” a maze where “the alleys crawl”. His sketch charms the imagination. In moments such as these, any and all sense of shortcoming in Rudavsky-Brody’s handling of the poems is utterly forgotten.