20th Century French Poems
ed Stephen Romer
178pp, Faber, £10.99
The idea that poetry is what gets lost in translation caught on because it reassured people that the mystery that was once alive and well in religion was now alive and well in language. If, for many people during the 19th century, God became increasingly difficult to get hold of, in the 20th century language was seen to be equally recalcitrant, resistant to human intervention. The new science of linguistics - that was always more a French thing, not a great concern for the British - made language seem impersonal in its dealings with the human community it was meant to serve. All the problems that we had had in translating what God had to say to us were transferred, in the 20th century, to working out what language had to say to us about who (and what) we are.
French poets of the 20th century, so well selected and so smartly translated in this fabulous anthology, were clearly well versed in the dilemmas they were inheriting. Whether to let the impersonality that was language speak for itself, or to personalise the language; whether to find a voice, or to ditch the egotism of the personal voice for something more strange; whether courting impersonality was being complicit with communism or fascism. This was what was at stake. "The whole world is new to me," the Stranger of Saint-John Perse's "Exile" sings, in Denis Devlin's translation, "And the birth of his song is no less alien to him."
It is the drama of the unfathomable modern inner life mixed and matched with the whole new political landscape of two world wars that this anthology tracks so deftly. And it shows us, by the same token, that now big business is the acknowledged legislator of the world, the small business of poetry is a relief: not because it is a retreat or a refuge from economic calculation, but because it is such a tenacious engagement with what is actually going on.
"The vast majority of the poets represented here," Stephen Romer writes, "take violent issue with the so called Cartesian spirit, so the route will not be straight, but crooked, circuitous and not without its culs-de-sac." To take violent issue with something as so-called as this is to be drawn to the more logic-defying logics, to more singular, less egotistical thoughts. It is to write more in praise of the cul-de-sac than of the way forward. Eluard's "Critique of Poetry" is appropriately blunt, in David Gascoyne's appropriately uncompromising translation.
Of course I hate the reign of the bourgeois
The reign of cops and priests
But I hate still more the man who does not hate it
As I do
With all his might
I spit in the face of that despicable man
Who does not of all my poems prefer this Critique of Poetry
How to be politically pragmatic while keeping in play complicated nuances of feeling was part of the surrealist project. Investigating the linguistic workings of the mind to find out where, if anywhere, politics stopped, to find out whether there is more to the modern self than propaganda and cliché was the other, related project of the early French poetry of the last century. Romer opens his anthology with Valéry's complete "Poem".
The sky is bare. The smoke floats. The wall shines.
Oh! How I should like to think clearly!
Romer follows Valéry - in his own and Paul Muldoon's wonderful translations - with Jarry, Roussell and Appollinaire. Romer is at once accurately documenting a history and, in his choice of poems and translators, keenly telling his own story. As with all the very best anthologies, there is a productive tension between the unarguable chronology and the arguments of the anthologist. Romer, a superb poet and translator in his own right, has taken his chances with this book to tell (and show) a history of French poetry in the 20th century that is also a voiceover for British poetry of the same period. And a suggestion for contemporary poetry.
So 20th Century French Poems is also the best kind of manifesto because it makes points without having to score them. It persuades by the quality of its poems, not by the special pleading of its propositions. "It is heartening," Romer writes, "to realise how much French poetry, in all its rich difference, has meant to a great number of poets writing in English." Many of the remarkable poems in English of this century and the past one - by T S Eliot, John Ashbery, Denis Devlin, C K Williams, Derek Mahon, Marilyn Hacker, Paul Muldoon, Alan Jenkins, and Romer himself - are French, as the translations in this book make abundantly clear.
All the most innovative modern - and modernist - poetry sounds as if it is translated from a peculiarly resistant, or secret, or occult foreign language. What Romer's endlessly intriguing and accessible anthology promotes, in its shrewd selection and pairing of poems and poets, and in its lucid, affable introduction, is a poetry gained in translation. A poetry that takes such subtle, violent issue in such various voices.