B U R E A U O F P U B L I C S E C R E T S |
François Villon, Poems
[1431-after
1463]
Villon was the original bohemian poet, hanging out in the taverns and
brothels of Paris with prostitutes, beggars and thieves, and being something of
a thief himself. Some of his poems are even written in underworld slang.
There are numerous translations, but the older rhyming versions are often
atrocious. Get a modern bilingual edition with a more or less literal
translation. Anthony Bonner’s and Galway Kinnell’s versions are both
reasonably
good.
Here is a literal
version of his most famous poem, Ballad of the Ladies of
Bygone Times, along with my free translation (designed to be sung to Georges
Brassens’s tune).
François Rabelais,
Gargantua and
Pantagruel [1553]
This is one of those utterly unique works that no one would ever have
predicted. Right in the middle of the bitter wars of the Reformation a Catholic
priest and doctor creates one of the most bawdy, exuberant and funny books ever written.
His literally “larger than life” story of the adventures of two giants
contains satires of law, education, the Church, and just about everything else.
It’s full of extravagant wordplay that would not be equaled until Joyce, and even
sketches a quasi-anarchist utopia (the Abbey of Thélème,
with its motto: “Do as you wish”).
I
prefer the old Modern Library Giant edition translated by Jacques LeClercq.
The more recent translation by Burton Raffel also looks pretty good, and may be
a bit more to contemporary taste.
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
[1588]
The French word essai originally had nothing to do with literature. It
meant attempt, test, trial, experiment, assessment. Montaigne applied the term
to his writings because he intended them as exploratory ventures — attempts to
find out about himself by examining his reactions to various subjects, keeping
an open, almost childlike mind and seeing where things would lead. Taken as a
whole, his leisurely, rambling, chatty observations form a candid self-portrait
of a kind that had never been seen before. You get to know a real person rather
intimately, and he is a very pleasant person to know.
The Donald Frame translation is probably still the best.
[Rexroth essay on Montaigne]
Molière, Selected Plays
[1622-1673]
Molière is probably the
greatest of all comic dramatists. His plays represent a delicate balance between
raucous farcical satire and the rigorous formality of French culture in the age
of Louis XIV. Perhaps some of their vitality comes from the constant tension
between the two. In any case, they are direct and universal enough that most of
the humor comes through even in translation. We laugh at the follies and
absurdities of his characters, then come to realize that we ourselves are not
much different.
Richard Wilbur and Donald Frame are among the better translators. Try Frame’s
versions of The Miser, The Doctor in Spite of Himself and The
Would-be Gentleman and Wilbur’s of Tartuffe and The Misanthrope.
(Save the latter for last — it’s rather untypical, and more subtle than the
others.)
French “Moralistes”
[17th-18th centuries]
In French a moraliste is not someone who preaches morality, but
someone who writes aphorisms, maxims or reflections about human nature and
social customs. The aphorisms of La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues and Chamfort
would in fact often be considered immoral by conventional-minded people. At
their worst, they are nothing but clever cynicism for its own sake; at their
best, they present a healthy challenge to prevalent illusions and pretensions.
Their extreme brevity almost guarantees that they are oversimplifications, but
it also makes them an amusing and easily accessible provocation to debate and
discussion:
Maxims and axioms, like summaries, are the work of persons of intelligence who have labored, it seems, for the convenience of mediocre and lazy minds. The lazy are happy to find a maxim that spares them the necessity of making for themselves the observations that led the maxim’s author to the conclusion to which he invites the reader. The lazy and mediocre imagine that they need go no further, and ascribe to the maxim a generality which the author, unless he was mediocre himself, as is sometimes the case, has not claimed for it. The superior person grasps at once the resemblances and the differences that render the maxim more or less applicable in one instance and inapplicable in another. [Chamfort]
Many other French writers are considered moralistes even though they
did not publish collections of aphorisms. La Bruyère
composed brief sketches of “Characters” illustrating different types of social
roles and pretensions. La Fontaine wrote witty poetic fables, some original,
some adapted from Aesop. Aphoristic observations can also be found within
larger works, such as Montaigne’s essays or Pascal’s Pensées,
in memoirs, letters, orations, conversations, and in fact just about anywhere
among cultivated French people. They are one of the most typically French
traditions, whether you enjoy them for their penetrating wit or are put off by
their blasé cynicism. Isidore Ducasse was
reacting to this tradition in his Poésies,
where he detourns dozens of aphorisms from Pascal, Vauvenargues, etc., and Guy
Debord also drew on it and added to it in his own way.
La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims and Reflections and La Bruyère’s
Characters are both available in Penguin. W.S. Merwin has translated
Products of the Perfected Civilization: Selected Writings of Chamfort. There
are numerous editions of La Fontaine’s Fables — try to get a bilingual
one if possible. The translations of Vauvenargues are long out of print, but
he’s quite easy to read in the original if you know any French at all.
Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
[1773]
Voltaire and Rousseau seem rather dated to me, but Diderot still has a lot of
sparkle. Rameau’s Nephew is a lively dialogue reflecting the collapse of
values toward the end of the Ancien Régime.
Even more entertaining is Jacques the Fatalist, a light-hearted
picaresque novel in which, in contrast to Don Quixote, the servant is
far more intelligent than his master. It has numerous modernistic or even
“postmodern” narrative elements, partly inspired by Tristram Shandy.
Pierre de Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville; The Marriage of Figaro
[1775, 1784]
Talk about sparkle! The Barber of Seville (Rossini) and The
Marriage of Figaro (Mozart) are the two best comic operas — I highly
recommend them even if you think you don’t like opera — but the original plays
by Beaumarchais are just as entertaining, and some of the funniest bits are left
out of the opera versions. In these two plays you can see some of the attractive
qualities of classical eighteenth-century society just before the French
Revolution, but also how the edifice is beginning to show some cracks. . . .
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
[1782]
This novel (a.k.a.
Dangerous Acquaintances) is a brilliantly cynical story of two manipulator-seducers. Modern readers are
often tempted to identify with the manipulators, as opposed to the insipid and
conventional victims, but in the end neither side comes out looking very good.
With each stage of the plot there is a new twist of the knife. . . .
Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, Monsieur Nicolas, or The Human Heart
Laid Bare [1797]
Restif was a French peasant who came to Paris
and became a typesetter, an ardent
womanizer (he recounts even more amorous episodes than Casanova, and is
extremely sentimental about all of them), and one of the most prolific writers
who ever lived (240 volumes). He’s one of those people like Henry Miller who has
not only conceived the idea that there’s something unique about his life, but
who somehow manages to make you agree — the narration draws you in so you want
to find out everything.
Monsieur Nicolas is his twelve-volume autobiography. I read the first
volume almost literally without putting it down (staying up all night) and soon
went on to read the whole thing, but I imagine that most people will be
satisfied with the one-volume abridgment (trans. Robert Baldick).
Also of interest is Les Nuits de Paris, Restif’s accounts of his
nighttime rambles in Paris before and during the French Revolution. (Note
that the English edition retains the original French title
— be sure you know which one you’re getting if you order
it.)
Stendhal, The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma
[1830,
1839]
These two great novels are the ancestors of all the modern novels of black comedy.
The protagonists are not just antiheroes, they are outsiders: the world
in which they
have found themselves seems absurd and alien to them, they can no longer take
its official values seriously. When young Julien Sorel (the antihero of The
Red and the Black) decides to go into the Catholic priesthood because he
perceives it as the easiest route to worldly success, he does this in a more
detached manner than earlier characters like Molière’s
Tartuffe or Shakespeare’s Iago, who still seem to take for granted the dominant
social values even if they violate them.
Going along with this moral detachment of the characters is the ironic
detachment of the narration — cold, objective, reminiscent of the stark style
of bureaucratic reports. This is a sharp contrast to the conventional moralism
and sentimentality of Victorian novels, and in fact to most fiction until well
into the twentieth century. (Nowadays, in contrast, a certain glib cynicism is
assumed, and readers are almost shocked if it’s absent.)
[Rexroth essay on The Red and the Black]
George Sand, Consuelo
[1842]
I read this romantic historical novel out of curiosity, because Debord
mentioned that it contained psychogeographical scenes that might be worth
detourning. However that may be, it’s an engrossing story. The title character
is a young soprano in eighteenth-century Venice. Toward the end of the book, and
continuing in the sequel, The Countess of Rudolstadt, she leaves Venice,
becomes the lover of a mysterious musical genius modeled on Chopin, goes through
some eerie Gothic-type adventures in a Bohemian castle, hits the road as a
traveling musician with the young Haydn, is initiated into a Masonic sort of
radical underground organization. . . .
Honoré de Balzac
[1799-1850]
Balzac envisioned his nearly one hundred novels (written, he once calculated,
with the aid of more than 50,000 cups of coffee) as parts of a vast “Human
Comedy.” They are characterized by the unusual combination of naturalistic
detail
with impassioned characters and melodramatic plots more typical of romanticism,
seasoned with the author’s worldly-wise commentary.
Here is a typical example of the latter from Cousin Bette
(which is probably as good a novel as any to start with if you haven’t
read any Balzac):
The moralist cannot deny that, generally speaking, well-bred people addicted to vice are much more likeable than the virtuous are. Being conscious of their own shortcomings, they are careful to show a broadminded attitude toward their critics’ weaknesses, and so they purchase lenience for themselves and are considered first-class fellows. There may be some charming people among the virtuous, but virtue usually believes that it is fair enough of itself to be able to dispense with trying to please. Besides, nearly all really virtuous people (leaving hypocrites out of account) have certain misgivings about their situation. They think they have had the worst of the bargain in life’s market, and their remarks are apt to be charged with acid, in the tone of those who consider themselves not properly appreciated.
Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil
[1857]
I would have thought that Rexroth would have just loathed Baudelaire (as he
did Poe). But while fully aware of his numerous flaws, he had no hesitation in calling
him “the greatest poet of the capitalist epoch.”
If he is, it is not for his dandyism,
his morbidity, his drug dependencies,
his reactionary politics, his miserable personal relationships, or his many other neuroses and eccentricities, but
for a nobility of attitude that comes through despite all that — an
uncompromising devotion to his prophetic vocation, an aesthetic intensity that
burns away all the dross, a courage and dignity that transforms
the banal, the bad and the ugly. Embodying all the splits and tensions of the
modern world, he goes so deep into his self that he ends up going beyond it,
transmuting it in a strange sort of way, to the point that he becomes universal
and speaks with the most direct impact to all kinds of people all over the
world. This is why, despite all the qualities that might seem likely to limit
his appeal, he has been translated hundreds of times into dozens of languages.
Even if you don’t know much French, this is one poet who’s worth the effort
of reading in the original. Get a bilingual edition, preferably one with a
literal prose translation, so that you can at least
examine the French from time to time while reading the English version. You can
find diverse versions of one of his poems
here.
In addition to
his verse (Flowers of Evil), Baudelaire wrote Paris
Spleen (prose poems), Intimate Journals, and lots of interesting art
criticism. There are numerous biographies and studies
of him from all sorts of
different perspectives.
[Rexroth’s Classics Revisited essay on Baudelaire]
[Another Rexroth essay on Baudelaire]
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Sentimental Education
[1857,
1869]
An extremely meticulous stylist, Flaubert spent countless hours trying to
find le mot juste — the precisely appropriate word — paring away anything that did not contribute to the exact
tone he was trying to convey. These two novels are his masterpieces. Madame
Bovary is the story of a woman whose romantic dreams are frustrated by the
boredom and banality of provincial life. Sentimental Education paints a
broader picture of the degeneration of values in the new bourgeois society into
greed, cynicism and disillusionment. (Ford Madox Ford, who strove to bring
Flaubert’s aesthetic seriousness into English fiction, claimed to have read
Sentimental Education fourteen times!)
I also recommend Flaubert’s unfinished final work, Bouvard and Pécuchet,
a satirical novel about two office workers who retire to the country to explore
(and become successively disillusioned with) the entire range of human endeavors
— agriculture, science, medicine, archeology, history, philosophy, psychology,
literature, politics, love, occultism, religion, education. . . . The characters
are fairly realistic, but the work has a fablelike quality more reminiscent of
Robinson Crusoe or Don Quixote or Gulliver’s Travels than an
ordinary novel.
Two good studies are Francis Steegmuller’s Flaubert and Madame Bovary
and Maurice Nadeau’s The Greatness of Flaubert. Steegmuller is generally
considered the best translator of Madame Bovary.
Comte de Lautréamont,
Maldoror [1869]
Lautréamont is the most important precursor
of the surrealists (with the possible exception of Rimbaud). Maldoror is
in fact more truly mind-blowing than anything the surrealists ever wrote. The
reader is almost physically jolted and disoriented. Senses are twisted,
expectations are upset, coherences are disrupted, literary forms are undermined.
The hallucinatory content is quite insane, often sadistic, but it’s far more
intriguing than the works of Sade himself. (Personally, I’ve always found Sade
pretty silly, and have never been able to understand why so many people take him
so seriously.)
The mysterious author, whose real name was Isidore Ducasse, was found dead in
a Paris hotel room at the age of 24. His one other work, Poésies,
a collection of detourned and often mutually contradictory maxims, is as strange
and unique as Maldoror, but with a totally different tone. It seems at
first sight to represent a renunciation of Maldoror, but should probably
be understood rather as a new stage of the same revolt,
continuing the negation at another level by negating any illusions that might
have been engendered by the previous work.
The best translations of both works are by Alexis Lykiard.
[Situationist
essay on détournement]
Arthur Rimbaud [1854-1891]
An adolescent rebel who undertook the most audacious visionary adventures,
wrote some of the most astonishing poetry of all time, then abandoned literature
before the age of 21, Rimbaud has inspired countless readers to obsession. Most
of what has been written about him exaggerates and distorts his life and work —
people tend to project their own fantasies onto him — but behind all the hype
there is a truly remarkable poet and individual.
There are numerous translations. I still like Louise Varèse’s
versions of Illuminations and A Season in Hell as well as any
others I’ve seen. Of
the complete editions, Wyatt Mason’s is pretty good and includes some
juvenilia
and fragmentary works not found in other collections. Wallace Fowlie’s edition
is more literal and the original French text is more conveniently located on
facing pages.
[Rexroth’s Classics Revisited essay on Rimbaud]
[Another Rexroth essay on Rimbaud]
Émile Zola,
L’Assommoir [1877]
A superb naturalistic novel about down-and-out working-class life in
nineteenth-century Paris.
Note: The book has sometimes been translated as The Dram Shop or The Gin
Palace, but most translations retain the original French title, a slang term
that literally means “a place where you get knocked out” — i.e. a cheap
lower-class bar where you go to get dead drunk.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
[1922]
Proust’s
immense work can seem tedious or ridiculous if you’re not in the right mood.
But if you settle down in a quiet place and immerse yourself in it, it’s like
entering into another person’s life. No other book gives the same impression of
the infinite richness of memory and subjectivity.
Reflecting the fact that our lives move in constantly shifting and
overlapping subjective times (in addition to conventional uniform chronological
time), the book consists primarily of the interweaving of different themes
within the narrator’s reveries, as he mulls over his past and tries to recapture
his most cherished experiences; so that the work is organized more like a
contrapuntal musical composition than an ordinary novel with a sequential plot
— a composition in which long and complex sentences like the one you are now
reading are used to reinforce the impression of the endless twists and turns of
time and memory. The society that Proust portrayed happened to be a relatively
interesting one (in a decadent sort of way); but the real point, I think, is
that anyone’s life, if examined in such depth and with such sensitivity, is full
of interest.
The editions with the title In Search of Lost Time (one revised by
Terence Kilmartin and then further revised by D.J. Enright, the other done by several different translators
under the editorship of Christopher Prendergast) are somewhat more
accurate than the earlier Moncrieff translation entitled Remembrance of Things
Past, as well as being based on a more recent and more definitive French
edition. Get
whichever one you feel most comfortable with and try at least the first volume (Swann’s
Way).
Surrealism
As an adolescent I was fascinated by surrealism, but in many ways it now
seems pretty silly. Its stress on desire and subjectivity, understandable as
that may have been as a reaction against the repressive forces of the existing
order, at the same time tended to reinforce some rather petty and self-indulgent
tendencies in its proponents. And its vaunting of the unconscious and the
irrational tended to foster the notion that the problem with the ruling system
is that it is too rational (whereas it is actually, of course, characterized by its
fundamental irrationality). These one-sided positions prevented surrealism from
developing a comprehensive, all-sided vision of life. Whole terrains — history,
science, ethics, spirituality — were abandoned to the enemy without a fight.
Even aesthetically, the surrealists’ literary and artistic creations were pretty
thin stuff. Free-associated poetry soon became boring, however
exciting it may
have seemed at first, and the paintings, if somewhat more interesting,
ultimately revolutionized nothing more than the walls of museums and the homes
of a few wealthy consumers.
Still, surrealism did represent a powerful striving for freedom and
adventure. What remains interesting is its explorations and experiments in
everyday life, including its outrageous scandals and polemics. These contain
lots of suggestive ideas that were to some extent appropriated by the
situationists and that might still be drawn on for new subversive ventures.
André Breton’s Nadja and Louis
Aragon’s Paris Peasant give some taste of the surrealists’ practice of
random strolling, which carried on a long tradition since De Quincey and
Baudelaire and influenced the “dérives”
of Debord and his friends in the 1950s. Most of Breton’s other works have been
translated. I suggest that you get one of the anthologies — Mark
Polizzotti’s André
Breton: Selections or Franklin Rosemont’s
What Is Surrealism?: Selected Writings
of André Breton — and perhaps also the Manifestoes of Surrealism.
Maurice Nadeau’s The History of Surrealism is the standard history.
Breton gives his own perspective in Conversations: The Autobiography of
Surrealism. Raoul Vaneigem’s A Cavalier History of Surrealism is a
briefer and more critical assessment.
[Debord essay on surrealism and other avant-garde movements]
[Debord
essay on dérives]
Louis-Ferdinand Céline,
Journey to the
End of the Night [1932]
A dynamite autobiographical novel, beginning on the battlefields of World War
I and continuing with down-and-out adventures in the jungles of Africa, the
factories of America and the slums of Paris. The narrative is very colloquial
and antiliterary — somewhat like Henry Miller but more bitter and cynical.
If you like it, you may want to read the sequel, Death on the Installment
Plan (a.k.a. Death on Credit), which has an even more bitter tone and
a much more slangy and frantic style. Céline
later became fascistic and rabidly anti-Semitic, but in these two early novels
his assault on society still has an underlying humanity.
The best translations are by Ralph Manheim.
French Poetry 1850-1950
With the exception of Villon, early French poetry has never impassioned most
foreign readers. But beginning around 1850 it really takes off — no other
country can claim so many consistently great poets during the following hundred
years, and many of them resonate with readers all over the world even in
translation. Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de
Nerval, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Tristan Corbière,
Jules Laforgue, Stéphane Mallarmé,
Paul Valéry, Francis Carco, Guillaume
Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Léon-Paul Fargue, O.V.
de Lubicz-Milosz, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, André
Breton, Antonin Artaud, Pierre Mac Orlan, Jules Supervielle, Henri Michaux,
Jacques Prévert are among the most notable,
but there are many others.
Baudelaire is the source and inspiration of virtually all the poets who came
after him. In one sense he (along with Nerval and Victor Hugo) can be seen as
the culmination of the Romantic movement, but he also began the revolt against
it. The succeeding currents went in many different directions. Verlaine
exemplified the most traditional, purely lyrical tendency, Rimbaud the most
innovative and apocalyptical. Corbière
and Laforgue developed new forms of ironic detachment that were later adopted by
T.S. Eliot. Mallarmé was a pioneer of “art
for art’s sake” aesthetic subtlety, seeking the ideal of pure poetry. Valéry
carried on a similar quest but in a more cerebral manner. Apollinaire heralded
the modern age with poems on contemporary urban life in a new
style influenced by the dissociative techniques of cubist art. Reverdy represents a
more stark, intense, interior form of “poetic cubism.”
Many of these poets challenged the limits of literary art, at one extreme by
abandoning it (Rimbaud), others by pushing the envelope of poetic content or
form, sometimes in a violent and explicitly revolutionary manner like Breton and
the other surrealists, sometimes in a more psychological or spiritual manner,
sometimes in both at once. Nerval, the explorer of dreams, and Artaud, the
explorer of himself, both ended up going insane. Max Jacob (Picasso’s pal) and
Lubicz-Milosz (a Lithuanian exile) were both mystics of sorts, the first more
whimsical, the second more somber. Cendrars (greatly admired by his friend Henry Miller,
whom he somewhat resembled)
wrote poems that are expansive and Whitmanesque.
Michaux explored the world of “inner
space,” sometimes with the aid of psychedelics. Supervielle
gently celebrated
the outer world of nature, animals and the simple things of life. Carco and
Fargue were noted for their nostalgic evocation of now-vanished Parisian
ambiences. Mac Orlan went further afield (Gypsies, sailors, distant voyages).
His poems, like those of many of the others, have been set to music. Some of Prévert’s
have even become popular songs (e.g. “Autumn Leaves”). Such crossovers between
highbrow and pop are not unusual in France, which has a long tradition of
popular songs with high-quality poetic lyrics, from the nineteenth-century
cabaret singers to great post-World War II poet-singers like
Georges Brassens,
Jacques Brel, Léo Ferré,
Félix Leclerc and Anne Sylvestre.
I suggest that you explore some collections such as
William Rees’s The
Penguin Book of French Poetry: 1820-1950, Angel Flores’s An
Anthology of French Poetry from Nerval to Valéry,
Wallace Fowlie’s Midcentury French Poets, and Paul Auster’s The
Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry and then follow up with the poets who
appeal to you. Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the French is
unfortunately rare and hard to find, but his translations of Reverdy and
Lubicz-Milosz are both in print. There are individual collections of most of the
other poets mentioned above.
[Rexroth essay on Pierre Reverdy]
[Rexroth essay on modern French poetry]
[Rexroth translations of modern French poetry]
Section from Gateway to the Vast Realms: Recommended
Readings from Literature to Revolution, by Ken Knabb (2004).
No copyright.
Bureau of Public Secrets, PO Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA
www.bopsecrets.org knabb@bopsecrets.org