A Strange Destiny

Saint-John Perse, translated by T. S. Eliot

Anabasis by Saint-John Perse, translated by T. S. Eliot

This one is a great rush, a torrent. Of ideas, and of more concrete, practical things. A poetic effort, in the translator’s mind at least, to encompass an entire continent. To channel all and to understand all, to see everything — everything that might ever be known. This is an immense goal, a strange and powerfully controlling ambition.

How, then, does Saint-John Perse fare?

He does it well, for this is a convincing book. It is a book of image radically and remarkably following image. Everything communicated in this immense oratorical fashion. A run-on sentence more like a runaway train. I will tell you, the poet implicitly says to the reader, of the life of many peoples scattered out among many lands. And you will believe all that I say, uncertain of when this was written, when it is meant to have taken place, or whether it occurred at all.

It’s the ambiguity between the real and the false, the image and the reality, the ideal and the filthy truth. All of these things are played up and played up and made to play the game.

But what is Perse’s game? It’s hard to tell. Is he communicating the result of a grand odyssey? Some voyage, like Xenophon’s, of a latter-day Ten Thousand? Sent into the maddening deserts and the terrible heats of the East.

Is this what is really going on here at all?

But I get ahead of myself. Instead, permit me to do as Perse does. I will give you some images to consider and to think of, some ideas to chew a little.

We see before us a host of cavalry. Rude-attired, hard of face and manner. They come cross the brow of the hill, from the other side of the rise, with their steaming, panting ponies hard-driven. And these men, they rough men, their bones visible through their weathered faces, they come in defiance of the dead, whose voices they still ever hear. They come not for food or yet for plunder. They come to carry off the women, the fine young women, of this settled place, this vain encampment.

Know this of them.

And those of you who venture into the cities (dens of vice, pitiable warrens of iniquity) see there the young men who bid and fail to topple pillars. And the handmaids of the wealthy who abscond when it is their time to hide among the ruins of happier days.

Think of the great seas, the seas that surround us. And the songs that were sung many years hence by lips now stilled, by voices now quiet. Take up the choiring songs that may be imagined and yet not heard. Think of them and the voices now silent. And believe, as you traverse the baked-hard earth that cracks into planks and resiling sheets in the cruel sun, that you may have your slender ankle grasped by the up-reaching heedless hands of the dead.

And walk you back into the city. The city of so many. A city where all act and do not permit you, observer, to see their thoughts. A place of silent faces. Of dark features, of thick, wiry hair. A place where you are not welcome, and where you might see much that would disturb you, make you doubt the goodness of creation, the decency of human life.

See there, the man with gonorrhoea washing his linen in the clean, clean river. Among the rest; among those who do not share his affliction. Seeming to be without shame!

Imagine such a place filled with teeming millions. Imagine such a place.

Perse’s work here is ambitious. It hopes to sum up so much. Life, death, madness, the progress and prognosis of life on an entire extended landmass, Asia Minor to Asia Major.

Many may say this is too ambitious, that Perse only hints and alludes to what he means to cover more fully. That he creates a synthetic East, a synthetic world, a place beyond time, unrooted, unmoored, difficult to grasp and even to imagine.

I have some sympathy here. Perse’s book is full of specifics. But it still lacks purchase. It is in many parts; it begins and ends with songs.

Critics say that his work is rapid-fire, heavily cut like a Hollywood action movie. No image given time, the mind never at rest, the piece unsettled and tearing itself to pieces under steam-pressure.

T. S. Eliot, the translator and publisher, says he only started to get this book after reading it many times. He writes that the reader of poetry, the serious reader, ought to be unsatisfied until they have as good a grasp of a book of verse as a barrister must have of his brief for court the next day. Naturally, this homework is somewhat ambitious.

Not for everyone.

Many images from this work stay on my mind. I can’t deny it. But perhaps what hangs around even longer (more so than Eliot’s effective, specific translation, which preserves some of the variability in phrasing and sentence length that Perse encodes deeply into the original) is the form of the book.

Eliot defends Perse’s collection as poetry, despite the fact that, to an untrained eye, it looks almost like prose. Long paragraphs. Full sentences. Like prose, though with non-standard capitalisation, punctuation and grammar.

But of course it is poetry, Eliot argues. Look at what it tackles: what images, what themes, what lyricism. (A latter-day critic would also say, look at Gibran; look at Crane; look at so many prose-poets of the century since.)

And certainly this book is lyrical. Its images range very widely. They fly up and out of the work, come in sideways, appear arcing, parabolically. There would be no way, in a work of sober prose, to admit and to surrender to that kind of madness, however cultivated. However much it claims to know of life; however so much it be prepared to tell.