Anabasis [Paperback]

St. John Perse (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 1970

This internationally famous poem by the 1960 Nobel laureate was introduced to English-language readers in this translation by T. S. Eliot. In this definitive edition, French and English texts appear on facing pages. Preface by T. S. Eliot.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger, also Alexis Saint-Léger Léger) (31 May 1887–20 September 1975) was a French poet and diplomat who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry."

Alexis Léger was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. His father, a lawyer, had lived in Guadeloupe since 1815. The Léger family was in charge of two family-owned plantations, one of coffee and the other of sugar.

In 1897, Hégésippe Légitimus, the first native Guadeloupan elected president of the Guadeloupe General Council took office with a vindictive agenda towards colonists. The Leger family returned to metropolitan France and settled in Pau. The young Alexis felt like an expatriate and spent much of his time playing sports, such as hiking, fencing, horseback riding and sailing.

In 1904 he received the baccalaureate with honors and started an academic course in Law at the University of Bordeaux. He frequented cultural clubs where he met Paul Claudel and Odilon Redon. He published a translation of Robinson Crusoe then undertook a translation of Pindar. He interrupted his studies in 1907 because of his family's difficult financial situation at the death of his father. He did, however, receive his degree in 1910, the same year he published Eloges.

He was recruited to serve in the Foreign Office in 1911 and spent his first years in office travelling to Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom. When World War I broke, he held the position of press corps attaché for the government. From 1916 to 1921, he held the post of secretary at the French Embassy in Peking. There, he received his first exposure to political affairs. In 1921 in Washington, while taking part in a conference on disarmament, he was noticed by Aristide Briand, the then-Prime Minister of France, who recruited him as his assistant. In Paris, he frequented the literary circles of André Gide and Paul Valéry, as well as the musical circles of Igor Stravinsky, Nadia Boulanger and les Six.

In 1924 he published Anabase, using the pseudonym of Saint-John Perse for the first time. After the death of Briand in 1932, he held successive important positions within the Foreign Office. From 1933 to 1940, despite great instability in the government, he remained general secretary of the Foreign Office. At the Conference of Munich in 1938 he opposed in vain the cession of Czechoslovakia to Germany. He was discharged from his post in 1940 and left France for the United States.

The Vichy government dismissed him from the Légion d'Honneur order and from French citizenship. He spent some time in financial difficulties until Archibald MacLeish, Director of the Library of Congress and himself a poet, offered him a position. Lilita Abreu joined him in Washington DC. He declined a teaching position at Harvard University, preferring to focus on his writing.

He remained in America long after the war ended, traveling extensively. In 1957, he was offered a villa in Provence and from that time on, he shared his time between France and the United States. In 1958, he married Dorothy Milburn Russell, a wealthy American.

In 1960, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in his villa in Provence and was buried in Giens.

Product Details

• Paperback: 110 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; Rev. and corr. ed edition (October 21, 1970)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156074060
• ISBN-13: 978-0156074063
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,104,480 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A modern treasure!, June 17, 2001

By 

Bill Given - See all my reviews

This review is from: Anabasis (Paperback)

The English edition of this book offers not only what is one of the most worthwhile pieces of poetry the 20th century has to offer to 21st century readers, but also a work that may serve as a standard to anyone looking to locate an example of a classic that survives the often deadly process of translation, for whom here we may thank T.S. Eliot, -- the edition prints the French language on the facing page, so that readers may trace what little poetic liberties the latter has taken in order to deliver across mountains and rivers, -- resembling the nomadic journey of St.-John Perse's epique, -- of language-scapes crossed . . . Mr. Eliot deserves our esteem for this feat if nothing else, to have retained that essence of "a great principle of violence", or rather that "essence" of the journey described in this book which is really not so much one of plot, character, or any emotional developement in the specific sense, but one of a progression of language . . . certainly the distinction is difficult to articulate, I mean that one existing between the emotional evolution and the progression of language, FEELING, essence, -- but that is what is so worthwhile about this book, in fact fascinating, to me, because it describes exactly this very experience, -- in that it reads as a kind of separate history, it describes the essence of man in history apart from any historical reference, apart from any identification that makes what the book describes HUMAN at all . . . we see a man here that is not a man at all except anatomically, as we would in focusing on the ancient cultures of South and Central America (Chavin, Olmecs, etc.), Egypt, China, and so on, they are only men as we are men today by an anatomical relationship. Thus this book reveals to us a sense of being, as men, that is largely lost in our modern day, and in the form of purely pleasurable poetry . . . so many lines in this books seem to sum up the entire statement of the entire vision, as if they could easily exist alone in fragments, say when our own culture has long passed to the dust of a long time's ravaging, and say all that the book builds from those lines together. I highly recommend this book, not so much for my own reasons, which are certainly a crock of my own reflection, but for your own. This is a book that speaks, there are few that do so, it is a book one can hear without reading. Mr. Eliot called it "as important as the later works of James Joyce", -- I would never give it so unworthy a comparison as that, -- I mean that this book is simply CAPABLE of more, Joyce is one thing, but this book, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, can be so much more. In terms of history, this is a book worth digging up.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "A poem of vast dimensions, impersonal as the sea journeys of Homer."--Archibald MacLeish, April 29, 2009

By 

Dawson C. Smith (Stratford, CT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Anabasis (Paperback)

Of all the poetry produced during the twentieth century two poems stand at the pinnacle, and this is one of them. "The Waste Land," by T. S. Eliot, is the other. "Anabasis" was written by St.-John Perse, the pen name of Alexis Leger, in 1924. It was translated from the French by T. S. Eliot with the help of Perse in 1930, a revised translation coming out in 1949. Perse was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature in 1960.

The Greek word "anabasis" means a march up-country, from the coast to the interior. Given the poem's setting one may be forgiven for thinking of Xenophon's "Anabasis." The word was also used by Plato in his allegory of the cave to depict the journey from the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge.

From Eliot's introduction:
"The poem is a series of images of migration, of conquest of vast spaces in Asiatic wastes, of destruction and foundation of cities and civilizations of any races or epochs of the ancient East."

An excerpt from the poem:
"Milch-camels, gentle beneath the shears, sewn with mauve scars, let the hills march forth under the facts of the harvest sky--let them march in silence over the pale incandescence of the plain; and kneeling at last, in the fantasy of dreams, there where the peoples annihilate themselves in the dead powder of earth."

Whereas Eliot, in his poem, portrays the modern world as a wasteland, the result of a loss of faith, Perse, in his, gives us a picture of the ancient world, beautiful and barbaric.

Note: I have on the shelf three versions of Anabasis. The first two are the ones done by Eliot with Perse's help: the initial translation of 1930, published by Faber & Faber Limited of London and the 1949 revision, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York. The third rendition is Perse's 1959 emendation of the 1949 translation, done without Eliot's participation, published by Faber & Faber, London. The one to have is the revision of 1949. This is the version currently available in paperback from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Colt Was Born Beneath the Bronze Leaves, October 17, 2008

By 

Lawrence (Christchurch NZ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Anabasis (Paperback)

St.-John Perse was perhaps the most ambitious and the greatest poet of the 20th century. His astonishing long-lined poems comprehend childhood, nature, the sciences, ancient civilisations, Asia.

"Anabase" is his best-known and most perfect work . The outline is clear: voyage of exploration and founding of a city in some exotic semi-barbarous civilisation. But the details can be hard to unravel. Perse arrived at his dazzling but difficult style by leaving things out, - the reader must supply many missing links, - and this accounts for its magical swiftness and surprise. (You can acclimatise yourself by reading the early "Éloges," where this style is still half-formed: you'll find them in the "Penguin Book of 20th Century Verse.") He also has the widest vocabulary of any French poet and a taste for the most confounding similes: the rain pursues travelling nomads "like a poll-tax."

Eliot's famous translation has a slightly prissy, affected quality which is alien to the original: but then, Perse's unabashed high-flown patrician eloquence has no English equivalent. So don't be put off by the obscurity: enjoy the gorgeous language and allow it to gradually make sense by itself. As a sample, try Section Ten with its kaleidoscopic lists outdoing Walt Whitman. I have been re-reading this poem for 30 years and it still amazes and delights me.