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Anabasis

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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-- in that it reads as a kind of separate history, it describes the essence of man in history apart from any historical reference, apart from any identification that makes what the book describes HUMAN at all .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.

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.

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.

"Anabase" (Anabasis, the Classical Greek word for a journey up country) was the first mature work by Saint-John Perse, the poetic pseudonym of French diplomat Alexis Leger. It was written in the early 1920s during a stint in China, where Leger represented the French foreign ministry. The poet wrote mainly for himself, but after the manuscript was brought back to France by friends, ANABASIS won instant esteem, with translations into several major European languages by the end of the decade, and the facing-page rendering into English here was made by no less a major figure than T.S. Eliot.

For some weeks, Leger traveled on horseback through China's rural provinces and the Gobi Desert, which inspired this great poem of migration, ten cantos narrated by a Conqueror glorying in his victories, but driven ever onward to new lands. But in drawing inspiration from the Asian cultures around him, Perse does not refer to their peculiarities, to what sets them apart from his own, but rather he distilled from his experiences a collection of human universals. ANABASIS is a saga could be set anywhere, whether Homeric Greece, the ancient Central Asian steppes, or even the Age of Discovery. The geographical setting is unspecified but similarly universal, ranging from the shores of the sea to high elevations, from fertile soil to barren sands.

Perse's poetry is centered around a humanist outlook. It is up to Man to create meaning for his existence through great deeds. AMERS, a later poem by Perse, includes the line "We who one day, perhaps, will die proclaim man immortal in the flaming heart of the moment", a statement that concisely captures his philosophy, which was already fully fledged in ANABASIS. There is no Providence in this plot, no hidden metaphysical reality. References to religious rites abound, but they serve merely as ethnographic colour, for the universal traits of Mankind through the ages that Perse depicts include propitiation of deities and often bloody sacrifice, even if Perse himself is a sceptical modernist.

Giving representative quotations of this work for the sake of a review is difficult, as ANABASIS is a ceaseless flow of images in prose poem form, and though the details are fine and innumerable, it is the whole overwhelming effect that makes this such a special work. But here's a bit from the introductory canto:

"So I haunted the pure city of your dreams and I established in the desolate markets the pure commerce of my soul, among you / invisible and insistent as a pure fire of thorns in the gale. / Power you sang on our roads of splendour... 'In the delight of salt the mind shakes its tumult of spears... With salt I shall revive the dead mouths of desire! / Him who has not praised thirst and drank the water of the sands from a sallet / I trust him little in the commerce of the soul...' (And the sun is unmentioned but his power is among us).

Men, creatures of dust and folks of divers devices, people of business and leisure, men from the marches and those from beyond, O men of little weight in the memory of these lands; people from the valleys and uplands and the highest slopes of this world to the ultimate reach of our shores; Seers of signs and seeds, and confessors of the western winds, followers of trails and of seasons, breakers of camp in the little dawn wind, seekers of watercourses over the wrinkled rind of the world, O seekers, O finders of reasons to be up and be gone, / you traffic not in a salt more strong than this, when at morning with omen of kingdoms and omen of deadwaters sung high over the smokes of the world, the drums of exile waken on the marches / Eternity yawning on the sands."

T.S. Eliot's translation sometimes strays from the strictest rendering of Perse's poem for the sake of dazzling English effect, but in the main it is faithful and serves well as a guide for readers who can't easily read Perse's original. This edition contains a brief but helpful preface by Eliot, as well as translations of the introductions which Larbaud. Hoffmanstahl and Ungaretti wrote for the Russian, German and Italian translations respectively. My only complaint is that this is now a print-on-demand title on lesser quality paper and the biographical details of the poet were never updated after the second edition in 1949. Still, this is a great poem, an ample work that one can curl up with and slowly get to know, and I highly recommend it.

(If your French is very good, I'd recommend getting the Perse OEUVRES COMPLETES volume in the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade series, which beyond gathering most of Perse's works in deluxe paper and behind, also contains the correspondence he wished to preserve, and among that we find discussions between Eliot and Perse on the creation of this English translation of ANABASIS).