by Paul Valéry
It was as if something real had existed between us—some love! (at least for Me) and by the secret you promised me, when I slipped those lines in your hand, so carefully, was it not like a love-letter? No! I would never have slipped you a love letter—but was it not the suave appearance of one, I mean: the same thing?
And now I am waiting to see you again when you will have read them—and everything will be finished—Berenice.
CAESAR / CЁSAR
First published in the 1926 edition of the Album, heavily revised from an earlier draft, but first version of unsure date.
THE FRIENDLY WOOD / LE BOIS AMICAL
Published in the eleventh issue of La Conque, January 1892, dedicated to Gide in reminiscence of their meeting in December 1890, though apparently written earlier. Hardly revised for the Album.
THE VAIN DANCERS / LES VAINES DANSEUSES
First published in the fifth issue of La Conque, July 1891, and reprinted in La Syrinx, December 1892. Added to the Album only in the 1931 edition of Poésies. The 1942 edition contains an entirely rewritten version of this poem, in which only lines 4, 6, and 20 are left intact.
A CLEAR FLAME … / UN FEU DISTINCT …
First published in the 1920 Album. The first known drafts date from 1897, where the fire is “Le feu amour” (the fire love), an interesting omission in the final version.
NARCISSUS SPEAKS / NARCISSE PARLE
Begun as a sonnet dated to September 28, 1890, rewritten in January–February 1891 at the request of Louÿs, and first published in the first issue of La Conque, March 1891. Substantially revised for the Album. Valéry explained in a 1941 lecture in Marseilles:
There exists in Montpellier a botanical garden where I used to go quite often when I was nineteen years old. In a rather isolated spot of this garden, which was much better and wilder in those days, there is a vault, and in this sort of crevice a marble plaque bearing three words: PLACANDIS NARCISSÆ MANIBUS [“to placate the shades of Narcissa”]. This inscription made me dream; but here is its history in a few words …
The tomb, according to local legend, was that of Narcissa, daughter of the English poet Edward Young. Valéry continues:
For me, that name of Narcissa suggested that of Narcissus. Then the idea developed of the myth of that young man, perfectly beautiful, or who found himself so in his image …
EPISODE / ÉPISODE
First version in Le Syrinx of January 1892, and reprinted with the subtitle “Fragment” in the eleventh issue of La Conque, January 1892. The flute, taken up from the end of “Narcissus Speaks,” is the faun’s flute from Mallarmé’s “Afternoon of a Faun,” to which this poem is a naturalistic and sensual response.
VIEW / VUE
First drafted in 1891 or 1892, published in volume 1 of Le Centaure, 1896, along with “Summer.” Closely inspired by Mallarmé’s sonnet “Toute l’âme résumée” (“The whole soul summarized”), which ends with the lines
Le sens trop précis rature
Ta vague littérature
Too precise meaning cancels out
Your vague literature
Like “Valvins” which follows, this poem seems to be inspired by hours Valéry and Mallarmé spent boating on the Seine near the older writer’s small summerhouse in Valvins, a town upriver from Paris. The unresolved “si” (if) was a favorite syntactic figure of Mallarmé, who according to Paul Claudel once expressed his wish to write a poem entitled simply “Si tu” (“If you”).
VALVINS
Valéry’s contribution to an 1897 album offered to Mallarmé by his friends, organized by Albert Mockel. Reprinted, with punctuation this time, in La Coupe, February 1898.
SUMMER / ÉTÉ
Published in Le Centaure, 1896. Six new stanzas were added in the 1942 edition of Poésies, and it is the longer version that is included in the standard paperback editions of Valéry’s poems today:
SUMMER (1942)
To Francis Viélé-Griffin
Summer, rock of pure air, and you, fierce hive,
O sea! Strewn in a thousand flies across
These tufts of flesh as fresh as a clay jar,
And even inside this mouth where the azure hums,
And you, a house on fire, dear calm Expanse
Where the tree smokes and loses some of its birds,
Where endless rumors of the massing sea,
The water’s soldiers and its march, all die,
Casks of odors, great happy throngs around
The bay that feeds and rises to the sun,
Pure nests, grassed locks, shadows of hollow waves,
Cradle the child enraptured in light sleep!
A burst of matter vainly rocks the sky,
But were it to raze the mountains, burn the seas,
Or flood this life with a deluge of light,
Set every demon screeching in the heart,
You, on the soft sand where the tide gives up
Its force in tears, its diamonds scattered and lost,
You who are wearied by the world’s wonders,
Virgin deaf to eternal elements,
You close around yourself and clasp your young throat,
A soul devoted to her own small night;
At these pure shocks, this star of madness forging
From unwrought gold, events as brute as noise,
You kiss the breasts of your ephemeral being,
Cherish this bit of flesh like a young beast,
And scorn and victim of the bitter splendor,
Savor the pain of loving yourself too well,
A girl exposed to gods the Ocean spangles
With foam it catches from the sun’s bright glass,
Over immortal games you choose this mortal
Island of private sleep, all shade and love.
Yet from high heaven, blasting human scale,
Time’s slakeless monster, burning time to come,
The Sun, High Priest, rolls and leads to the altars
Of azure sky its victim, the passing days …
Your legs (though one is fresh, unfolding from
The rosier one), your shoulders and hard breast,
Your arm that mingles with a moistened cheek,
Shine out forlorn around the darkened vase
Where rumbling noises filter down of beasts
Drawn from cages of leaves and folds of sea
By windmills of water and the rosy huts
Of day … Your whole skin gilds the vineyards of air.
EVENING PROFUSION / PROFUSION DU SOIR
First published in the 1926 edition of the Album, this poem was written at the same time as “Fragments of Narcissus,” as a development of the opening sonnet, which seems to date from around 1899.
ANNE
A first version, containing stanzas 1–5 and 13 (the last), was published in La Plume, December 1900, and dated to 1893, though this date is rejected by most scholars. In December 1920, a version with three more stanzas was published in Les Écrits nouveaux, and the poem appeared in this form in the 1920 Album. The remaining stanzas, 7–9 and 12, were added in 1926. Particularly admired by the young André Breton, this poem is Valéry’s most direct engagement with Baudelaire, and the scholar Suzanne Nash finds echoes of at least eight of Baudelaire’s poems, notably “Une Charogne” (“A Corpse”), “Un Voyage au Cythère” (“A Voyage to Cythera”), “Le Voyage,” and “Les Bijoux” (“Jewels”). In early drafts, the “lovers” of the sixth stanza were the deluded followers of Mallarmé.
SEMIRAMIS’S ARIA / AIR DE SÉMIRAMIS
First published in the July 1920 issue of Les Écrits nouveaux. Stanzas 22–24 were added in the 1926 edition of Charms, where the poem was placed for several years before being returned to the Album. Inspired by Edgar Degas’s 1861 painting Semiramis Building Babylon, “Semiramis” was begun after Valéry visited the auction of Degas’s private collection of paintings on March 24, 1918, some six months after his friend’s death. There are also echoes of Voltaire�
�s eponymous drama and a couple of nineteenth-century poems: Theodore de Banville’s “Les Princesses,” and Hugo’s “Gloire à Sémiramis la fatale” (“Glory to the Fatal Semiramis”).
THE POEM LOVER / L’AMATEUR DE POÈMES
First published in Walch’s 1906 Anthologie, accompanied by the note:
At our request, Mr. Paul Valéry has been kind enough to offer an explanation of himself and his art for our readers. We reproduce here a characteristic page which he has shared with us for this purpose. It makes for a curious literary document.
INDEX OF FRENCH TITLES AND FIRST LINES
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Abeille, L’
Air de Sémiramis
Amateur de Poèmes, L’
Ange, L’
Anne
Anne qui se mélange au drap pale et délaisse
Assise, la fileuse au bleu de la croisée
Au Bois Dormant
Au Platane
Aurore
Azur! c’est moi … Je viens des grottes de la mort
Baignée
Bois Amical, Le
Cantique des Colonnes
Ceinture, La
Celles qui sont des fleurs légères sont venues
César
César, calme César, le pied sur toute chose
Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes
Chute superbe, fin si douce
Cimetière Marin, Le
De sa grâce redoutable
De sa profonde mère, encore froide et fumante
Dès l’aube, chers rayons, mon front songe à vous ceindre!
Dormeuse, La
Douces colonnes, aux
Dures grenades entr’ouvertes
Du soleil soutenant la puissante paresse
Ébauche d’un Serpent
Épisode
Été
Été, roche d’air pur, et toi, ardente ruche
Fausse Morte, La
Féerie
Feu Distinct, Un …
Fileuse, La
Fragments du Narcisse
Grenades, Les
Hélène
Humblement, tendrement, sur le tombeau charmant
Insinuant, L’
Intérieur
J’ai, quelque jour, dans l’Océan
… Je compose en esprit, sous les myrtes, Orphée
La confusion morose
La lune mince verse une lueur sacrée
La lune mince verse une lueur sacrée
La princesse, dans un palais de rose pure
La Pythie exhalant la flamme
Même Féerie
Naissance de Vénus
Narcisse Parle
Ni vu ni connu
Nous avons pensé des choses pures
Ô Courbes, méandre
Ode Secrète
Ô frères! tristes lys, je languis de beauté
Orphée
Palme
Par la surprise saisie
Parmi l’arbre, la brise berce
Pas, Les
Penché contre un grand fleuve, infiniment mes rames
Poésie
Profusion du Soir
Pythie, La
Quand le ciel couleur d’une joue
Quelle, et si fine, et si mortelle
Quels secrets dans son cœur brûle ma jeune amie
Que tu brilles enfin, terme pur de ma course!
Qui pleure là, sinon le vent simple, à cette heure
Rameur, Le
SI je regarde tout à coup ma veritable pensée, je ne me console pas de
Si la plage penche, si
Si tu veux dénouer la forêt qui t’aère
Sylphe, Le
Tes pas, enfants de mon silence
Tu penches, grand Platane, et te proposes nu
Une esclave aux longs yeux chargés de molles chaînes
Un feu distinct m’habite, et je vois froidement
Un fruit de chair se baigne en quelque jeune vasque
Un soir favorisé de colombes sublimes
Vaines Danseuses, Les
Valvins
Vin Perdu, Le
Vue
INDEX OF ENGLISH TITLES AND FIRST LINES
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
A clear flame burns inside me, and reveals
A fruit of flesh is bathing in some fresh basin
A mouth that had been drinking
Angel, The
Anne
Anne, who mingles with the pale sheet and lets
A slave, her languid eyes in yielding chains
At last, the shimmering end I’ve always known!
Azure! It’s I … returned from caves of shades
Bathing
Bee, The
Birth of Venus
Caesar
Caesar, calm Caesar, bestriding everything
Cemetery by the Sea, The
Clear Flame, A …
Dawn
Deep in the leaves the whispering breeze
Enduring the sunset’s powerful somnolence
Episode
Evening Profusion
Fair columns, lightly crowned
Fantasy
Fragments of “Narcissus”
Friendly Wood, The
Girdle, The
Hard pomegranates half-ajar
Helen
Here they are, the floating flowers have come
Her Seeming Death
However keen may be your sting
Humble and tender, on the charming tomb
Hymn of the Columns
If not the wind, then who is crying there
I found my beauty in your nakedness
If the beach lists, if
If you let down the breezy woods like hair
Insinuation
Interior
Leaning into the river, endlessly my rowing
Lost Wine
Narcissus Speaks
O Curves that meander
One day I tossed into the Ocean
One sunlit evening graced with blissful doves
Orpheus
Our thoughts were of the purest things
Out of her mother’s cold and smoking depths
Palm
Poem Lover, The
Poetry
Pomegranates
Pythia, The
Rower, The
Same Fantasy
Scarcely veiling the blaze
Secret Ode
Semiramis’s Aria
Since dawn, dear rays, my brow has dreamed of your crown!
Sketch of a Serpent
Sleeper, The
Sleeping Wood, The
Spinner, The
Steps, The
Summer
Summer, rock of pure air, and you, fierce hive
Sylph, The
The fall so splendid, the end sweet
The murky disarray
The princess sleeps in a palace of pure rose
The slender moon decants a sacred gleam
The slender moon decants a sacred gleam
The spinner sits beside the window’s blue
This peaceful roof of milling doves
Through her nostrils thick with incense
To the Plane Tree
Unseen, unknown
Vain Dancers, The
Valvins
View
What secrets burn the heart of my young friend
WHEN I observe all of a sudden my true thought, I cannot come to accept
When blushing like a cheek, the sky
… Within m
e I compose, under the myrtles
You lean, great Plane Tree, offering the white
Your steps, the children of my silence
About the Author
One of the major figures of twentieth-century French literature, Paul Valéry was born in 1871. After a promising debut as a young symbolist in Mallarmé’s circle, Valéry withdrew from public view for almost twenty years, and was almost forgotten by 1917 when the publication of the long poem La Jeune Parque made him an instant celebrity. He was best known in his day for his small output of highly polished lyric poetry, and posthumously for the 27,000 pages of his Notebooks. He died in 1945. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
Introduction: Paul Valéry, the Life of a Mind
Translator’s Note
A Note on the Text
Album de vers anciens, 1890–1900 / Album of Early Verse, 1890–1900 (1920)
From the Notebooks, 1894–1914
La Jeune Parque / The Young Fate (1918)
