by T. S. Eliot
[Commentary II 145–46 · Textual History II 649]
viii O genealogist upon the market-place! how many chronicles of families and connexions?—and may the dead seize the quick, as is said in the tables of the law, if I have not seen each thing in its own shadow and the virtue of its age: the stores of books and annals, the astronomer’s storehouses and the beauty of a place of sepulture, of very old temples under the palmtrees, frequented by a mule and three white hens—and beyond my eye’s circuit, many a secret doing on the routes: striking of camps upon tidings which I know not, effronteries of the hill tribes, and passage of rivers on skin-jars; horsemen bearing letters of alliance, the ambush in the vineyard, forays of robbers in the depths of gorges and manœuvres over field to ravish a woman, bargain-driving and plots, coupling of beasts in the forests before the eyes of children, convalescence of prophets in byres, the silent talk of two men under a tree …
ix but over and above the actions of men on the earth, many omens on the way, many seeds on the way, and under unleavened fine weather, in one great breath of the earth, the whole feather of harvest! …
[Commentary II 146 · Textual History II 649–50]
x until the hour of evening when the female star, pure and pledged in the sky heights …
xi Plough-land of dream! Who talks of building?—I have seen the earth spread out in vast spaces and my thought is not heedless of the navigator.
[Commentary II 146 · Textual History II 650]
CHANSON
Mon cheval arrêté sous l’arbre plein de tourterelles, je siffle un sifflement si pur, qu’il n’est promesses à leurs rives que tiennent tous ces fleuves (Feuilles vivantes au matin sont à l’image de la gloire) …
* * *
Et ce n’est point qu’un homme ne soit triste, mais se levant avant le jour et se tenant avec prudence dans le commerce d’un vieil arbre, appuyé du menton à la dernière étoile, il voit au fond du ciel à jeun de grandes choses pures qui tournent au plaisir …
* * *
Mon cheval arrêté sous l’arbre qui roucoule, je siffle un sifflement plus pur…. Et paix à ceux, s’ils vont mourir, qui n’ont point vu ce jour. Mais de mon frère le poète on a eu des nouvelles. Il a écrit encore une chose très douce. Et quelques-uns en eurent connaissance …
SONG
i I have halted my horse by the tree of the doves, I whistle a note so sweet, shall the rivers break faith with their banks? (Living leaves in the morning fashioned in glory) …
* * *
ii And not that a man be not sad, but arising before day and biding circumspectly in the communion of an old tree, leaning his chin on the last fading star, he beholds at the end of the fasting sky great things and pure that unfold to delight …
* * *
iii I have halted my horse by the dove-moaning tree, I whistle a note more sweet … Peace to the dying who have not seen this day! But tidings there are of my brother the poet: once more he has written a song of great sweetness. And some there are who have knowledge thereof …
[Commentary II 146 · Textual History II 650]
Anabasis: Commentary
1. St.-John Perse 2. Editions 3. Apropos of Publication 4. Anabase to Anabasis 5. Translation
1. ST.-JOHN PERSE
St.-John Perse was the pseudonym of the French diplomat Alexis St. Léger Léger (1887–1975), of whom Henry Eliot noted: “a French exile, sometime head of the French Foreign Office; was offered ambassadorship to Washington after the German occupation, but declined. A bachelor, pro-British; was in USA in 1940” (catalogue of items given to Eliot House, Harvard). Perse was a friend of Alain-Fournier and Valery Larbaud (editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française), of Léon-Paul Fargue and André Gide. In 1944 it was proposed that TSE “should join Alexis Léger on his staff for the season 1945–1946, to promote international cultural relations” (TSE to Hayward, 1 June 1944). Perse published Éloges (1911), Anabase (1924), Exil, suivi de Poème à l’Étranger, Pluies, Neiges (1944), Vents (1946) and Amers (1957). (Anabase was published, in French only, in New York in 1945.) Perse was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1960.
2. EDITIONS
The publication history of Anabasis is complex and the textual revisions between editions were much more extensive than in any of TSE’s other publications.
The first edition was published in 1930, in Britain only, with a limited edition of 350 signed copies on hand-made paper. Less than a third of the ordinary copies sold at ten shillings and sixpence, so in 1937 the remaining sheets were cut down and reissued in a plainer volume at five shillings. A revised text, Gallup’s “Second edition (first American edition)”, was published in 1938. A further revision, Gallup’s “Third edition, revised and corrected”, was published in the US in 1949, with TSE’s “Note to Revised Edition”. It also included a Bibliography (I. The works of St.-John Perse in French and foreign editions. II. Anabasis), and reprinted prefaces by Valery Larbaud, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Giuseppe Ungaretti to the Russian, German and Italian translations respectively. When Gallup’s “English edition” of 1959 appeared, the text had undergone its most thorough revision since publication, with Perse taking a decisive part, as TSE acknowledged in the “Note to the Third Edition” (1958). It also had an expanded Bibliography, and the Note by Lucien Fabre (1924) referred to in TSE’s Preface. Anabasis has not previously been published in collections of TSE’s writings. He did not make a recording.
3. APROPOS OF PUBLICATION
PREFACE
I am by no means convinced that a poem like Anabase requires a preface at all. It is better to read such a poem six times, and dispense with a preface. But when a poem is presented in the form of a translation, people who have never heard of it are naturally inclined to demand some testimonial. So I give mine hereunder.
[Poem II 81–129 · Textual History II 643–50]
Anabase is already well known, not only in France, but in other countries of Europe. One of the best Introductions to the poem is that of the late Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which forms the preface to the German translation. There is another by Valery Larbaud, which forms the preface to the Russian translation. And there was an informative note by Lucien Fabre in the Nouvelles Littéraires.
For myself, once having had my attention drawn to the poem by a friend whose taste I trusted, there was no need for a preface. I did not need to be told, after one reading, that the word anabasis has no particular reference to Xenophon or the journey of the Ten Thousand, no particular reference to Asia Minor; and that no map of its migrations could be drawn up. Mr. Perse is using the word anabasis in the same literal sense in which Xenophon himself used it. 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.
I may, I trust, borrow from Mr. Fabre two notions which may be of use to the English reader. The first is that any obscurity of the poem, on first readings, is due to the suppression of “links in the chain”, of explanatory and connecting matter, and not to incoherence, or to the love of cryptogram. The justification of such abbreviation of method is that the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric civilization. The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced.
Such selection of a sequence of images and ideas has nothing chaotic about it. There is a logic of the imagination as well as a logic of concepts. People who do not appreciate poetry always find it difficult to distinguish between order and chaos in the arrangement of images; and even those who are capable of appreciating poetry cannot depend upon first impressions. I was not convinced of Mr. Perse’s imaginative order until I had read the poem five or six times. And if, as I suggest, such an arrangement of imagery requires just as much “fundamental brainwork” as the arrangement of an argument, it is to be expected that the reader of a poem
should take at least as much trouble as a barrister reading an important decision on a complicated case.
I refer to this poem as a poem. It would be convenient if poetry were always verse—either accented, alliterative, or quantitative; but that is not true. Poetry may occur, within a definite limit on one side, at any point along a line of which the formal limits are “verse” and “prose”. Without offering any generalized theory about “poetry”, “verse” and “prose”, I may suggest that a writer, by using, as does Mr. Perse, certain exclusively poetic methods, is sometimes able to write poetry in what is called prose. Another writer can, by reversing the process, write great prose in verse. There are two very simple but insuperable difficulties in any definition of “prose” and “poetry”. One is that we have three terms where we need four: we have “verse” and “poetry” on the one side, and only “prose” on the other. The other difficulty follows from the first: that the words imply a valuation in one context which they do not in another. “Poetry” introduces a distinction between good verse and bad verse; but we have no one word to separate bad prose from good prose. As a matter of fact, much bad prose is poetic prose; and only a very small part of bad verse is bad because it is prosaic.
But Anabase is poetry. Its sequences, its logic of imagery, are those of poetry and not of prose; and in consequence—at least the two matters are very closely allied—the declamation, the system of stresses and pauses, which is partially exhibited by the punctuation and spacing, is that of poetry and not of prose.
[Poem II 81–129 · Textual History II 643–50]
The second indication of Mr. Fabre is one which I may borrow for the English reader: a tentative synopsis of the movement of the poem. It is a scheme which may give the reader a little guidance on his first reading; when he no longer needs it he will forget it. The ten divisions of the poem are headed as follows:
I. Arrival of the conqueror on the site of the city he is to found.
II. Marking out of its boundary walls.
III. Consultation of the augurs.
IV. Founding of the city.
V. Longing for new worlds to conquer.
VI. Plans for establishment and for filling the coffers.
VII. Decision to undertake fresh expedition.
VIII. March through desert wastes.
IX. Arrival at borders of a great land.
X. Warrior-prince received with honours and celebrations. He rests for a spell but is soon yearning to be on his way again, this time with the navigator.
And I believe that this is as much as I need to say about Perse’s Anabasis. I believe that this is a piece of writing of the same importance as the later work of James Joyce, as valuable as Anna Livia Plurabelle. And this is a high estimate indeed.
I have two words to add, one about the author, the other about the translation. The author of this poem is, even in the most practical sense, an authority on the Far East; he has lived there, as well as in the tropics. As for the translation, it would not be even so satisfactory as it is, if the author had not collaborated with me to such an extent as to be half-translator. He has, I can testify, a sensitive and intimate knowledge of the English language, as well as a mastery of his own.
T. S. ELIOT
1930
(Rossetti to Hall Caine, 1882: “Conception, my boy, fundamental brain-work—that is what makes the difference in all art”. For TSE on prose poems, a speciality of the French, see headnote to Hysteria.) TSE’s Preface first appeared in 1930 but is given above in its final form, from 1959 (see Textual History). Because this final edition contained E. M. Hatt’s translation of Lucien Fabre’s Note, her phrasing of the description of the ten divisions of the poem was adopted also in TSE’s Preface. Previous editions had given a different translation, presumably by TSE:
I. Arrival of the Conqueror at the site of the city which he is about to build.
II. Tracing the plan of the city.
III. Consultation of augurs.
IV. Foundation of the city.
V. Restlessness towards further explorations and conquests.
VI. Schemes for foundation and conquest.
VII. Decision to fare forth.
VIII. March through the desert.
IX. Arrival at the threshold of a great new country.
X. Acclamation, festivities, repose. Yet the urge towards another departure, this time with the mariner.
TSE to Robert Giroux, 31 Mar 1948: “I have just had a letter from Léger asking about the rights of my translation of Anabasis. He tells me that you released to him the rights in his poem as the volume had been out of print for some years, but he is not sure whether that includes the right to use my translation or not. I have told him that if he could get another publisher to reprint his poem with my translation I should be quite glad for him to do so. He has now found a publisher who is ready to go ahead with it. So far as I am concerned I have no interest in this translation by itself and have no intention of ever reprinting it amongst my own works. I think I shall not allow it to be used apart from the French text.”
[Poem II 81–129 · Textual History II 643–50]
NOTE TO REVISED EDITION
Since the first publication, nineteen years ago, of the text of Anabase together with my translation, this and other poems of the author have extended his reputation far beyond the bounds of his own country. St.-John Perse is a name known to everyone, I think, who is seriously concerned with contemporary poetry in America. It has therefore seemed high time that the translation should be revised and corrected.
When this translation was made, St.-John Perse was little known outside of France. The translator, perhaps for the reason that he was introducing the poem to the English-speaking public, was then concerned, here and there, less with rendering the exact sense of a phrase, than with coining some phrase in English which might have equivalent value; he may even have taken liberties in the interest of originality, and sometimes interposed his own idiom between author and reader. But (to revert to the first person) I have always refused to publish the translation except in this way, en regard with the French text. Its purpose is only to assist the English-speaking reader who wishes to approach the French text. The method of the author, his syntax and his rhythm, are original; his vocabulary includes some unusual words; and the translation may still serve its purpose. But at this stage it was felt that a greater fidelity to the exact meaning, a more literal translation, was what was needed. I have corrected not only my own licences, but several positive errors and mistakes. In this revision I have depended heavily upon the recommendations of the author, whose increasing mastery of English has enabled him to detect faults previously unobserved, and upon the assistance of Mr. John Hayward, to whom I also wish to make acknowledgement.
T. S. ELIOT
1949
NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION
The alterations to the English text of this edition have been made by the author himself, and tend to make the translation more literal than in previous editions.
T. S. ELIOT
1958
1930 front flap (as also 1937):
Mr. T. S. Eliot, who has translated this poem from the French, in collaboration with the author, considers the Anabase of St.-J. Perse one of the most remarkable poems of this generation. It has already been translated into several other languages. Here, the French text appears side by side with Mr. Eliot’s English version, so that readers may judge for themselves of the merit and accuracy of the translation, and of the beauty of the original.
