Prose (48 page)

The stories “date” more than the other prose, but they are still good and still amusing. In
Hamlet, or the Consequences of Filial Piety
(1886) Laforgue achieves what Warren Ramsey in his
Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance,
calls his “ironic equilibrium.” It is a sort of acrobat's small landing-stage from which he surveys the scene of past flights of fancy and plans more daring ones—which, alas, he did not live to make. Hamlet says: “To be—well, to be if one must.” He complains: “There are no longer any fine young ladies; they have all taken up nursing.” After the debacle in the graveyard he tells himself, “Ah, how I must work this winter with all this new material!” It is all still recognizable and topical. The earlier story,
The Miracle of the Roses,
is much slighter, and mainly illustrates the poet's obsession with death; it prefigures
Zuleika Dobson
and Firbank. Also—an old argument about translating—should the translator, when possible, limit his choice of words and phrases to the period of the text? I found expressions like “a real son-of-a-bitch,” “a hopeless ham,” “corny,” and “well-heeled,” grating badly on my ear.

In the travel pieces,
Berlin, the City, and the Court,
Laforgue (who was reader to the Empress Augusta for five years) presents German royalty, militarism, and taste in a set of beautiful neat miniatures, always ironic, naturally. Then comes an article written to introduce a show of French impressionists to Berlin. The banker, Charles Ephrussi, one of the first to encourage the impressionists and collect their paintings, was Laforgue's friend, and Laforgue knew and understood his contemporary painters better than poets frequently do. (It was Ephrussi who obtained the post of reader for him.) If, as Mr. Smith remarks, Laforgue had odd ideas about the evolution of the eye, never mind—there was nothing the matter with his own. His poetry is filled with the same visual excitement as the impressionists', and the eight and a half pages of
Landscapes and Impressions
often sound the way the impressionists look. But these pages also throw light on the poetry. I wanted to quote “Noon”:

One half the earth is lit by the sun, the other half black and spotted with fire, gas, resin, or candle flame.… In one place people are fighting, there are massacres; in another, there is an execution, in another a robbery … below men are sleeping, dying … the black ribbons of funeral processions winding toward the yew trees … endless. And with all this on its back, how can the enormous earth go on hurtling through eternal space with the terrible rapidity of a lightning flash?

This reminds us again that no poet has been so constantly aware of the whole solar system: burning, whirling, immense. Laforgue's “ironic equilibrium” is like a seesaw; the solar system weights one end and our tiny planet, laden with his clowns, casinos, and pianos, lit by “fire, gas, resin, or candle flame,” the other. He never lets us forget outer space; it is the margin of his staccato lines.

The section of Literary Criticism consists of jottings on Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Corbière. Of Baudelaire: “He was the
first
to write about himself in a moderate, confessional manner and to leave off the inspired manner.” Add to this his remark in a letter to his sister: “I find it stupid to speak in a booming voice and adopt a platform manner,” and obvious as it may seem, now, one has marked the shift in feeling that did more than anything else to transform English poetry after 1908.

*   *   *

The letters are so good that I would like to see Mr. Smith translate a whole book of them sometime. But why does he say, “Few young poets have at any time written with such candor and gaiety”? It seems to me a good many have. (But then, I have just been reading Coleridge's youthful letters, full of candor and gaiety, too, and he, by himself, may seem like quite a few.) At the age of twenty-one, Laforgue, poor and alone in Paris, writes to his favorite sister: “My depression began to constitute a sort of artistic joy.” And, “Life is gross, that's true—but for heaven's sake, when it comes to poetry, let us be elegant as the sweet william.…” Shortly after his marriage he writes: “We have a good fire, a lovely lamp, some good tea in the tea set the Empress had [?] given me.” Then, “You haven't heard anything for a long while about my literary affairs.… you can be sure … that I have the right to be proud of myself; there is no literary man of my generation who is promised such a future.… Alas, how I long to get well.…” A month later he was dead of tuberculosis, at the age of twenty-seven. Because Laforgue is so quiet, so disciplined, so “ironic,” always, it is worse than Keats, almost—and yet one who accomplished so much, who did it so superlatively well, and to whom all modern poets owe such a debt, scarcely needs our pity.

To go back to the poetry. By now everyone knows how to review a book of translated poetry. First, one says it's impossible. Second, one implies that the translator is an ignoramus, or if that's going too far, that he has missed the plays on words; and then one carps about the inevitable mistakes. The first objection is still true: it is impossible to translate poetry, or perhaps only one aspect can be translated at a time, and each poem needs several translations. But Mr. Smith has made an exceptionally good try and I think his faithfulness to the French will impress most reviewers. But the quickness, the surprise, the new sub-acid flavor, have disappeared. Mr. Smith is too intelligent not to know this; he says:

Translating poetry is like converging on a flame with a series of mirrors, mirrors of technique and understanding, until the flame is reflected in upon itself in a wholly new and foreign element. Such an operation is rarely, if ever, successful: the manipulation of the mirrors depends to such an extent on the sensibility and skill of the translator.

Besides being a pretty image, this is a true one, as anyone who has ever tried translating poetry will know. But surely, besides sensibility and skill, it depends (about 50 per cent, I'd say) on luck: the possibilities of the second language's vocabulary. Without luck the worst happens, the flame goes out, and we shouldn't blame Mr. Smith when it does.

Lune, ô dilettante Lune,

A tous les climats commune,

Tu vis hier le Missouri,

Et les remparts de Paris,

Les fiords bleus de la Norwège,

Les pôles, les mers, que sais-je?

“Moon, oh dilettante Moon,

With all the climates in common,

You saw the Missouri yesterday,

And the ramparts of Paris,

The blue fjords of Norway,

The poles, the oceans, and what else?”

But if anyone thinks he could do better he should sit down and try. Some of the poems, those with longer lines and those in free verse, are more successful.

It is a pity the poems have not been printed bi-lingually, or at least with a facsimile or two in the poet's curious, “artistic,” but legible hand-writing. The four sketches from the notebooks are worth seeing, but Laforgue seems to have been so much of a piece (or is this a delusion we have about certain poets? It seems true of Hopkins, too): letters, poems, life—even to his appearance, that surely there should be a picture of that reserved, composed young face under its top hat? And even if this is not a critical study, shouldn't Verlaine's influence at least be mentioned? And—this has nothing to do with Mr. Smith's work, of course—the 1956 abstract water-color on the jacket doesn't go at all with Laforgue's sketches of 1885 inside.

Mr. Smith also says:

Laforgue was one of the few poets who could write convincing poetry around the tremendous discoveries of his age.… Laforgue was in so many respects in advance of his time that it is not surprising to find him writing poems one would not have thought possible until the present day.

I am not sure who that “one” is—but isn't this putting the cart before the horse? Do our three or four great poets who were born around the time of Laforgue's death, seventy years ago now, and who derive the most from him in one way or another, give us much more of what we are appalled to recognize as “our” time than he did? The truth may be, I think, that poetically we are now away behind it.

*   *   *

This book should be most useful to: 1. very young, almost embryonic, poets and critics; 2. the more knowing reader whose languages don't include French or who is lazy about reading it; 3. anyone at all curious about the difficult work of translation. These should read it and then, if they are also interested to the slightest degree in poetry, they should supply themselves with a French grammar and dictionary and the two volumes of the poems, published by
Mercure de France,
or even with the small volume in the
Poètes d'aujourd'hui
series, which skimps the poetry but is a fascinating little book, with pictures, and then, well—perhaps sign up at the nearest Berlitz School.

1956

Introduction to
The Diary of “Helena Morley”

Minha Vida de Menina:
The Book and Its Author

When I first came to Brazil, in 1952, I asked my Brazilian friends which Brazilian books I should begin reading. After naming some of Machado de Assis's novels or short stories, or Euclides da Cunha's
Os Sertões,
they frequently recommended this little book. Two or three even said it was the best thing that had appeared in Brazilian letters since Machado de Assis, and then they were apt to launch into animated exchanges of their favorite stories from it.

In English the title means “My Life as a Little Girl,” or “Young Girl,” and that is exactly what the book is about, but it is not reminiscences; it is a diary, the diary actually kept by a girl between the ages of twelve and fifteen, in the far-off town of Diamantina, in 1893–1895. It was first published in 1942 in an edition of 2,000 copies, chiefly with the idea of amusing the author's family and friends, and it was never advertised. But its reputation spread in literary circles in Rio de Janeiro and there was a demand for it, so in 1944 a second edition was brought out, then two more, in 1948 and 1952, making 10,000 copies in all. George Bernanos, who was living in the country as an exile when it first appeared, discovered it and gave away a good many copies to friends, a fact to which the author and her husband modestly attribute much of its success. He wrote the author a letter which has been used, in part, on the jackets of later editions. Copies of
Minha Vida de Menina
are now presented every year as prize-books to students of the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Rio.

The more I read the book the better I liked it. The scenes and events it described were odd, remote, and long ago, and yet fresh, sad, funny, and eternally true. The longer I stayed on in Brazil the more Brazilian the book seemed, yet much of it could have happened in any small provincial town or village, and at almost any period of history—at least before the arrival of the automobile and the moving-picture theatre. Certain pages reminded me of more famous and “literary” ones: Nausicaa doing her laundry on the beach, possibly with the help of
her
freed slaves; bits from Chaucer; Wordsworth's poetical children and country people, or Dorothy Wordsworth's wandering beggars. Occasionally entries referring to slavery seemed like notes for an unwritten, Brazilian, feminine version of Tom Sawyer and Nigger Jim. But this was a real, day-by-day diary, kept by a real girl, and anything resembling it that I could think of had been observed or made up, and written down, by adults. (An exception is Anne Frank's diary; but its forced maturity and closed atmosphere are tragically different from the authentic child-likeness, the classical sunlight and simplicity of this one.) I am not sure now whether someone suggested my translating it or I thought of it myself, but when I was about half-way through the book I decided to try.

I learned that “Helena Morley” was still very much alive; that the name was the pseudonym of Senhora Augusto Mario Caldeira Brant and that she was living in Rio, well known and much loved in Rio society. Her husband was then, although almost eighty years old, acting as president of the Bank of Brazil for the second time. The poet Manuel Bandeira, an old friend of the family, kindly gave me an introduction. Armed with a friend, Lota de Macedo Soares, to serve as interpreter because my spoken Portuguese was very limited, I went to call.

Senhora Brant, or Dona Alice as I shall call her in the Brazilian way (“Helena” and “Morley” are both names from her English father's family), now lives in a large, stuccoed, tile-roofed house, on the street that borders the “Lagôa,” or lagoon. It is a fashionable place to live. The house is set in a yard with flowerbeds, coconut palms, eight fruit-trees and a servants' house and vegetable garden at the back. A stuccoed fence and wooden gates protect it from the street. A large Cadillac is sometimes parked in the driveway, and its mulatto chauffeur wears a white yachting cap: Cadillac, chauffeur, and white cap are all contemporary Rio fashion. Nearby rise the extravagant Rio mountains and across the lagoon towers the one called the “Gavea,” or crow's-nest, because its shape reminded the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorers of the lookout platforms on their little vessels.

On our first visit we were ushered into a large living-room, parlor, rather, with its silk and lace curtains closely drawn, luxuriously furnished: vases, bronzes, and clocks on small tables, rugs, a chandelier, chairs and sofas covered in gold-colored satin. This room is divided from the hall and another living-room opposite by a fence and gate-way of wrought iron, painted white. One of Dona Alice's daughters, Dona Sarita, appeared and started talking to my friend. Although they had not met before, very shortly they were identifying and placing each other's relatives, something that seems to happen in Brazil as quickly as it does in the south of the United States, when Dona Alice herself came in.