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Dartmouth's undergraduate book review |
Andrew Carreras
The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, ed. Mary Ann Caws
In her anthology, editor Mary Ann Caws writes that, in the 20th
Century, "French poetry became so infused by the poetic spirit beyond the
hexagon that it could never again be accused of parochialism”. What most
distinguishes this volume from its predecessors is its egalitarianism in
choice of works, giving often untested non-white and female poets almost the
same amount of page space as favorites such as Roubaud and Apollinaire. It's
a daring decision, but worth it as the result is an indispensable compendium
of modern French poetry which seeks not only to present a literary but a
sociological and historical view on French poetry of the last century.
Caws places a heavy emphases Francophone poetry--poetry written in French outside of France, especially in former French colonies. As she points out in the introduction, these poets, by writing in French, "[t]he language of the former colonizer" there was usually a "psychological conflict, or at the very least, a dose of ambivalence." Poets from these areas often chose to write in French instead of their native languages out of a sense of irony, as their works were often charged by anger over injustices handed to them by their imperialist rulers. This irony is epitomized in, among others, the work of the Haitian poet Rene Depestre: "Me, an unknown nigger in the crowd/ Me, a solitary blade of grass/ And wild I cry out to my century." She also gives a good smattering of examples of works from the negritude movement--a mass of works that emphasized African culture on it’s own terms rather than through the lens of years of European rule. Again, these works are often dosed with irony just by virtue of being written in French.
If Francophone poetry was often political, mainland poetry of the last century was often metaphysical. One of the major literary movements of the time, surrealism, questioned the ability of words to represent reality. As Caws points out, surrealism was at least partly based on the assumption that: "[t]he limits of our universe are determined by those of our language,” and that the movement, “ expanded the powers of writing and speech beyond the rational and the ordinary". Some poets resorted to chemical mind-benders like carbon tetrachloride or mescaline to inform their poetry. Others, like Rimbaud--who gave up literature at the age of twenty-one to become a mathematician--used highly ordered, almost arithmetic verse to represent--or skew--reality: "it follows that I believe that I believe that it is raining./ And it thus follows that I simultaneously believe that it is raining." Even feminist poetry of the 20th century, which in America was usually politically charged, in France was often more concerned with psychoanalytic theories on sexuality. Later in the century, however, French poetry became less abstruse and, as Cawes put it, became rather a “celebration of everyday life”. Of course, most of the poems in the anthology don't fall into neat classifications, but rather, as Caws points out, are characterized by L'entre-deux, or betweeness.
This hefty but well-organized and elegant volume includes the original French side by side with English translations on facing pages. Caws, besides using many of her own translations, draws from and commissions translations by several well known poets such as John Ashberry and William Carlos Williams. Thus Caws continues the long poet- as- translator tradition.
The anthology is divided into six chronological sections, alphabetically subdivided by poet. If the anthology suffers from any flaw, it's that the choice of poems is often too egalitarian. Caws writes in the introduction that she has "given less attention to the number of poems and pages per poet than to the more important goal of including as many poets from as many countries as a single volume permits.". Though this is a worthy objective, it's also sometimes frustrating as Caws has the unfortunate practice of pointing out principle works of each poet, and then not including any of them. Also, perhaps she gives too much attention to some poets and not enough to others.
But on the whole, Caws succeeds in what she set out to do; she provide as longitudinal a sampling of French poetry as possible without detracting significantly from the literary utility of the collection. And perhaps eventually there wont be a need for such a tradeoff: as Caws writes, “During the years surrounding the war, the frontiers of the French poetic establishment finally began to open to what we might think of as a great otherness--women poets and poets from other lands. That spirit of generosity has become increasingly felt.”