MASSACHUSETTS REVIEWS: New Translations of Lost Profiles and White Decimal
- By Michael Thurston
Soupault, Philippe. Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism. Translated by Alan Bernheimer. City Lights. xiv + 99 pp. ISBN: 978-0-87286-727-7. Paper. $13.95.
Daive, Jean. White Decimal. Translated by Norma Cole. Omnidawn. 144 pp. ISBN: 978-1-63243-028-1. Paper. $11.95.
Collage, agglomeration, accumulation and declamation, les memes as no more than memes. As the late twentieth-century poet Pete Shelley put it, “noise annoys.” Call this the dominant trend in experimental writing in French up to around 1940, the writing that sought, sometimes, to bring onto the page the antic activity of the unconscious, that struggled, at others, to strain sense from nonsense, and, at yet others, to show the nonsense latent in all sense. This is the work influenced by Cubism, that borrowed the logics of juxtaposition from visual collage; it is the work of Surrealism and Dada, pursuing the dream work of condensation and displacement or performing the exhaustion of meaning in repetition, ripping and riffing and rifling until seem was finale of seme.
Blankness, absence, gaps and fissures, no choses from which to choose. As the late twentieth-century poet Ian Curtis put it, “listen to the silence, let it ring on.” Call this a dominant trend in experimental writing in French after around 1945, the writing that sought, often, to expose through the whiteness of the page the contingency of consciousness, to limn in language’s limits history’s threats to continuity and conjunction. This is the work influenced by Existentialism, that borrowed the breathless realization of absurdity from Beckett and Camus, that registered the fugue of death performed by Celan, that effaced to face the effacements that were certain to be met.
New work in translation brings to the U.S. exemplary texts from each of these aspects of modern and postmodern French writing. In White Decimal, Norma Cole offers a new English version of Jean Daive’s 1967 Décimale blanche, the Belgian writer’s first book. Cole’s translation updates Cid Corman’s 1969 version. As the title suggests, whiteness is at once a theme and a formal feature in this book-length poem, whose first page reads, in its entirety:
white decimal
at the edge of space
Over the course of the first few pages, that whiteness is condensed (as it often has been, at least since Melville’s horrified contemplation of nonbeing in “The Whiteness of the Whale”) with silence, absence, formlessness, separation, incompleteness, nothingness, emptiness, and death. The parenthesis in that sentence might suggest that there is something old hat or hackneyed about the correspondences Daive explores, but this is not at all the case. To read a poem like White Decimal in 2017, in the wake of decades of writing—by Ponge and Perec, by Blanchot and Derrida, by Celan and Levi, by Creeley and Niedecker and Merwin—is to read something with which we have become familiar, maybe, but it is at the same time to return to that mid-sixties moment when the radical reduction of words against great gulfs of white space registered the awful gaps and absences still palpable two decades after the Second World War.
Daive’s poem has no overarching narrative, but it gestures toward myth and epic, the hero’s or heroine’s entrapment in a labyrinth or descent into an underworld. The first-person speaker with whom we begin soon fades (perhaps into “the labyrinth / of an incomplete attitude” named early on), and we encounter an old woman and a “shade” called “C.” Many of the page-long “episodes” of the poem then consist of something “she said” or “he” did, though the “I” appears as agent or locus of action from time to time, these pronominal “persons” moving through and often considering explicitly the blankness of their world. At least as important for the poem as its attenuated echoes of epic, though, are its echoes of mathematics. This begins in the title, of course: a “decimal” is a fraction expressed in tens and tenths, in powers and multiples of ten. Numbers and operations recur, from “the old woman is four times” to “white is not dividing four grey by / zero but dividing their decimals by zero,” from “I was four times” to “power of the first division.” Sometimes the math is geometry, as lines and angles, polygons, circles, and spheres are named, figured, and dissolved. Both the mythic and the mathematical, for Daive, point to the incalculability of loss:
she disappeared
under cover of snow
to serve as ground to emptiness
who embodies its name becomes decimal
she said.
And while there is nothing here that lets us ground such loss in any specific historical circumstances, there is much that, like Perec’s La disparition, invites us fill in the blanks:
I heard weeping from the neighboring race
I hear
unearth unearth
I hear the man
in his solitude
telling himself stories of dragons.
Daive’s poem is haunting, accumulating in the repetitions of its limited vocabulary of words and (one hesitates to call them) images the vertiginous recursivity of mirrors places before each other, reflections reflecting reflections ad infinitum. Only what gets amplified here is silence; it’s like when Jimmy Stewart falls into the empty grave during the dissolution scene in Vertigo:
time describes a circle in space
and space inside begins
other circles larger
other times longer.
Cole’s translation haunts, as well, limiting itself at once to Daive’s own restrictive vocabulary and to an appropriately straightforward, unadorned reproduction of the French. Like the old woman in the poem’s final page, “elle hanta ce que l’absence ne contient plus.” This is, I want to be clear, high praise.
After the chilly austerity of White Decimal, it’s something of a relief to eavesdrop on Philippe Soupault’s pleasurably prolix memories of fellow artists and acquaintances among the French avant-garde entre les guerres. A co-founder of the Surrealist movement, Soupault was well placed to meet and remember a wide range of artistic accomplices, antagonists, and antecedents. In this volume, he recalls such early influences as Baudelaire, Henri Rousseau, and Apollinaire, some modernist titans (Joyce and Proust), and, especially, such vital figures as Pierre Reverdy and Blaise Cendrars. Part of what he wonderfully captures in these portraits (all of which are also, of course, self-portraits) is the noisiness of the age’s experimentalism. Dada, he writes, was a self-consciously violent rebellion against convention and quietism. It was met with “indignation and wrath.” “[I]nsults . . . were abundantly hurled at us in every tone,” Soupault writes, “not to mention the rotten eggs, tomatoes, and pieces of meat.” This only served, though, to persuade the revolutionaries that they were right, and so they gave as good as they got: “In crowded and rowdy halls, we tried to outdo our arrogance and tossed challenges to all who claimed to assert their privilege in defending what they called tradition.”
Of course, part of what a book like this one does is precisely to construct a tradition of its own, and Soupault is often at his best when reminding readers why someone like Apollinaire was so important. “Because I owe him so much,” he writes, “I can’t recall without emotion a gray winter morning in 1917,” the morning that he first read a poem by Apollinaire in Reverdy’s Nord-Sud review. Apollinaire was, for Soupault, a “signal rocket,” a poet who “invoked the heavens and called the stars like familiar birds.” But his aesthetic example is only part of his importance; it is his life in letters, his absolute devotion to literature as a mode of living that sets Apollinaire into the firmament. The same is true of Joyce, whom Soupault praises for his commitment, for his willingness to live out Stephen Dedalus’s prescription for the artist (“Silence, exile, and cunning”): “I can never emphasize enough Joyce’s attitude, voluntarily exiled, exiled in order to complete his work. It would have been sweet and exciting, especially for an Irishman, to be welcomed in Dublin, to take revenge after thirty years on those who had made fun of the poor little student going into exile. His work was not completed. That sufficed to stifle his longing.” And it’s true of Cendrars, whose chapter here also dwells on his life-as-poetry more than on his poetry itself: “Impoverished and one-armed, he learned to write again, to light his eternal cigarette with one hand. There was no destination at that time. It was the ‘heroic’ period. Every opportunity for him was a good one. That’s how he taught me – and I’ve never been able to forget it, that you have to live poetry before you write it – writing, that was superfluous.”
Over and over again, what emerges from Soupault’s memoirs is noise. Everyone talks a lot. You begin to wonder when and how the writing got done at all. But the talk, whether Reverdy’s (“When it was his turn to speak [and he took the first turn in any conversation], he did not readily relinquish it”) or Georges Bernanos’s, is dazzling, passionate, and brilliant. Words mattered to these men (they are all men), and they matter, deeply, to Soupault. Alan Bernheimer’s translation shows that they matter to Bernheimer, too; notice the rhythm and sonic repetition in a sentence quoted above: “crowded and rowdy,” “outdo our arrogance,” “challenges to all who claimed.” Bernheimer’s attentiveness to sentence rhythm and to sound makes me wonder, in my only quibble, about some choices of phrases to translate or to leave untranslated. Why, in the Cendrars chapter, is one title (J’ai tue) translated (I Killed) and another, just one “and” away, not (Profond aujourd’hui)? And why is Chaplin’s film left in Soupault’s French (Charlot soldat), while the right-wing Action Francais to which Bernanos belonged is given here as “French Action” (which has the unsavory echo of the British habit of calling all manner of unmentionables French this or that)?
In general, though, there is much of real value in each of these books, and they complement each other as well: the icy astringency of a day out in the wintry weather and the warm and companionable fireside to which one returns afterwards.
Michael Thurston is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College.
