Anabasis

Of all the poetry produced during the twentieth century two poems stand at the pinnacle, and this is one of them. "The Wasteland," by T. S. Eliot, is the other. "Anabasis" was written by St.-John Perse, the pen name of Alexis Leger, in 1924. It was translated from the French by T. S. Eliot with the help of Perse in 1928, a revised translation coming out in 1949. Perse was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature in 1960. The Greek word "anabasis" means a march up-country from the coast to the interior. Given the poem's setting one may be forgiven for thinking of Xenophon's "Anabasis." The word was also used by Plato in his allegory of the cave to depict the journey from the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge. From Eliot's introduction: "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." An excerpt from the poem: "Milch-camels, gentle beneath the shears, sewn with mauve scars, let the hills march forth under the facts of the harvest sky--let them march in silence over the pale incandescence of the plain; and kneeling at last, in the fantasy of dreams, there where the peoples annihilate themselves in the dead powder of earth." Whereas Eliot, in his poem, portrays the modern world as a wasteland, the result of a loss of faith, Perse, in his, gives us a picture of the ancient world, beautiful and barbaric.

St.-John Perse was perhaps the most ambitious and the greatest poet of the 20th century. His astonishing long-lined poems comprehend childhood, nature, the sciences, ancient civilisations, Asia. "Anabase" is his best-known and most perfect work . The outline is clear: voyage of exploration and founding of a city in some exotic semi-barbarous civilisation. But the details can be hard to unravel. Perse arrived at his dazzling but difficult style by leaving things out, - the reader must supply many missing links, - and this accounts for its magical swiftness and surprise. (You can acclimatise yourself by reading the early "Éloges," where this style is still half-formed: you'll find them in the "Penguin Book of 20th Century Verse.") He also has the widest vocabulary of any French poet and a taste for the most confounding similes: the rain pursues travelling nomads "like a poll-tax." Eliot's famous translation has a slightly prissy, affected quality which is alien to the original: but then, Perse's unabashed high-flown patrician eloquence has no English equivalent. So don't be put off by the obscurity: enjoy the gorgeous language and allow it to gradually make sense by itself. As a sample, try Section Ten with its kaleidoscopic lists outdoing Walt Whitman. I have been re-reading this poem for 30 years and it still amazes and delights me.

The English edition of this book offers not only what is one of the most worthwhile pieces of poetry the 20th century has to offer to 21st century readers, but also a work that may serve as a standard to anyone looking to locate an example of a classic that survives the often deadly process of translation, for whom here we may thank T.S. Eliot, -- the edition prints the French language on the facing page, so that readers may trace what little poetic liberties the latter has taken in order to deliver across mountains and rivers, -- resembling the nomadic journey of St.-John Perse's epique, -- of language-scapes crossed . . . Mr. Eliot deserves our esteem for this feat if nothing else, to have retained that essence of "a great principle of violence", or rather that "essence" of the journey described in this book which is really not so much one of plot, character, or any emotional developement in the specific sense, but one of a progression of language . . . certainly the distinction is difficult to articulate, I mean that one existing between the emotional evolution and the progression of language, FEELING, essence, -- but that is what is so worthwhile about this book, in fact fascinating, to me, because it describes exactly this very experience, -- in that it reads as a kind of separate history, it describes the essence of man in history apart from any historical reference, apart from any identification that makes what the book describes HUMAN at all . . . we see a man here that is not a man at all except anatomically, as we would in focusing on the ancient cultures of South and Central America (Chavin, Olmecs, etc.), Egypt, China, and so on, they are only men as we are men today by an anatomical relationship. Thus this book reveals to us a sense of being, as men, that is largely lost in our modern day, and in the form of purely pleasurable poetry . . . so many lines in this books seem to sum up the entire statement of the entire vision, as if they could easily exist alone in fragments, say when our own culture has long passed to the dust of a long time's ravaging, and say all that the book builds from those lines together. I highly recommend this book, not so much for my own reasons, which are certainly a crock of my own reflection, but for your own. This is a book that speaks, there are few that do so, it is a book one can hear without reading. Mr. Eliot called it "as important as the later works of James Joyce", -- I would never give it so unworthy a comparison as that, -- I mean that this book is simply CAPABLE of more, Joyce is one thing, but this book, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, can be so much more. In terms of history, this is a book worth digging up.