Poems of Jules Laforgue

 Poems of Jules Laforgue by Jules Laforgue, translated by Patricia Terry, 100 pages

Largely forgotten today, in his time Jules Laforgue was very much in the vanguard of French poetry. 

Her eyes said, "Do you understand?

Why don't you understand?"

But neither would take the first step;

We wanted to fall together to our knees.

(Do you understand?)

His verse often, unfortunately for him, reads like an echo of Baudelaire.

Man and his wife, to the body

Slaves, whirlpooling sewers

Webbed with harp-string nerves,

Serfs to all and jumping their tracks

Under miscellaneous attacks.

Yet even then, he has a voice that is uniquely his own.

And even if we trample where we like,

Never will we be as cruel as life...

Jules Laforgue died at the age of 27.  As always, one wonders what he might have been had he been given more life.  As it is, his verse proved more influential in the Anglosphere than it ever was among the Francophones, inspiring Pound and Eliot.

Like the thorn that sees the petals

Falling, by evening excused, from his best rose.

Ancient City

The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, translated by Willard Small, 323 pages

In The Ancient City, the 19th century historian Fustel de Coulanges explores the origins of the great city-states of the classical world, chief among them Sparta, Athens, and Rome.  All of these, he observes, were born out of a context of familial, tribal associations bound together by religious observance, in which the concept of property was centered on the ancestral tomb and law was "at the same time a code, a constitution, and a ritual."  The history of the ancient world then progresses or degenerates as a movement away from this hierarchical religious community towards a polity which is more egalitarian, secular, and dissolute.

In an age like our own when historiography generally treats religion as an accident, this landmark work indisputably establishes religion as the central reality of every ancient civilization.  The family, the tribe, and the city were all religious in their foundations.  Then, as now, those foundations are vulnerable to water and fire, to the slow drip of complacency and the burning flame of resentment.

Life of St Dionysius

The Life of St Dionysius the Areopagite by Michael Syncellus, Anthony Pavoni, and Evangelos Nikitopoulos, 267 pages

The book of Acts records that St Paul, on his visit to Athens, converted one "Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus."  Tradition relates that this Dionysius, venerated as St Dionysius the Areopagite, would become the first bishop of the city, and was eventually martyred.  Halfway across the Roman Empire, the first bishop of what would become Paris, St Dionysius or Denis, was beheaded, his remains buried at the place where the church and abbey dedicated to him were eventually built, and it was sometimes claimed that this Dionysius was the Areopagite in exile from his native Greece.  In the early centuries of Christianity multiple works appeared which claimed to have been written by the Athenian bishop, among them foundational works on Christian mysticism and angelology, most of which seem to have been written by a single author.

Modern historians discount most of this, beyond the existence of two Dionysii, one in Athens and another, later one in Paris.  The writings are ascribed to a hypothetical pseudonymous author who is thought to have lived around 500 AD.  The Life of St Dionysius the Areopagite is a panegyric composed in the 9th century by the Greek scholar monk Michael Syncellus, a translation of which takes up about fifty pages of the present book.  Most of the rest is a scholarly attack on the historical consensus, arguing that the Dionysian corpus is actually the work of the Areopagite.  The authors argue that apparent seeming anachronisms are explicable in a 1st century context, and, more exhaustively, that what are assumed to be Pseudo-Dionysian borrowings from Proclus actually represent Proclean borrowings from Dionysius.  This last point is convincingly buttressed by what appear to be references to the corpus present in pre-fifth century writings.  

If the textual analysis is quite dense and sometimes baffling to a layman, it clearly deserves to be taken seriously and not dismissed with stale references to 19th century skepticism.

Leopard

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 320 pages

Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salinas, would be perfectly content ruling over his large family, amusing himself with his mistress, indulging in his passion for astronomy, playing with his dog, and watching over his hereditary estates with benevolent indifference.  Unfortunately for him, history has other plans, as Garibaldi's revolutionaries lay siege to Palermo, with Fabrizio's own nephew, the dashing Tancredi, joining them in their effort to overthrow the monarchy.  Even in the security of his country estate at Donnafugata, the prince has to reckon with his eldest daughter Concetta's love for Tancredi and his nephew's growing affection for the bourgeois beauty Angelica.

The Leopard is a masterpiece.  It is not a dramatic novel - most of the major external conflicts are resolved without struggle or comment.  The real drama is social, historical, psychological, and, in the end, metaphysical.  Despite the sentimentality of its characters, it is a remarkably unsentimental work.  There is much to attract us in the passing world of the Sicilian nobility, but the novel does not romanticize them.  CS Lewis famously remarked that there is no "magic about the past.  People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we.  But not the same mistakes.  They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us."  So it is with The Leopard - the novel unfolds for the reader a universe of values which overlaps but significantly diverges from those of liberal modernity and allows him to judge between them.

Early History of Glastonbury

The Early History of Glastonbury by William of Malmesbury, translated by John Scott, 83 pages

The Early History of Glastonbury is a translation of William of Malmesbury's 12th century history De Antiquitate Glastonie Ecclesie, accompanied by the Latin text as well as commentary and notes. William undertook this project at the behest of the monks of Glastonbury, at least partially as a supplement to four Lives of Glastonbury saints he had written (of which only the Life of Saint Dunstan survives), but the primary aim seems to have been a catalogue of the various charters and bequests associated with the monastery.  Indeed, the short book is generally more of a legal record than a conventional history, as rights and privileges awarded to the abbot and monks are thoroughly documented - in the uncertain period following the Norman conquest, this was a necessity.

For a modern reader this focus proves something of an obstacle, as it does not make for particularly entertaining reading.  To the kind of reader who is likely to even consider reading a 12th century monastic history, however, the rewards will almost certainly be worth the price.

Master of Hestviken

The Master of Hestviken by Sigrid Undset, 994 pages

By right, Olav Audunson inherits the estate of Hestviken when he is still a boy, although he is an orphan living far from the home of his ancestors.  By the time he is able to take possession of it, decades have passed and he has already experienced love, hatred, loss, exile, betrayal, and mortal sin.  His struggle with this last defines his life, a grim life full of tragedy illuminated only by intermittent flashes of grace.

The Master of Hestviken is a series made up of four novels, The Axe, The Snake Pit, In the Wilderness, and The Son Avenger, set in 13th century Norway.  Although there is a bit of action and bloodshed, and quite a bit of romance, it is fundamentally a social, familial, psychological, and theological drama.  It is slow-moving and complex, but also compelling, heartbreaking, and surprising.  

Leaving the Hermitage

Leaving the Hermitage by Rohan Koda, translated by Jiro Nagura, 195 pages

Leaving the Hermitage is a collection of poems collectively telling the story of a poet who seeks refuge in a hermitage in order to escape the distractions of the passing world and draw from the deepest part of his heart the purest poetry, but who eventually discovers that poetry fills the mundane world as well.

Koda was better known as a novelist than a poet, and Leaving the Hermitage is a kind of novel of poetry, as the poet considers his lot and encounters a series of challenges to his repose.  The quality of the poems as poems is not that high, but it is impossible for anyone who does not read Japanese to know whether this is a failing of the poet or the translator, while the narrative flow has an undeniable charm.

Birgitta of Sweden

Birgitta of Sweden: Life and Selected Revelations by St Birgitta of Sweden and others, translated by Albert Ryle Kezel, 235 pages

St Birgitta (often referred to as St Bridget but here given the more Teutonic variant in order to distinguish her from her more popular Irish namesake) was born in Sweden around 1303 and died in Rome in 1373.  Such was her reputation that she was canonized less than two decades later.  Beginning in early girlhood, she experienced a series of mystical visions of varying nature and subject matter, all drawing her into an ever more passionate love for God, a consuming flame that demanded to be spread to others. 

The core of St Birgitta's visions, as they are presented here, are of a dissolute monk (unnamed but known to the visionary) who interrogates God as to His nature and the nature of His creation.  This runs through an impressive catalogue of objections to God's existence, not only general questions about the existence of evil but also more specific inquiries into the cruelty of beasts, the economy of salvation, and the purpose of pleasure, all resolved with holy clarity and simplicity.  The collection of texts is rounded off with the rather dry Life prepared for her canonization and a selection of moving prayers to Christ and His Mother.

Oresteia

Oresteia by Aeschylus, translated by Richard Lattimore, 171 pages

The Oresteia is a cycle of three plays relating the tragedy of the royal house of Mycenae in the aftermath of the Trojan War.  Agamemnon tells the story of the return of the king, accompanied by the captive Cassandra, and his murder by his wife Clytemnestra, who had taken his cousin Aegisthus as a lover during his decade-long absence.  The Libation Bearers continues the story as the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra avenges his father by slaying his mother.  Finally, in The Eumenides, the goddess Athena stands as judge between the titular Furies and Orestes, in the process establishing Athenian jurisprudence and domesticating the goddesses of vengeance.

Robert Lowell once admitted that it is impossible to recover the power of Aeschylus' drama, "something no doubt grander than any play we can see."  Perhaps some intimation of that power is available to us in these post-Enlightenment times, for meeting it outside the cramped blood-soaked ground of the grand narrative of progressive history, what the reader is immediately struck by is its earnest religiosity.  It is certainly possible for a crippled soul to dismiss Apollo, Athena, and even the Furies themselves as dramatic contrivances and ignore the atmosphere that surrounds them in favor of shallow psychologizing.  It is likewise trivial to invert the tale, to turn Clytemnestra into the righteous avenger of her sacrificed daughter, inevitably ending with her liberation of Cassandra into an unconvincing sisterhood.  If Aeschylus does not have true religion, it is certainly more true than any of the modern simulacra.  Aeschylus' cycle is a real myth, his tragedy rooted in a legacy of crime and guilt inherited both by the sons of Atreus and the daughters of Leda, a shared fault that stretches back into remotest antiquity, where it assumes unknowable cosmic proportions, and which can only be expiated by cult and sacrifice.

Crime and Punishment

 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett, 484 pages

"...a fantastic, gloomy business, a modern case, an incident of to-day when the heart of man is troubled, when the phrase is quoted that 'blood renews,' when comfort is preached as the aim of life.  Here we have bookish dreams, a heart unhinged by theories.  Here we see resolution in the first stage, but resolution of a special kind: he resolved to do it like jumping over a precipice or from a bell tower and his legs shook as he went to the crime."

It is difficult to imagine a better description of Crime and Punishment than that which Dostoevsky offers through the voice of one of his own characters, especially as the form - a prolonged monologue - is how much of the novel's action unfolds.  Raskolnikov is a failed student languishing in late nineteenth century St Petersburg, possessed by the notion that he can, by a single decisive act, break totally with the past and enter a realm of absolute freedom.  What he slowly and painfully discovers is that that realm is found in an entirely different direction, at the end of a radically different path, than he imagined.

It is difficult to say anything new about Crime and Punishment.  Obviously, it is not for everyone.  It is dreary and disorienting and merciless towards the reader.  Just as obviously, it is a work of genius, an incredible artistic achievement as well as an antidote to much of the existentialist sophistry that followed in its wake.

Three Ages of the Interior Life

The Three Ages of the Interior Life: Prelude of Eternal Life (Volume One) by Rev Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange OP, translated by Sister M Timothea Doyle OP, 470 pages

This book is an adaptation of a course Father Garrigou-Lagrange taught for over twenty years at the Pontifical College of St Thomas Aquinas (the Angelicum) in Rome.  The subject is mystical and ascetic theology, subjects which are sometimes treated as distinct but which the author demonstrates form a unity.  More importantly, he explains that these are not the concern merely of great saints and spiritual athletes, but are the heart of the universal call to holiness.  The interior life in which the soul ascends to God is both a foretaste of and a necessary preparation for that heaven which is true life in His presence.

The first volume treats of some foundational matters as well as the first of the three stages described by the great mystical writers, the purgative way.  Given the origin of the book, Garrigou-Lagrange's intended audience is current and future priests and spiritual directors, but despite occasional digressions into theological complexities, the work itself is imbued with a deep love of God and a concern for the souls of the faithful, so that it is pastoral in the best sense of the word.  A lay reader is likely to find himself both enlightened and inspired, though there is danger in reading beyond one's level.

Fire in the Steppe

Fire in the Steppe by Henryk Sienkiewicz, translated by WS Kuniczak, 717 pages

In With Fire and Sword, Poland was saved from the Cossacks.  In The Deluge, she was saved from the Swedes.  In Fire in the Steppe it is the Turks who threaten the Commonwealth, and again her heroes, gathered around the incomparable swordsman Volodyovski, stand ready to defend her.  One final time they take their places on the ramparts of Christendom, disregarded by the sensible men of their own time and sensible historians of times to come, but glorious giants in the world of song and story.

In many ways Fire in the Steppe parallels With Fire and Sword.  Again, steppe warfare features prominently, again the most prominent villain is an easterner living among the Poles who is driven to treason by his desire for the hero's woman, again there is a climactic siege in which the defenders face impossible odds.  The last novel in Sienkiewicz's trilogy is far superior to the first, however.  Love at first sight has been replaced with a dramatic romance and courtship with as many twists and turns as any battle.  Where the love interests in the first two novels fell easily into the role of damsel in distress, Volodyovski's wife is more capable of handling herself physically.  Best of all, the climax dramatizes in unforgettable fashion one of the central themes running through the entire trilogy, the necessity of brave men to defend Poland and the cowardice that turns soft men into traitors in spite of themselves.

Essays

Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism Considered in Their Fundamental Principles by Juan Donoso Cortes, translated by Rev William McDonald, 347 pages

In his celebrated 1988 Gifford lectures, Alisdair MacIntyre exposed the failure of both the modernist "encyclopedic" and postmodernist "genealogical" approaches to ethics, a failure rooted in their incommensurability, their inability to meaningfully dialogue with and assimilate alien systems.  Now we stand in the ruins of those towers of human pride, with leaders who, whether from knavery or imbecility or some mixture of the two, leap uncomprehendingly from one to the other, asserting at one moment that "my truth" is something manufactured, and at the next that it issues from the Delphic prophetess Science, once her mad ravings have been suitably interpreted by her labcoated priests.  If reason is the slave rather than the master of the passions, every subjectivity is at war with every other, convenient lies contending with convenient lies, and so the heathen rage.

This was all warned against by Juan Donoso Cortes in the early nineteenth century.  The liberal superstition that truth will triumph in a free marketplace of ideas is belied by the fact that men do not seek the truth, to the contrary, even when the Truth appeared to them they mocked Him, spit on Him, and ultimately crucified Him.  The entire liberal project is founded on the mistaken belief that human freedom consists of the power to choose between good and evil rather than the ability to will the good.  The result is moral chaos, the war of all against all by other means, and sin, Cortes reminds us, is nothing more or less than disorder, the confusion of lesser goods for higher, ending in the disunion of soul and body which is death.  Life, then, is order, true order, the harmony which exists in the presence of the supreme mysteries in the light of which all apparent contradictions are resolved.   

In Such Hard Times

In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu by Wei Ying-wu, translated by Red Pine, 359 pages

Wei Ying-wu lived in hard times indeed.  The eighth century saw the crisis of the An Lushan rebellion, which forced the Tang court to flee Chang-an, and even the final suppression of the revolt only seemed to increase the power of the regional warlords.  Wei himself lived a life full of disappointments - a born aristocrat but a middling scholar, his career as a civil servant never equaled his early promise.  How much of this was a cause and how much a result of his desire for a retired, ascetic life is an open question.

     reports neglected for days

     no one dealing with ink or words

     it must be because of the quiet

     or because I met a man of the Way

In medieval China, poetry was the language of social discourse, and most of Wei's poems look to past meetings or present ones or future encounters, or all of these simultaneously.

     we met and got drunk among the flowers

     we were going in different directions but not very far

     what the evening tide took away the morning tide brought back

Wei's status as a man of culture with at least aspirations to virtue moving in and out of an imperial administration is one he shared with a number of celebrated figures in Chinese history, many of whom he acknowledges as models.  It gives him a certain sensitivity to human foibles.

     the price of a single cup was a hundred sacks of grain

     it was strong at first and then thin and finally robbery

     but patrons knew its name and nothing of its taste

The world was hardly clamoring for an English translation of the poetry of Wei Ying-wu.  That Red Pine took the task upon himself is itself evidence of the way the life and work of the poet resonate with those of his translator, and the latter's excellent commentary makes it available to the receptive reader.

     whistling out loud I hike past towering trees

     admiring the heights his footsteps have reached

King's Minion

The King's Minion: Richelieu, Louis XIII, and the Affair of Cinq-Mars by Philippe Erlanger, translated by Gilles and Heather Cremonesi, 240 pages

As the Thirty Years' War stumbled to its exhausted close, it became increasingly clear that the power of France would dominate the Continent, and that the director and architect of that power was the Red Eminence, Armand Jean de Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu.  If to some he seemed nearly omnipotent, canny observers - and there were none more canny than the Cardinal himself - understood how precarious his position truly was, for he was deeply unpopular and served only at the pleasure of the king.  Louis XIII, for his part, personally loathed the man who had forced him to send his beloved mother into exile and thrown France into a murderous war for which he would have to answer before God, yet Louis also recognized his minister's genius and found him irreplaceable.  In an effort to ensure that this did not change, Richelieu went to great lengths to introduce Louis to the charming young Henri Coiffier de Ruze, Marquis de Cinq-Mars.  As Richelieu hoped, Cinq-Mars captivated the king, swiftly replacing his quarrelsome mistress Marie de Hautefort in his affections.  The proud, impetuous Cinq-Mars chafed under Richelieu's patronage, however, and soon found himself embroiled in a series of conspiracies against the Cardinal, eventually leading to a tragic end for the royal favorite.

Erlanger walks breezily through the backroom intrigues of the baroque court, following the interwoven plots with a clear narrative and such memorable sketches of the various personalities involved that even minor figures are easily distinguished.  If at times this leads him to go beyond the facts and to presume to know the hearts and minds of his subjects, it is easy enough to recognize this as the informed speculation it is.

The Day Is Now Far Spent

The Day Is Now Far Spent by Robert Cardinal Sarah and Nicolas Diat, translated by Michael J Miller, 343 pages

The hour is late indeed, says Cardinal Sarah in this book-length interview with his favorite interlocutor, Nicolas Diat.  The Church, he tells us, is riven by dissension, compromised by unbelief, and stained with sin.  Meanwhile, the decadent ruins of Christendom are in the grip of a "fundamentalist liberalism" that pursues wealth and power (often under the guise of "justice" and "liberation") while treating the sacred with indifference and contempt.  The irony is that, by attempting to place himself at the center of the world, modern man has created a world in which he is increasingly superfluous.  Not content in its iconoclasm with the destruction of its own past, the neo-colonialist West actively works to erase the cultures of Africa and Asia even as it plunders their lands of their natural resources.  

It is necessary, then, for faithful Catholics to resist the temptations of compromise and despair.  This demands the cultivation of virtue and excellence - "The Church does not have the right to be mediocre."  Fittingly for the author of The Power of Silence, while Sarah's message is urgent, it is not primarily a "call to action", but a call to prayer and contemplation.  "Your mission is not to save a dying world... Your mission is to live out with fidelity and without compromise the faith you received from Christ."

Desert Tracings

Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes by 'Alqama, Shanfara, Labid, 'Antara, Al-A'sha, and Dhu al-Rumma, translated by Michael A Sells, 76 pages

This collection presents six poems from the rich history of the Arabian qasida, a primarily oral tradition practiced amongst the bedouins in the centuries before the advent of Islam.  The typical form begins with a lament for lost love, continues to an account of a journey, and ends with a boast. 

     She takes your heart

          with the flash edge of her smile

     her mouth sweet to the kiss

          sweet to the taste.

The poems are full of images of desert animals, the desert landscape, and the ways of the desert people, who were often little more than brigands.

     I have three friends: a brave

          heart, a bare

     blade, and a long

          bow of yellow wood.

But their values are found to be preferable to those of the city.

          What you own

     is a wooly plaything,

          growing long on stubby sheep,

     then shorn.

And they are not strangers to irony and satire.

          I fell for her by chance

     She fell for another

          who fell for another

     other than her.

Remarkably complex yet not at all "sophisticated", rooted in a dynamic, living tradition spanning centuries, unmistakably tied to a specific place and time and way of life, the beauty of these Arabian odes is unique and profound.

Tales of the Early Franks

 Tales of the Early Franks: Episodes from Merovingian History by Augustin Thierry, translated by MFO Jenkins, 166 pages

It is no less a commonplace of our time than of Augustin Thierry's that the so-called "Dark Ages" are a confusing, dull, and unprofitable era to study - indeed, the sometimes-equivalent term "Middle Ages" seems to imply an unedifying interlude between the more significant Classical and more important Modern periods.  If scholars and ideologues are divided on when the "darkness" fell, in what, precisely, it consisted, and when and how it lifted, it seems certain that Gaul in the late 6th century was deep beneath it.  

It should be a pleasant surprise, then, to discover Thierry's tales of love, war, religion, politics, and intrigue in the Merovingian era.  Based largely on the histories and memoirs of St Gregory of Tours, Thierry's work is divided into seven interrelated narrative episodes covering events ranging from the tragic life of Queen Galswinth to the rigged trial of Bishop Praetextatus to the happy friendship of Radegund and Venantius Fortunatus.  Thierry delightfully combines a contagious love for the period with a deep awareness of the importance of personalities and character.

A Sunday in Ville-d'Avray

A Sunday in Ville-d'Avray by Dominique Barberis  (Translated from the French by John Cullen) 144 pages

This novella packs a lot into it. It’s brief, moody, spare, completely French and has a other-worldly atmosphere to it.

 Two sisters, Jane and Claire Marie don’t see each other often, even though they live relatively close to each other. Jane lives in the heart of Paris, while Claire Marie lives in the suburban community of Ville-d”Avray. Jane lives with her partner and Claire Marie has a husband and a teenage daughter.

It’s early autumn, and the sisters are enjoying a few glasses of wine in the garden. After the initial and normal conversation exchanges, Claire Marie begins to talk about a man she had known fifteen years prior. It’s a whimsical, whispery, misty description of a man named Marc Hermann. I’m was never sure if the two had an actual affair or danced around one.

Claire Marie would sneak out of the house to meet him, but the meetings took place more around train stations and parks than in hotel rooms or quaint B&Bs. I got the feeling that Marc was more of a stalker, and that Claire Marie was having wispy fantasies about him. The scenes in which Claire Marie tried to see him at his place of business is disturbing, making the reader feel as if there was something else going on altogether.

The pace of the novella ebb and flowed, as a good story does. However, it didn’t reel me in completely. I found myself more mystified than satisfied at the conclusion. Therefore,  A Sunday in Ville-d'Avray received 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world. I wanted to give it 2 stars, but the beautiful writing and scenery had me bump it up a star.

 

Nine Songs

 The Nine Songs: A Study of Shamanism in Ancient China by Yuan Qu, translated by Arthur Waley, 61 pages

The "Nine Songs" were probably written down in the 3rd or 4th century BC, although the songs themselves are clearly older than that.  The eleven short poems are ritual hymns intended to aid a shaman in summoning a spirit or god.  Interestingly, they are love songs, with the god often described as a fickle lover and the shaman as the longing, forsaken partner.  As Waley suggests in his introduction, the closest Western equivalent is likely the Song of Songs, and similarly to that work the Nine Songs have been given a variety of allegorical interpretations down through the centuries, including many which literal-minded moderns will no doubt find impossibly tendentious.

Tracing the influence of the Nine Songs in Chinese cultural history is not Waley's aim, however.  Rather, he is interested in presenting them in something resembling their original context.  To this end, not only has he supplied an excellent introduction to the series as a whole, but each poem also gets its own brief but informative commentary.