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Literary Review
Perse's symphonies
Anabasis: a going or marching up; an advance, especially a military advance; or a difficult or dangerous retreat as of the Younger Cyrus in 401 BC narrated by Zenophon in Anabasis.
Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary
POETRY makes nothing happen", but as Saint-John Perse concluded his Nobel Lecture, 1960, "it is enough for a poet to be the guilty conscience of his age." That's all he can do because poetry today (has been for some time) is in a paradoxical situation: it is the art at once least and most threatened by mass communication and mass culture. It has reached the point of minimal survival where nothing will make a difference to it; extinction is at least a logical, if not an inevitable step.
For example, take the question of poetry anthologies: they are rapidly disappearing (even Oxford University Press scrapped its poetry list some years ago), few review them and it is doubtful if more than a tiny proportion of the reading public responds to this piety. And that tiny proportion is made up of first the poets immediately involved, their friends and relations; second, those people, who hope, sooner or later, to be involved — that is, poets in the making; and third, the specialists — teachers and critics — and this category is rapidly dwindling. In other words, the reading of poetry is now almost wholly professional. All this does not add up to a viable proposition.
The general educated public which reads reviews of novels, biographies, travel books and so on to find out what should or should not be read, what might or might not be of interest, treats poetry as a diversion that is simply not its concern. The professional classes, the diplomats (John Perse was a much-travelled diplomat) lawyers, clergymen, civil servants and politicians who made Tennyson, for instance, a bestseller (if he still is, it is because of his place in academic courses) seem no longer interested. If poetry after its long illness were finally to die of mass culture, there would be precious few mourners.
What mass communications does, more than its immediate effect on poetry, is to breakdown the ability to read. Poetry is after all, the supreme version of language ("perfection's sweat," as Derek Walcott put it), the one art that depends wholly on concentration. You can get by music as pleasant background music, painting and sculpture as mere decoration, and even the novel apparently can be read with half an eye. But poetry, because it takes common language and remoulds it to fit exactly the writer's sensibility, demands of the reader a great effort of concentration; he has, in a sense, to relearn language with each new poet.
If this is a longish introduction to the place of poetry today and the problems of interpretation, it is because of Saint-John Perse's Anabasis which is part "poetry", part "verse and prose" with a background of musicality, with its rhythms and interplay of sounds. Many traditions believe that poetry, in the final analysis, is song, and this, too, is a typical French tradition — that poetry is related to music and springs from the deepest and most primitive act of nature and draws upon all forms of knowledge: psychoanalysis, history, phenomenology, autobiography and so on in one great act of synthesis that would reveal the inner life of the poet and hence the character of the human soul. The French, unlike the English, have little place in their literature for creative work without theories to support it.
Anabasis hence makes considerable demands on the reader. T.S. Eliot, who translated the prose poem, said in his 1930 introduction that he had to read the poem five or six times to get a hang of it — but what serious reader does not feel the need, at times, to stretch himself and go beyond his limits, to flush out his soul? After all, it makes a welcome change from the usual fare of neurosis, sex and sociology.
The poem itself, in 10 cantos, is a series of images of migration of the warrior hero along the Mongolian trade routes on horseback. It speaks of the conquest of the vast spaces in the Asiatic wastes of the Gobi desert in Central Asia, of the destruction and foundations of cities and civilisations or epochs of the ancient East. Eliot, in his introduction, has provided a tentative synopsis of the movement of the poem in ten divisions: 1. Arrival of the conqueror on the site of the city he has founded. 2. Marking out the boundary walls. 3. Consultation with astrologers. 4. Founding of the city. 5. Longing for new worlds to conquer. 6. Plans for the establishment and filling of the coffers. 7. Decision to undertake a fresh expedition. 8. March through the desert wastes. 9. Arrival at the borders of a great land.10. Warrior prince received with honours and celebrations. He rests for a spell but is soon yearning to be on his way again, this time with the navigator.
In appearance, it is almost like paragraphs of prose, although each canto ends with a refrain line. There is a clear narrative thread: the travelling writer thinks of his forthcoming meeting with the Prince and recounts in canto one and two the words of praise he had heard about the Prince. A portrait is painted of the archetypal Oriental ruler, holding sway not by force but by deep and silent meditation in the midst of his people, fulfilling his functions by wise watching. The apparent paradox is resolved by finding the Way (the Tao), which is an important part of Buddhist and Confucian philosophy. Basically it amounts to a life of simplicity and tranquillity, expressed in Tao Te Ching, the sixth-century BC Chinese text:
By non-action everything can be done.
Without stirring abroad
One can know the whole world;
Without looking out of the window
One can see the way of heaven.
The further one goes, The less one knows.
At the very general level, Anabasis is fairly easy to comprehend: the poem is an expression of man's nomadic spirit that follows the image of a primitive society, wandering, setting up camp, forming a township, recognising the limitations that civilisation imposes and moving on. This can be seen in different ways: as a historical, evolutionary or psychological allegory of our developing relations with society, underlying our constant need to remain an outsider to safeguard our privacy. There is also a sense of constant renewal expressed through the image of the journey, of desire unsatisfied, that illustrates our imperious need to decide courses of action relating to our inner self as well as to the demands and expectations of society at large.
Anabasis is complex, rather like the human body: it does not simply mean, it is there. To understand what it means (which is rather like a cold-blooded academic exercise) we can dissect the organs, thereby defining the way it works more accurately but in doing so we lose sight of the personality, the spirit of the poem and the ultimate value which, in poetry at least, is inseparable from the physical texture of the words. We have to be sufficiently flexible to take in the general and particular simultaneously: the particular analysed in surgical detail and scalpel applied to Parse's language. The general and its ultimate relation to the particular will always be a matter of opinion and we have therefore to turn to the sound of music. Even in translation, the musicality comes through:
... So I haunted the City of your dreams, and I established in the desolate markets the pure commerce of my soul, among you invisible and insistent as a fire of thorns in the gale.
Power, you sang on our roads of splendour... `In the delight of salt the mind shakes its tumult of spears... With salt shall I revive the dead mouths of desire!
He who has not praised thirst and drunk the water of the sands from a sallet I trust him little in the commerce of the soul... '
Anabasis isn't easy but it is full of existential insights and if you persevere, your time will be well spent reading it.
Anabasis, St. John Perse, first translated by T.S. Eliot in 1930, above quotes from revised edition, 1949 and reprinted in 1958. Also from Saint-John Perse, Althone French Poets, Roger Little, 1973. Current prices not known.
RAVI VYAS
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