63. Exile by St.-John Perse
Really the Bollingen
Collected Poems is full of one gem after another, but it is the single work
Exile that is dearest to me. When I first discovered the poems of St.-John Perse I was instantly fascinated—I’d never encounter anything like them before and devoured the Collected cover to cover, as well as his letters. Most people I know are not familiar with his work at all, despite his 1960 Nobel Prize. Those who are, know of him almost exclusively through T.S. Eliot’s translation of
Anabasis. Perse wrote exclusively in the prose poem format, but there can be little doubt that the language he employs is unadulterated poetry. One of the most captivating parts of his work is his vocabulary which is so sensually rich in technical terms that a list of the words I learned through reading him is a poem in itself.
...seisms, phasmas, vanessas, almagesta, portulains, spandrel, natron, alburnum, latria, uriae, aurochs, saltwort, crockets, culm, achene, anopheles...
Timeless and resoundingly mythic, to me these poems sound like long-lost anonymous manuscripts discovered in some forgotten cave or cask. Indeed, though he led a very public life as a statesman and diplomat, Perse seems to have purged his work of all details of selfhood, choosing a path of self-effacement—in stark contrast to that chosen by the confessionalists who are legion. His is a voice that always seems to come from very far away. And yet the great paradox of this otherworldly approach is that it manages to come across as intensely political, and—for me—almost unbearably intimate.
“...He who, in the midnight hours, ranges the stone galleries assessing the title-deeds of a beautiful comet; he who, between two wars, watches over the purity of great crystal lenses; he who rises before daylight to clean out the fountains, and the great epidemics are at an end; he who does the lacquering on the high seas with his daughters and his sons’ wives, and they have had enough of the ashes floating above the land...
.....He who soothes the insane in the great blue-chalk asylums, and it is Sunday over the rye-fields, the time of great blindness; he who, at the entry of the armies, goes up to the organs in their solitude; he who dreams one day about strange quarry-prisons, and it is a little after mid-day, the time of great bereavement; he who, at sea, below the wind from a low-lying island, is awakened by the dry scent of a little immortelle of the sands; he who stays awake in the ports, embraced by women of another race, and there is a vetiver flavour in the armpit smell of the low, receding night, and it is a little after midnight, the time of great opacity; he whose breathing, asleep, is one with the sea’s breathing, and at the turn of the tide he turns on the bed like a ship putting about...”
(translated by Denis Devlin)
I did a reading in New York City of this single long poem,
Exile, about six or seven years ago—one of the best performances I’ve ever given. I had goosebumps for the duration.
http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?qwork=14047134&matches=3&cm_sp=works*li sting*title
"...There has always been this clamour, there has always been this splendour."
Nemo