A Life of Poems, Poems of a Life. Comtesse Anna de Noailles (1876–1933) by Anna de Noailles (review)

This welcome volume from specialists is the first—and much needed—anthology of Noailles’s poetry available to Anglophone audiences. As she has done in related scholarly studies, Catherine Perry provides an invaluable introduction to the comtesse de Noailles (1876–1933) that contextualizes her achievements, explains their poetic and philosophical merits, and prepares the reader for Norman Shapiro’s generous reinscription of their intensity and depth. We learn of the praise bestowed upon her by her contemporaries including Marcel Proust and Rainer Maria Rilke, of the highs and lows of her public recognition, the personal relationships that nourish her writing, and the underpinnings in French poets and Greek and European thought that give her verse its “intelligence” and “extraordinary energy” (22). Perry shows that, despite the “Romantic trappings” of Noailles’s poetic world, “[t]he term ‘Dionysian’ best describes her work : ecstatic, sensual, erotic, playful, sometimes violent, and always marked by a tragic undercurrent that becomes magnified with time” (18–19).

A wordsmith honored for his English-language translations of French women poets as well as Jean de La Fontaine and Paul Verlaine, Norman Shapiro reminds us in his initial remarks of Noailles’s “light and dextrous touch,” “delicacy of style,” and “inspiration often lush and musical, often visual” (7). The nine collections, presented with facing-page originals, offer a window on Noailles’s spiritual ache, interpersonal yearnings, love for the natural world, fascination with suffering and death, and quest for artistic transcendence. Seen together as a unified whole, they convey the progression of her ideas and her preference for “traditional patterns of rhythm and rhyme,” mostly “alexandrine and octosyllabic verse, often set in distichs, tercets, and quatrains, but also in long strophic verse” (19). Shapiro captures the qualities of the French verse by respecting their focus on rhyme and meter while augmenting their semantic richness. For the most part, his translations are dazzling. Their remarkable sheen helps us to understand the blend of vision, emotion, and imagination that makes Noailles unique, as in these opening lines from “The Animals” [ « Les Animaux » ] in Le Coeur innombrable (1901) and from “Poem on the Azure Sky” [ « Poème de l’azur » ] in Les Éblouissements (1907) : “Crook-wielding gods who guard the flocks, give us / Beasts’ age-old innocence ingenuous” (51); “Gasping for breath, the summer day stands by / Beneath the arrogant white porcelain sky, / Choked by the heat... A saffron veil consumes / Everything, burning, musing on a flume’s / Invisible, torrential acid course...” (105). Shapiro takes commendable liberties with syntax and diction that usually make this poetry ring true as a tapestry of sound and sense. Some readers may find that his transpositions shift Noailles’s voice at times to unfamiliar terrain, as in the latter example when a “torrent” in French becomes a “flume” in English in order to incorporate a rhyme with “consumes.” Compound nouns and adjectives, in particular, depart from the original’s plainer style. While some of these shifts can come as surprises, others make for seamless reading and ensure a smooth flow. Shapiro’s skill is such that, in college-level courses, his choices should spark fuller dialogue of poems’ meanings and discussion of their literary-historical ties.

Noailles’s daring perceptive élan, set within an appealing array of forms and accompanied here by essential background information and occasional footnotes, fills the reader with a sense of discovery and poetic use of words, as when in “Space” [« Espace »], one of the Derniers vers (1933), evening’s “star-swept void thrills the wise heart with wonder” (371). Minor caveats notwithstanding, Shapiro revives with great intelligence an individual voice gradually earning fuller representation in the literary canon. At once a bold creative feat and an accurate representation of “the variety and breadth” (19) of Noailles’s poetic output, A Life of Poems is a must...