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  • Wallace Stevens, Poetry, and France: "Au pays de la métaphore." ed. by Juliette Utard, Bart Eeckhout, and Lisa Goldfarb
  • Lee M. Jenkins
Wallace Stevens, Poetry, and France: "Au pays de la métaphore."
Edited by Juliette Utard, Bart Eeckhout, and Lisa Goldfarb. Paris: Éditions Rue d'Ulm / Presses de l'École normale supérieure, 2017.

Wallace Stevens, Poetry, and France germinated in a conference on "Stevens in France" held at the Université Paris-Sorbonne in 2015. The conference title signaled a different tack from the 2008 special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal, guest-edited by Anne Luyat, on "Stevens and France." The titular shift from conjunction ("Stevens and France") to preposition ("Stevens in France") enabled the contributors to the present collection to encounter Stevens, as he envisaged encountering himself, in a country he never visited—in a France that for Stevens was synonymous with the "pays de la métaphore" which is the poet's habitat.

Juliette Utard's brave and brilliant introduction, "A 'Special Relation'? Stevens' French, American English, and the Creolization of Modern Poetry," takes Stevens scholarship into the new and fertile theoretical terrain mapped out by Caribbean theorist Édouard Glissant in an essay entitled "The Unforeseeable Diversity of the World" (included in the recent volume Creolizing Europe, Liverpool UP, 2015). As Utard demonstrates, Glissant's relational poetics prove "highly applicable to Stevens' baroque poetic polyglotisms" (20), to the frequent interpellations into American English of French and of what Antoine Cazé terms "Near French" that characterize Stevens's poetic lingua franca. Utard thereby prepares the semantic ground for the chapters comprising the first of the four parts of the collection, "Stevens' Uses of French." In "'Luminous Traversing': Stevens' Near French and the Vagaries of Translation," Antoine Cazé asks "what happens to translation" if we subscribe to Stevens's adage that "French and English constitute a single language" (32; CPP 914). Cazé finds that French "as it is used in English" in Stevens's verse constitutes an "interstitial space" (37) in which the difference (or différance?) between French and English is perhaps paradoxically obscured by a "luminous traversing" between the two (CPP 24). In the following chapter, Lisa Goldfarb builds on her authoritative scholarship on Stevens and Paul Valéry to compare the ways in which the two writers treat the relationship between the senses and thought, before performing assured readings of two Stevens poems that embody sensory experience, "A Postcard from the Volcano" and "A Dish of Peaches in Russia." Valéry's notebooks, Goldfarb shows, "serve as prelude" to Stevens's poems insofar as in both, the sensory pertains to sensibility—to "the blood of thought," as Valéry puts it (47), and to what Stevens in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" calls "An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought" (CPP 333). In "'The lingua franca et jocundissima': The Comedian as a French Speaker," Aurore Clavier—a splendid name for a Stevensian—continues Cazé's exploration of the interstitial nature, in Stevens, of French and of a France that is an "exotic foyer," both "domestic and foreign" (56). In Clavier's fine reading of Stevens's mock epic, "The Comedian as the Letter C" is "a model stage for the poet's French voices to resonate" (62). Lisa M. Steinman concludes this first part of the collection with an adroit assessment of Stevens's perception of French not only "as the language of sensuousness and the erotic" but also [End Page 270] as "being inflected, by association, with the language of order and regulation, that is, the language of the law." French for Stevens is again a liminal linguistic zone, Steinman shows us, "both inside and outside of civilized culture" (73).

Part Two, on "Stevens' Poetic Legacy across the Atlantic," comprises four fine chapters, in the first of which, "Hoobla-hoo and Hullabaloo: Divagations with Stevens," poet-critic Maureen N. McLane engages Stevens, creatively and critically, in a "complex reckoning" (81). McLane, who like other contributors attends to "Stevens' bravura naturalization of a register of French into his own ludic American English" is also alert to the operations of "French" and "German" as "frequencies within the emergent bandwidth of [Stevens's...

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