Valéry’s Graveyard: “Le cimetière marin,” Translated, Described, and Peopled by Hugh P. McGrath and Michael Comenetz (review)

In terms of its genesis this is a peculiar book. Divided into three sections written by two co-authors, it is composed of a translation of the celebrated poem “Le cimetière marin” by Paul Valéry and then a transcript of the [End Page e-27] accompanying public lecture about it given in 1978 by McGrath. The third part by Comenetz aims instead to comment on McGrath’s more general description and to analyze in greater detail this exceptional modernist French poem. The details provided by both writers presumably serve to “people” the text under scrutiny. While I appreciate this goal, given the increasingly dynamic, thematic dimension of the work as one reads through it, I am not always sure what such peopling means, however. Does this verb refer to the poem’s myriad “actants”—to use a semiotic term—that inhabit, so to speak, the world of the poem? Or does it instead signal the presence of readers themselves in the latter—that is, a need for readers to participate in the creation/re-creation of the universe imagined by Valéry, le prince des poètes of his early twentieth-century generation? Probably it means both, given the poet’s copious notes about the production and reception of artistic works.

In any case, two other weaknesses of the book involve the translation itself and the lack of certain secondary materials one might have expected in its bibliography. While semantically adequate to the explicatory text it precedes, the translation does not do justice to the original. Indeed, from its celebrated decasyllabic form, to its impressively alliterative verses, to its haunting internal rhymes, Valéry’s original barely comes through the rather pedestrian transposition it undergoes in McGrath’s hands. As a result, little attention is paid to the musicality of the poem, turning a phoneme-rich verse such as “le temps scintille et le songe est savoir,” for example, into the rather banal phrase “time scintillates and Dreaming is to know.” Even the syntactical rendering of this last verse, along with a few others found elsewhere, is problematic.

On the other hand, after this point in the poem, the line “la scintillation sereine sème” is shrewdly translated as “serene the scintillation sows upon,” which indicates that McGrath was not at all unaware of the importance of such poetic devices as internal rhyme. But why, for instance, does he invert the substantive adjective phrases “beau ciel, vrai ciel” to “Sky true, sky beautiful,” and just as curiously, why does he make no attempt to render these same French monosyllables into simpler, more lexically similar English equivalents, such as “blue sky, true sky,” even if my own proposed change here would, admittedly, merit an equally long clarification of its own? Finally, too often we are left to wonder what has happened to the target language when verses such as “la vie est vaste, étant ivre d’absence,/Et l’amertume est douce, et l’esprit clair” are translated as “life’s a great vast, drunken with absentment./And bitterness is sweet, the mind is clear.” Besides raising several issues—What is a “vast,” and how is “absentment” [End Page e-28] different from “absence”?—these renditions do not take seriously enough many striking morphological or grammatical aspects of the original text, for example, the repetition of /v/ and the chiastic structure of the words “vie est vaste, étant ivre.” Assuming, as I do, that McGrath did in fact appreciate such matters himself, we must accept that due to certain unstated strategic decisions—the purposes of a public lecture?—his translation does not always demonstrate that.

For this reason, it is refreshing to discover in the “description” his comments regarding the alliteration of the words pins and palpiter, as well as his rationale for choosing the verb quiver rather than palpitate to express the...