Harmonium by Wallace Stevens, and: Minuties Préliminaires by Wallace Stevens (review)

Over the past twenty years, several French translators have applied their talents to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, including Claire Malroux, Claude Mouchard, and Alexandre Prieux. Two recent translations by Gilles Mourier are worthwhile additions to these efforts: one of Harmonium, the other of various poems that Stevens published in periodicals before the release of his début (here collected under the title Minuties Préliminaires). Mourier, who is perhaps best known in France for his version of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, brings a distinct sensibility to Stevens’s earliest poetry.

The French language mattered profoundly to Stevens, and no collection expresses that love more clearly than Harmonium. The book is peppered with French words (connaissance, ingénue, peignoir), names (Vincentine, Ursule), and historical figures (Racine and Bossuet both make an appearance in “The Doctor of Geneva”). A few poems even bear a French title, like “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle.” But the influence also comes through, more discreetly, in Stevens’s syntax. Think of his fondness for impersonal constructions (“One must have a mind of winter” [CPP 8]), which sound much more at home in Racine’s tongue than in English. To bring Harmonium into French feels especially fitting, then, because it returns Stevens to a language he drew from so widely and deeply.

One of Mourier’s strengths is his ability to find in the French language opportunities for Stevensian flourishes beyond what the original text may demand. Harmonium is chock-full of alliteration, assonance, and puns. These effects are difficult to carry over in translation, and there are certainly instances that Mourier is unable to match; but he makes up for those necessary losses with passages that accomplish Stevensian effects within the parameters of his language. The end of “Fabliau of Florida,” for instance, is transformed into a grand, thunderous cacophony with “Ce ressassement du ressac” (73). The line is more thunderous than the original (“To this droning of the surf” [CPP 18]), yet it is not hard to imagine that Stevens would have written it in just this way had he been working in French.

At their best, Mourier’s innovations reveal buried implications in the texts, as with the final stanza in “Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks”:

And the beautyOf the moonlightFalling there,FallingAs sleep fallsIn the innocent air.

(CPP 46)

Avec la beautéDu clair de la luneQui tombe par là,Tombant comme tombeDans l’air innocentLe sommeil.

(Harmonium 169)

Tombe, the French verb for “fall,” is fortuitous because it allows a pun on the word for “tomb.” The scene, for all its beauty and innocence, is death-haunted, so that the air’s innocence gets complicated by the euphemistic evocations of “sleep.” The fact that “fall” and “tomb” are both expressed in French by the word tombe is a linguistic accident, yet it is one that Mourier knew to seize upon here because it captures something essential to the poem.

Mourier is also particularly good at hearing the complex registers of Stevens’s writing. The poems in Harmonium repeatedly combine a sophisticated vocabulary with bawdy and earthy subject matter. Stevens’s mode of address similarly strikes a complex balance, sounding elevated as well as familiar, confrontational, or provocative. From “To the One of Fictive Music”:

Sister and mother and diviner love,And of the sisterhood of the living deadMost near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom,And of the fragrant mothers the most dearAnd queen, and of diviner love the dayAnd flame and summer and sweet fire, no threadOf cloudy silver sprinkles in your gownIts venom of renown, and on your headNo crown is simpler than the simple hair.

(CPP 70)

Ô toi et sœur et mère et amour plus divin,Et de la sororité de la mort en vieLa...