{"id":1286,"date":"2013-11-27T16:40:09","date_gmt":"2013-11-27T16:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1286"},"modified":"2014-02-12T09:43:33","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T09:43:33","slug":"musical-glimpses-hugo-stevens-baudelaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1286","title":{"rendered":"Musical glimpses – Hugo, Stevens, Baudelaire"},"content":{"rendered":"

I stumbled on this bit of Victor Hugo in a book on nineteenth century French poetry[1]<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Sara, belle d\u2019indolence
\n……….<\/span>Se balance
\nDans un hamac, au-dessus
\nDu bassin d\u2019une fontaine
\n……….<\/span>Toute pleine
\nD\u2019eau puis\u00e9e \u00e0 l\u2019Ilyssus\u00a0;<\/p>\n

Et la fr\u00eale escarpolette
\n……….<\/span>Se refl\u00e8te
\nDans le transparent miroir
\nAvec la baigneuse blanche
\n……….<\/span>Qui se penche,
\nQui se penche pour se voir \u2026<\/p>\n

My first thought was simply how lovely this is; it makes you wish English could dance in rhyme as easily as French can. My second was how like a lot of Wallace Stevens it is \u2013 the Wallace Stevens of \u201cThe Load of Sugar-Cane\u201d, say:<\/p>\n

The going of the glade-boat
\nIs like water flowing;<\/p>\n

Like water flowing
\nThrough the green saw-grass …<\/p>\n

I think the feeling of something like Stevens\u2019 use of repeated phrases, simultaneously echoing something just said and pushing the poem forward into something new came to me before<\/i> I \u00a0reached the repetition of \u201cQui se penche\u201d; I think Hugo\u2019s rhymes themselves were creating a similar effect, or, to put it the other way round, I find myself wondering if Stevens developed his art of repetitions partly as a way of recreating in English the kind of dance of sound that the French can do so easily with rhyme alone. Of course there are other factors too, like the shortness of line shared by this poem of Hugo\u2019s and the kind of poem from Harmonium<\/i> that I\u2019m thinking of.<\/p>\n

My third thought was that I should read the whole poem, which is called “Sara la baigneuse”. I was disappointed when I read it on the net, as you can do here<\/a>. It\u2019s all pleasant enough in its musical, voyeuristic way, but for my taste goes on far too long and loses its initial imaginative force both by sheer length and by its explicitness. That made me think of something Baudelaire said about the sonnet:<\/p>\n

Parce que la forme est contraignante, l\u2019id\u00e9e jaillit plus intense \u2026 Avez-vous observ\u00e9 qu\u2019un morceau de ciel, aper\u00e7u par un soupirail, ou entre deux chemin\u00e9es, deux rochers, ou par une arcade, etc., donnait une id\u00e9e plus profonde de l\u2019infini que le grand panorama vu du haut d\u2019une montagne\u00a0?<\/p>\n

(The restrictiveness of the form means that the idea bursts forth with greater intensity … Have you noticed how a bit of sky glimpsed through a basement window, between two chimneys or through an arcade etc gives a deeper idea of infinity than the wide panorama seen from the height of a mountain?)<\/p>\n

One of the wonders of so many of the very short, oblique poems in Harmonium<\/i> is how intensely they haunt you with images and impressions they only let you see out of the corner of your eye and never allow to dissipate by resolving themselves into sense.<\/p>\n

The opening of Hugo\u2019s poem also reminded me strongly of Baudelaire\u2019s wonderful, dense and sensuous \u201cLe serpent qui danse\u201d which starts \u201cQue j’aime voir, ch\u00e8re indolente<\/b>\u201d and later has the phrase \u201cBelle d’<\/b>abandon\u201d. You can read it here<\/a> in French and in several different English translations.<\/p>\n


<\/p>\n
\n
\n

[1]<\/a> Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France<\/em>, by David Scott<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I stumbled on this bit of Victor Hugo in a book on nineteenth century French poetry[1]: Sara, belle d\u2019indolence ……….Se balance Dans un hamac, au-dessus Du bassin d\u2019une fontaine ……….Toute pleine D\u2019eau puis\u00e9e \u00e0 l\u2019Ilyssus\u00a0; Et la fr\u00eale escarpolette ……….Se refl\u00e8te Dans le transparent miroir Avec la baigneuse blanche ……….Qui se penche, Qui se penche […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,19,45,89,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charles-baudelaire","category-form","category-victor-hugo","category-wallace-stevens","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1286"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1286"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1347,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1286\/revisions\/1347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}