As an exercise, I've started trying to translate the French poet Charles Péguy –– a friend had given me his long free-verse Portal of the Mystery of Hope several years ago, and I confess to finding it a little tedious, but I discovered, rummaging around online, that his long poem Éve is in rhyming quatrains, and I thought I might have a go at it. Of course, what I have discovered so far is that a) my French is really rusty, b) my grasp of French idioms, particularly circa 1913, is tenuous to the point of nonexistence, and c) I haven't remotely begun to get into the mind of Charles Péguy. In other words, a translation project quickly morphs into a research project. I find that the late English poet Geoffrey Hill wrote a 1983 study of Péguy [no, I'm wrong, it's actually a long POEM: The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy], and wonder if I can get my hands on that somehow (and if I'd find it readable if I did).
And why Péguy? He's kind of a problematic figure, apparently: I read somewhere that De Gaulle carried a copy of The Portal of the Mystery of Hope with him during World War II, but the Vichy government also appropriated him (conveniently dead since 1914), at least his writings in political philosophy, about which I know nothing beyond the fact that he was a socialist, as inspiration. His own sons seem to have denounced him posthumously as a proto-fascist and a racist. How much truth there is in this I don't know. I certainly don't endorse fascism or racism. On the other hand, the Resistance adopted him, too. If what I find out about Péguy becomes un-stomachable, I won't translate him further. I'll find somebody else's mind to put on. But I'm interested in his apparent stance, from the 19-aughts forward, as a "believing but non-practicing Catholic." What does that mean? It seems to me that to believe as a Catholic is to live and practice as a Catholic; you can't just be a Catholic in your head. Obviously much of his work, including this visionary poem I've started working with, took up Catholic preoccupations. Christian publishers have produced translations of his work, like the Schindler translation of Portal of the Mystery of Hope, which again I have found gelatinous. I need to go and read the introduction to that translation, though, because it might be helpful.
Anyway, I thought of Péguy because I had read a little of him and hoped he had something in form that I could work with –– he's modern enough that I can access the French without undue difficulty, and he's not, say, Apollinaire, whom I really can't relate to, I don't think. I'm probably going to need to learn more about early-20th-century French poetry generally than I remember from my undergraduate classes. I'm going to need to learn a lot. I might just lie down in the road instead.
Meanwhile, I've managed to peck out a few stanzas of Éve provisionally and become interested in some of the repeated patterns in those stanzas –– at the dawn of the world, all the various animals knotting and unknotting, mingling and unmingling, tangling and untangling, their various "courses" or paths through the Edenic world. The speaker is Jesus, addressing Eve, the "Mother buried beyond the garden," who has ceased to know an unfallen world. I'm going stanza by stanza and have no idea what this pattern of tangling and untangling is supposed to add up to, where the poem is going, and part of that is that I'm still outside Péguy's head, not seeing the vision he's trying to render into language. If I can learn to understand how Péguy thinks and sees as a poet, then I'll know better what my own word and phrasing choices should be.
There's a lot of AND in this poem. Everything strung together by and, which seems significant. I wrote a poem a year or so ago that I wound up constructing as a series of long sentences (cutting across line breaks, obviously) whose clauses were all connected by and, and I did it deliberately: to show a kind of simultaneity of action, if that's even a word, things all suspended in a simultaneous present moment that (I hoped) would paradoxically appear to be outside time. I think maybe that's what Péguy is trying to do. Eve has died and been buried in exile, but Jesus –– speaking out of eternity, presumably –– is recalling to her that sense of a living moment in which time doesn't matter much because there's really no end, no death. So possibly all the tying/untying action is showing things that are fully alive in their joy but also kind of going nowhere, toward no end, no ultimate cessation of whatever their activity is. Something to meditate on, anyway. I'd initially wanted to dispose of the ands a little, just to make for easier lines here and there, but I don't think I can. I think they're crucial.
Here is the poem in French, in case anybody reads French. I do, but laboriously and hardly with uninhibited fluency. Possibly you can just run your eye over it and know what it says better than I can. I will need to consult with French speakers at some point to check the veracity of my translation, especially if it gets to the point of being really more than an exercise.
Another day of temperature ups and down, from a low of 32 to a high of 63. It's 44 out right now, already a good deal warmer than when I went out with Dora first thing. Wearing:
Sierra, AGAIN. I believe this is three days in a row, but there's really nothing better in my closet for these transitional-weather days. This is as easy as putting on pajamas, but looks a little more polished, at any rate. Wearing with my thrifted emerald-green cotton J. Crew cardigan, old-ish light-gray cotton-blend leggings, and purple Xero Oswegos, around which I built the outfit, really. I knew if I was going to wear purple shoes, everything else should be kind of low-key. These shoes are good for transitional weather, when it's not warm enough for sandals, but a little too springlike for boots.
Hair (washed Friday, so I guess this is Day 4) in a ponytail with a pink silicone-coil hair-tie.
I have to accompany my husband to a lawyer's office in a while in order to sign the title to our van, which we have been trying to give away for the last year and a half. My husband had given it to our mechanic, signing the title over to him (but forgetting that my name also is on that title). Then our mechanic died of Covid. His son has been trying to straighten out his affairs, and we're trying to help him by sorting out this car title so it's his in the clear, and he can then dispose of the van however he wants to. It's essentially a rebuilt transmission in a very large metal box, and aside from maybe salvaging the transmission for himself, the best thing to do with it, probably, is to send it to the junker, a thing he cannot do until he has the title in hand in his own name.
So we have to do that, and then the rest of the day will be largely catching up on household tasks I neglected over the weekend. My husband works late, so I'll be finding something to watch tonight, once I've finished reading the . . . what am I up to? I think it's the 24th Roderick Alleyn, another theater mystery, this time involving a Shakespearean artifact. I wish I could read more slowly, but really, I can't. I just inhale these things.
Outside, the day has gone from sun to cloud. I can't remember whether we're supposed to get rain or not. On balance I hope not, because I took the weekend off from dog-walking, and Dora and I need to get back to it this afternoon. She's walking better and better on the loose leash, and we're able to take longer and longer walks along more distracting routes. This is good for my physical fitness, anyway, or what passes for it.
Camellias still coming into flower:
Sometimes in Holy Week the ground is all strewn with their fallen red petals, though this year I think that imagery will be long gone.
And the forsythia is tuning up, slowly:
A new week, new things to do. I suppose I should go and do some of them now.