Abounding Freedom
by Julien Gracq; translated by Alice Yang
About a half-century ago I first read Julien Gracq’s one and only book of prose poems Liberté Grande. First published in 1946, the writer amplified the volume several times over more than a decade. I vaguely remember finding the work of interest as an example of densely-constructed Surrealist convolutions. Compared to poetry by my other Surrealist or Symbolist hero poets, however, the poems didn’t seem of much importance to me, particularly compared to his novels that I very much liked. But then I was suddenly presented this Spring with Abounding Freedom and I quickly realized my arrogant younger self had largely missed what Gracq was up to in this most marvelous collection. Wonderfully (almost miraculously) translated by Alice Yang, World Poetry Books also wisely chose to face the English versions with the original French. In addition, Wang provides a very useful introduction along with end notes, which given Gracq’s relative obscurity in the English-speaking world, will be of enormous use to his new readers.
I don’t usually feel dizzy while reading, but Gracq’s great liberty in creating destabilizing imagery, incongruent verbal juxtapositions, extended metaphors and lengthy lines, had the cumulative effect of producing some slight disorientation. The issue was not with deciphering meaning—deliberately suffused—but with accommodating the sense stirred with non-sense, the precipitous leaps in thought and verbiage. Here’s just one of many examples, this one from “The Basilica of Pythagoras:”
There, a hospitable house is putting on—why not?—its playful games; through the window’s bars, I’ve sometimes found, in the hollow of a cotton bale, revelry of the least reprehensible kind. Suddenly one thinks oneself—in a grand finale of colored madras and this shade, this cool shade!—at the heart of some South Carolina! And the dust!—this fine coal dust of weathered train stations, whose smell is intoxicating. All around, a garden, welcoming—autumn crocuses, bougainvillea. It is forbidden to stop for too long. A white skyscraper’s shadow extinguishes the small station, Sicily suddenly comes to mind, or the cliffside streets of some Salerno of concrete where, in a hurricane of flies, the shadow of the town hall’s loggias, perched high above, looms over the houses by the port and their lovely multicolor linens, their large flags raised on days of celebration, which is to say every day. There’s also an excess of iron clocks, like large spiders.
Gracq consistently and deliberately attempts to mix his “observations:” urbanscapes turn into desolate places neither inside nor outside a metropolis; nature is replete with impossible vegetation and odd goings-on; the sea, a favorite place for the poet, is an unfamiliar ocean, as in this passage from “Ambiguous Departure:”
Long stretches of flat land and white, ghostly wood pigeons flying above the banks were the first awakenings of the magic seascape I improvised in the nocturnal scene. Solemn and mournful, knights in sable armor saluted me from the banks with the blaze of their banners’ fleur-de-lis patterns—on the water blue as petrol, a row of oriflammes outlined the open course for the victor. Waves drew out in grand fermatas toward the horizon—at times a raging whirlwind, a crystal gauntlet, a finger pointing up like a sundial’s gnomon served as the familiar zodiac for those ill-defined voyages.
A new discovery for me in this volume was “The Road,” two entries from a 1953 diary which Gracq published a decade later as “La Route.” (The entire unfinished manuscript was published posthumously in 2014). “The Road” is an odd, fragmentary account of a traveler encountering other travelers on an impossible journey. Though written in the first person it is disembodied, as if the writer was taking dictation rather than involved in the trip itself.
[T]he custom of the Road was to add a stone in passing, a gesture of distracted absolution that cleared the dead man of his memory and the murderer of his motives: this little moraine of men that grew little by little along the path didn’t weigh on memory like cemetery grounds, and didn’t give way to reflection. It made the wind and open waters murmur along the Road, like boats moored to a dock, and when it spread beneath the trees, one could sit there undisturbed to collect one’s thoughts or get one’s bearings: there was a sense of repose in those faint graves, which put life so at ease and had so little to see to that they were matters of neither testimony nor duty.
Abounding Freedom is a very welcome addition to modern French translations in English. And Gracq has found the ideal translator. Yang not only very faithfully renders the syntactically-challenging prose poems in a highly-readable English, she goes one step beyond in that her versions read as remarkably good English prose poems.
—Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
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