GRAND HOTEL
I belong to a boisterous race that likes more than anything the busy afternoons of a luxurious city, before an opera gala solemnizing the downward slope of day, those torrid afternoons when the sun hums behind dense thickets of awnings stretched over the hotel’s facade, like a maritime festival’s white flags proudly hoisted for a regatta, above the asphalt’s black oil where the reflection of puddles eaten away by foliage thins out in illusion. I wouldn’t know how to harmlessly excuse the luxury of those details in poor taste that mysteriously poeticize it: summer furs, melancholy cascades of change ringing along staircases of gravestones, smoking parlors with plumed voices dazed by cordovan leathers, nickel-bars of railings from which the horizon flees toward the piers—but the sure mark of luxury is to be nestled in the back of the car amid the cushions on a warm evening, with a marvelously green horizon swelling up with nearby strains of music, one’s head cast upwards against the skies green as prairies, one’s face smoothed by the delicious wind at an extravagant speed, like beautiful simplicity regained, the princely largesse, the ancient deprivation of pure gold trickling between one’s fingers.
UNATTAINABLE
She’s a young woman beneath whose steps images arise in profusion. Sometimes, on an April path, she raises a hand, soft and light as a plume, and slowly calms the landscape’s disquiet—or perhaps her gait’s mysterious print between asphalt margins rivals the finest instrument of a littérateur. Along the meanderings of a colorful street, I like to follow that melodious thread of sudden death which her appearance echoes back and forth on the horizon of facades. No ringing street—with a ransacked theater, shattered storefronts, town criers announcing the century’s finest assassination, no glassware stained with blood, no fine, foaming blood singing like trills, like arpeggios, no saxophone’s soft inflection will ever, for me, compare to the gaze she sheds from the corner of her eye, calm and sharp, her gaze’s magnetic stream flowing along the banks, between the houses like the acidic saliva of a glacier.
A HIBERNATOR
In the morning upon waking, the double windows imprisoned him in their virgin forest, a delicate palm grove of ice. It was only a question of watering those windows for the forest to grow in a single night. One would hardly be surprised, however, to find oneself walking upside down: the sky was nothing but gray dirty loam, though the milky way of snow lit the world below. Every face was beautiful, rejuvenated—the snow bore glorious bodies. At noon, in the garden of snow and cotton wool, standing on one foot and holding his breath, he recomposed the silence. In the evening, the fleecy labyrinth of fog secured the house—the doors were left swinging. Then the moonbeam prowled around the bedroom till the window set a large black cross on the bed. Such delicate, luminous ruses, however, weren’t always without danger.
ROBESPIERRE
That angelic beauty reluctantly ascribed—beyond the dusty pages of a book one can leaf through only in a fever—to some of the minor figures of the Reign of Terror: Saint-Just, Jacques Roux, Robespierre the Younger—their beauty preserved for us over the centuries, floating like an Egyptian balm around a garland of elegant severed heads, by the nickname “the Incorruptible”—those necks of Jean-Baptiste’s, their whiteness sharpened by the guillotine, those streams of lace, those white gloves and those yellow culottes, those bundles of grain, those canticles, that sunlit luncheon preceding grand revolutionary suppers, that blondness of ripening wheat, those supple curves of mouths set in place by the thought of death, Jean-Jacques’s coos beneath the dark verdure of the first chestnut trees to bloom in May, their leaves shaded a peculiar green from the fine red blood of the guillotine blades, those funereal madrigals of sleepwalking dandies, a bouquet of periwinkles in hand, those flowers and virgin aristocrats dropped into the bran basket—as if, from knowing that one day they’d be led to the end of a pike, all the enchanting beauty of the night of man had flowed into the magnetic faces of those Medusan heads—that superhuman chastity, that asceticism, that wild beauty of picked flowers that makes every woman’s face grow pale—that is the language of fire which mysteriously descends for me here and there amidst the lightning-quick silhouettes of the shifting wide streets, as on the screen of flaming trees in a country path on a June night, and reveals to me, in a certain panicked ecstasy, the unforgettable faces of some of the guillotined by birth.
from Abounding Freedom
Julien Gracq
translated from the French by Alice H. Yang
©Julien Gracq, In Liberté grande, Editions Corti, 1969.
Listen to the original read by the translator:
Liberté grande (Abounding Freedom) is Julien Gracq’s sole collection of prose poetry. Initially published in 1946, the collection was expanded twice—in 1958 and 1968—to include poems Gracq wrote later in his life. The title refers to the freedom he found in writing poetry, which allowed him to let his pen follow the wanderings of his imagination. He took pleasure in the brevity of the form and the fact that he could write a poem, or the essential part of a poem, in an afternoon—a welcome respite from the day-to-day difficulty of having to pick up the narrative thread of a novel.
The four poems translated here are taken from the first edition of Abounding Freedom. While Gracq declared that his poetry did not constitute automatic writing, his early poems bear clear marks of surrealism. They teem with surprising, disorienting, and logic-defying descriptions, metaphors, similes, syntax, and juxtapositions of words. His dense style further destabilizes his prose; sentences sometimes seem endlessly extended by images, phrases, and appositions. The accumulation of discordant elements often makes it difficult to visualize a composite tableau in a given poem, to piece together its individual parts to form a cohesive whole. Rather than seek a logical unity, we should understand each poem as what Maurice Blanchot called, in a review of Gracq’s second novel, an “indistinct whole, a disorganized world of things.” Each poem creates an impression of the whole, but its discrete parts—words, phrases, or sentences—don’t necessarily add up in a neat or immediately comprehensible manner.
What holds these parts together is the sonorous way in which Gracq’s phrases and sentences flow into each other. Gracq was highly attuned to rhythm and sound, arranging words and syntax to please the ear. It is the musicality of his prose that I sought to capture above all in my translations. The tongue should find a smooth, if winding, path in English, even as the rational mind might pause over Gracq’s associative drift.
The four poems translated here are taken from the first edition of Abounding Freedom. While Gracq declared that his poetry did not constitute automatic writing, his early poems bear clear marks of surrealism. They teem with surprising, disorienting, and logic-defying descriptions, metaphors, similes, syntax, and juxtapositions of words. His dense style further destabilizes his prose; sentences sometimes seem endlessly extended by images, phrases, and appositions. The accumulation of discordant elements often makes it difficult to visualize a composite tableau in a given poem, to piece together its individual parts to form a cohesive whole. Rather than seek a logical unity, we should understand each poem as what Maurice Blanchot called, in a review of Gracq’s second novel, an “indistinct whole, a disorganized world of things.” Each poem creates an impression of the whole, but its discrete parts—words, phrases, or sentences—don’t necessarily add up in a neat or immediately comprehensible manner.
What holds these parts together is the sonorous way in which Gracq’s phrases and sentences flow into each other. Gracq was highly attuned to rhythm and sound, arranging words and syntax to please the ear. It is the musicality of his prose that I sought to capture above all in my translations. The tongue should find a smooth, if winding, path in English, even as the rational mind might pause over Gracq’s associative drift.
Julien Gracq (1910–2007), born Louis Poirier, was a French writer best known for his novels. He wrote under a pen name—a combination of Julien Sorel, the protagonist of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, and the Gracchi brothers, social reformers of the Roman Republic. A high school history and geography teacher, Gracq forged a distinguished literary career writing prose poetry, short stories, plays, criticism, and essays in addition to novels. His prose—lyrical and dense—earned him recognition as a master stylist. In 1951, he won the Prix Goncourt for The Opposing Shore (Columbia University Press, 1986 [1951]) but refused it out of disdain for the literary establishment. He is one of the few writers whose complete works were published during their lifetime by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, France’s most prestigious editorial collection of classic authors.
Alice H. Yang is a teacher and translator based in Lyon, France. She graduated from Yale in 2019 with a degree in literature. Her translation of Gracq’s collection of prose poetry Abounding Freedom: A Collection of Prose Poetry by Julien Gracq was awarded Yale’s Theron Rockwell Field Prize, a university-wide honor for a “poetic, literary, or religious work of scholarship.”
