Book review of The
Poems of A. O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud (Black Widow Press, 2008). Translated by Ron Padgett and Bill Zavatsky. #valerylarbaud #thepersonalreview
Rather than draining
away the literary merit of the poems, however, these simple facts of Larbaud’s
biography, I think, lend them an affecting familiarity, one that contemporary
readers, assuming a more globalized perspective on the nature of travel and literary
production, will find both poignant and uncanny on discovering his work. It is oddly touching and queer in our era of bombastic consumption and nepotistic
stardom to learn that Valery Larbaud considered his wealth a possible
impediment to the recognition of his genuine talents as a poet. The mask of Barnabooth, then, was created to
deflect the ridicule he feared his poetic endeavors might provoke on being
offered up to the public and its literary arbiters. In the end, as interesting as the stratagem might
seem, Barnabooth becomes the vestigial remnant of a literary subterfuge whose function
was quickly dissipated once the French literati of the day had embraced Larbaud’s
work and the poet had revealed his identity.
Reading these
poems now, we often sense we are hearing Larbaud’s own voice, his sweetly
melancholic disposition fully eclipsing the braggart mask of his fictional stand-in. Once we get past the title page of Padgett’s
and Zavatsky’s edition, Barnabooth spasmodically fades away until the “Private
devotions” that come at the end. It is
here that we discover a surprising envoi
“To Mr. Valery Larbaud” signed by Barnabooth “himself,” though by the time we
see his name again, we have trouble recalling who this entitled personage might
be. In fact the envoi seems to acknowledge the collection as Larbaud’s alone,
citing certain private references, a signature nostalgia and fretful regret for
unfulfilled desires. The fictional hero asks
permission to drop his cameo role in a book for which he no longer feels suited: “But wouldn’t there be a way, with me, your
companion of so many years,/ To leap out of this era […] these miserable latest
Paris-London-Vienna fashions/ Into the sun and warm air of the Empire?/ Like
those goldfish at Valbois during a hot spell” (143). Modernity seems too hot for Barnabooth who
prefers the old ways.
Larbaud’s authorial
mask proves a reluctant one, even if another in the collection—a poem entitled
“Mask”—reminds us how futile it is to seek the actual man behind the words of
ANY poem, given that some level of imposture is endemic to all creative writing
and its mimicries of intimacy between writer and reader. Comparing his private mask to other literal
ones in the “old Venetian style,” Larbaud asks, with Baudelairean stealth,
that some reader, my brother, to
whom I speak
Through this pale and shining mask,
Might come and place a slow and
heavy kiss
On this low forehead and cheek so
pale,
All the more to press upon my face
That other face, hollow and
perfumed. (23)
Even as the masks fuse they seem to
multiply between reader and text and thus to increase the many selves behind them. Like so many travelers raised in a
cosmopolitan milieu, Larbaud searches for a truer self while recognizing how easily
the places one visits can alter the verbal self-portrait one has already
created as a substitute for oneself: places
like the cities one is charmed by, the souvenirs one buys, the acquaintances one
makes—overlaying but sometimes erasing the past and its apparent primacy in the
establishment of identity. The poems
thus partake of a synaesthesia of past and present, the familiar and the strange
(or new), of truth and artifice, the Self and the Other that Victor Segalen, another
French poet and traveler of the time, seemed transfixed by and almost a victim
of—his inner “otherness” multiplying itself to the point of dispersion and “autoscopy”.[1] But unlike Segalen, who wrote extensively about
China and Polynesia, Larbaud’s itineraries are more firmly rooted in Europe, assiduously
crisscrossing the Mediterranean and Black Seas, even if they sometimes also extend
farther out (and farther back) to the Americas where the poet stages his
alter-ego’s birth but the real attraction of which seems more cultural and linguistic
than nostalgic. (The settings in the poem “Yaravi,” for
instance, bounce back and forth from the Bosporus to the Tyrrhenian Sea, yet
the title itself refers to a folk tradition originating in the Andes, one of
many references to folk lyrics in Spanish.)
The centrality of Europe, however, proves dominant by the end of the
book with its long, multi-tiered poem of that same name.
Right
away in the collection Larbaud allegorizes his irrepressible impulse both for indulging
himself and for physical travel in a verse “Prologue” premised on the funny if
sometimes embarrassing rumblings of the “borborygmi”: the intestinal groans that tend to erupt at
socially inopportune moments. In these
irrepressible gurglings from the depths of one’s bowels Larbaud finds a surprising
physical parallel to his personal longings—whether for pleasure or its
discontents—longings almost every poem in the collection encapsulates and extols
in some way. As if to extend this
analogy of guts and brains, peristalsis and sentiment, the Ode that comes next transforms
these intestinal spasms into a network of deluxe express trains fanning out across
Europe and Asia, a network Larbaud exuberantly celebrates. It is a kind of anticipatory “Prose of the
trans-Siberian” that both condenses and fragments Blaise Cendrars’s modernist
masterpiece of verbal locomotion. But
instead of transporting us across the Russian steppes like the train Cendrars
was inspired by, the ode simply evokes it in a catalog of first-class trains Larbaud
seems to have ridden, like some lyrical Paul Theroux negotiating the great
railway bazaar of the world. From the Harmonika-Zug
to the Orient Express, Larbaud hurls his readers forward with verbal exultation
toward what he calls “the unsayable” and “[the] eternal aspiration for vague
things” (13). But the things he aims at
bring their burden of sadness, too, something Larbaud always acknowledges
before concluding his poems, as if to say that that was really the point of it all: the poignancy that mysteriously
enriches the pleasure of travel. Another
poem about railway travel or its aftermath is the exquisite “Old Station at
Cahors,” which describes an abandoned train station serving a forgotten destination,
a station the poet compares to an aging, if still flirtatious woman, mostly
ignored but sometimes gently tickled by the memory of her aging amours: the huffing steam trains that once filled her encompassing
quais.
Conspicuously
evocative of sea travel are “Indian Ocean,” “Night in the Port,” and
“Mers-el-Kebir,” three poems in which a speaker lounges comfortably on the deck
or in the cabin of an imaginary cruise ship, steaming under the stars at night
or docking at a town once lived in. The
first of these might seem the most exotic, set as it is “on the deck of a big
ship/ On the way to the Dutch East Indies” (25), but the poem heightens one’s
sense of isolation on the sea at night under a star-filled sky unimpeded by the
“Himalaya of sails” one would find on the old wooden ships. The speaker is nowhere but where the stars
tell him, “gazing at infinity gazing down on [him,]” a “vision of Creation,
immensely/ Silent” (25). Engulfed by
this awesome quietude, he thinks back longingly to something simpler: a cool spring morning he once enjoyed in
Marseille as he looked out his hotel window onto the city’s old port and its
famous Chateau d’If. The other two poems
carry us to towns on the coast of Africa where the poet recalls the narrow lives
of the people he knew there if also the enchanting song of two girls—unseen by
each other—whose “united voices” persuade the poet he is not only the “wounded
paloma [dove]” of which they sing, but is himself “this passing moment[,]” this
“African evening” (53). He becomes his
destination, but his latest destination is always just another screen of
himself.
The
singing of the two girls in the previous poem echoes another written in tribute
to the songs and voices of former servants.
Though we are supposed to be in mind here of Barnabooth, born and raised
in Argentina, one is reminded of the patrician pleasure Larbaud must have
regularly taken in having a bevy of servants to cater to his needs whenever he
experienced the more
expansive moments
of health,
One of those cruel moments when one
is really oneself!
Living in a corner of a city’s
hundred thousand folds,
Like a criminal thought in a brain,
Able to buy everything in the
dazzling shops,
Like those in Paris, Vienna, or
London,
Restaurants, jewelers, wide-open
streets
(The stomach like loaded
saddlebags, the eyes
Two lighted lanterns).” (39)
Among these women’s voices are those
of the sambas (mulatto servants),
pure toned and deep, singing the zarzuelas
of yesteryear. At the center of these
delicious memories are thoughts of Lola, an old servant with “crazy eyes
staring into the distance” and one “Rose Auroy, in the embassy gardens,/ In
streaked raffia and red silk scarf dotted with buttercups,” telling the poet
her riddling sirandanes. Amparo, Carmeta, and Angustias soon follow,
“[filling] this heart that dedicates these tears to [them]” (41). Though this may seem a bit patronizing, there
is a grace conferred on the women in a way that suggests genuine regret for the
past and the unique circumstances that provoked or inspired the memory of it. It is the kind of sadness that comes from
realizing, at a certain stage in life, that one’s good fortune and security are
probably completely undeserved—though the same could be said of one’s bad
fortune. Still, these deep feminine
voices suggest another kind of wealth even in servitude, something even the
poet cannot fully grasp.
If
Larbaud’s admission of the sheer joy of consumerism startles the reader at
times, one is no less surprised by the strong link the poet makes between
pleasure and criminality. Larbaud takes
this notion farthest in “L’Eterna Volutta” in which the connection between
human suffering and the inhuman delight anyone might take in it is repeatedly
if ambiguously sounded. The translators’
notes inform us that in his journal Barnabooth claims to have written the poem
at a time when he was despairing over his own baseness. But the poem seems more interesting without
the explanatory framework as the verses oscillate unpredictably between civilization’s
highest values and the viler genealogies Nietzsche attributes to them. No sooner has the poem listed all the
beauties of feeling that might justify the human race than it announces how
easily they are quelled by “the eternal voluptuousness of suffering!”
(33). Yet the poem never definitively
establishes whether the poet’s sympathies are with the afflicted or with the
afflicters; both seem to claim him as their own, like a kind of cosmopolitan
Kurtz—the best that Europe can produce—suddenly losing his moral coordinates as
soon as he’s given the opportunity to satisfy his secret appetites. But this
Kurtz hasn’t penetrated the jungles of the Congo: it’s the labyrinth of department stores and
restaurants one finds in the great cities of the world that have unhinged the
speaker. Though done with a seductive
playfulness or even sentimentality at times, Larbaud captures an unsettling if
all too familiar truth about the potential cruelty of pleasure, thanks mostly
to the insensitivity of the pleased.
Something Larbaud himself somehow always avoids.
In
the magnificent assemblage of poems that make up “Europe” we catch a glimpse of
the charming majesty of the “gone world” of the early Twentieth Century and what
it must have been like to explore even the farthest eastern boundaries of the
western world in the few remaining years before the Great War would shatter
Europe’s peace. Sailing at midnight
on—what else?—a Cunard liner, the poet hears the ocean waves lapping the ship’s
flanks in hushed tones at the approach of the continent. The passengers see flashes of lightning in
the distance, only to realize they are the beams of “a lighthouse, like a
madman/ Whirling its flaming head in the night, a giant dervish” (101).
So it’s you, Europe, you I surprise
at night.
I find you once again in your
perfumed beds, O my loves!
I saw the first and foremost
Of your billions of lights.
There are the civilized nations,
With their enormous capitals, so
luminous that at night,
Even above the gardens, their skies
are pink. (103)
This doesn’t prevent Larbaud from giving
a nod, expressed with a “fie,” to the colonies that contributed so much to the
old empires and new nations wrangling for position in the vastness of peopled
cities and the empty plains around them, all laid before us in these poems. But in the colonies, “which have/ Only the
marvels of nature” and where bored colonials, “[dressed] in white linen, in
towns with nowhere to buy anything,/ [Do] nothing but think of you, [and]
through you, Europe” (105). While
seeming to extol the colonizer’s self approval—his sense of ruling the world
“Through knowledge, behind the scenes, as if [Europe] held/ The strings of
these colorful puppets in a single fist”—the poet notes how dizzy one gets on
high as if in the evil grip of temptation:
“As if someone were murmuring to you, ‘All this I will give to you,’ on
the mountain top!” (105).
From “slumming in
the night-spots” to skirting the Dalmatian coast where sea bays fold into
mountains “[c]renellated with inaccessible Venetian citadels,” to plashing in a
silver bathtub in London, or Stockholm (with its “Little Red Riding Hoods”) or Berlin
(where “nothing of importance/ Has been built since 1810”), the pageant of
Europe is luxuriously displayed for the reader, if casually discovered from a series
of vehicular windows opening onto the highways and byways of its beautifully
proportioned landscapes, its encrusted borders along the villages, towns, and
cities pinning it to the map of the world.
Larbaud never shrinks from fashionable excess, but like all good
travelers, he knows when it’s time to forsake the beaten track and return “to
the virgin forests,/ The desert, the prairie, the colossal Andes,/ The White
Nile, Teheran, Timor, the South Seas,/ The entire planetary surface ours for
the asking!” (107).
Aside from certain
suitably prosodic substitutes, Padgett’s and Zavatsky’s translation avoids bending
the English language in any way that might unduly strain its lovely frame. Beautiful as the French originals may be,
there is such a thing as reproducing too much Frenchness in the English; instead,
the present translations fit themselves very snugly into the idiom of the
book’s “target language,” to use the terminology of translation theorists. This seems to be the tendency of most American
translations today—to assume that other cultures and languages will readily fit
in with the public patter of the American scene and its various political
correctives. But at no time does this
translation seem at odds with the sensibility of the original except when it’s
Larbaud’s sensibility itself, a certain unease of dislocation, wrinkling up the
sheen of his sophisticated, but never condescending, French. Even the prickliest connoisseurs of Gallic taste
will know they are in expert hands. The same sense of surety is evident in the detailed
but unfussy notes that accompany the poems, an intellectual relief to have on
hand but also a pleasure to flip back and forth through—helpful, learned,
worldly. The book, now ten years old, is
a forgotten gem of a collection, like a rediscovered cabinet of curiosities
waiting to be despoiled of its surprises.
[1]
See Charles Forsdick’s discussion of Segalen in which he claims that “[t]he
descriptions of the meeting of ‘moi-même et l’autre’ in Équipée appears to be that of an authentic
experience of autoscopy.” Forsdick, C. Victor Segalen and the Aesthetic of
Diversity: Journeys Between Cultures. Oxford Univesity Press, 2000:
212-213.
