"The Missing Pieces" by Henri Lefebvre

Selected reviews of Henri Lefebvre's The Missing Pieces translated by David L. Sweet

I won't be writing a review this time, just providing a list of links to reviews of poet and publisher Henri Lefebvre's book The Missing Pieces, which I translated into English for Semiotext(e) in 2014.  The original French title is Les Unités perdues and the book was first published by Manuella Editions in 2011.  Reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Harper's Magazine, Hyperallergic and other magazines and journals.  The book was also included in the Semiotext(e) installation at the last Whitney Biennial in New York (the installation included my translation of Baudrillard's Architecture:  Truth or Radicalism?).


http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-missing-henri-lefebvre-20141208-column.html

http://hyperallergic.com/196363/a-poetic-record-of-creations-lost-missing-or-destroyed/

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-58435-159-7

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/bullet-points-a-review-of-the-missing-pieces-by-henri-lefebvre/

http://www.utne.com/arts/the-missing-pieces-ze0z1503zcwil.aspx

http://harpers.org/archive/2014/10/remembrance-of-things-trashed/

Cubist Painting of Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger

Review of “Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection” at The Metropolitan Museum, October 20, 2014 – February 16, 2015

The Concupiscence of Cubism

Fernand Leger, "The Typographer"

As The New York Times announced last year in its review of this superlative exhibition, the Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Cubist Painting—recently donated to The Metropolitan Museum of Art—fills a conspicuous gap in the Met’s modern art collection, so much so that the museum has become a veritable rival to MoMA and the Guggenheim in the field of modern painting.  Aside from the long-term benefits of the gift is the short-term one of this encompassing yet muscularly compact show, one that helps us reconsider (yet ultimately reaffirm) the incomparable achievement of the inventors of the form:  Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger.  As their works again prove with undiminished bravura, these artists introduced some of the most radical yet enduring changes to the cultural conception of what art is and how it works.  Beyond illusionism and the representation of phenomenal reality, beyond structural abstraction and the liberation of color and line from objects in space, painting was now first and foremost a philosophic investigation of the relation between structure and appearance, form and perception.  The rigor of this investigation ensured the work’s integrity as it oscillated between representation and pure composition.  Art in the hands of the cubists had become both a metaphysical discipline and a poetics of the sign. 

            Strangely, while most reviewers are quick to celebrate the cubists’ creative destruction of illusionistic space and the shift toward pure abstraction—a development the movement certainly contributed to—its aesthetic essence remains this “reciprocity of directions” between apparent depth and literal surface, as Leo Steinberg once described it.[1]  In short, Cubism’s success still depends on an assumption of illusionism, albeit an illusionism that is ingeniously curtailed at virtually every turn, resulting in a “consistent self-contradiction,” as Ernest Gombrich famously declared.[2]    

Picasso, "Nude in Armchair"

            The first galleries of the exhibition recapitulate the achievements of Picasso and Braque.  But the collection suggests that each of these artists arrived at an almost identical species of Cubism by different paths, with Picasso concentrating on the human figure while Braque focused on landscape.  Inspired by tribal African and primeval Iberian sculpture, Picasso drastically distorts the human face and figure in many preliminary studies where he seems poised to make history with the shock of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).  Braque’s work is obviously inspired by the landscapes of Paul Cézanne and their subtle shifts of perspective, the push and pull of colored facets of paint against the literal surface of the canvas.  Trees at L’Estaque (1908), for instance, seems to uproot the foregrounded trees from a village landscape that envelopes them like a blanket despite its being illusionistically “behind” the trees.  But look again, Picasso’s bathers are no less Cézannesque in their effects and in the way the Spaniard almost brutally unrolls his figures to conform to the two-dimensionality of the picture plane (Nude in an Armchair, 1909).  Like Braque’s, Picasso’s landscapes also reveal how responsive he was to Cézanne's  analytic approach, as suggested by the one painted in Paris in 1908, or by The Old Mill, painted at Horta de Ebro in Spain in 1909. 

Braque's "Duo pour flute"

            Despite these early, if groping, experiments in different genres, Cubism, for most of us, only fully achieves its aim in the context of still-life, and both artists seem to have grasped this exemplarity right away.  Indeed, it is in the still-life genre that Picasso’s and Braque’s works become nearly indistinguishable, as if they had instinctively understood that the art form they were inventing had a particular essence from which neither could substantially deviate.  Unlike the painters, however, the curators of the exhibition seem keen to make distinctions between the oeuvres readily apparent, explaining, for instance, how Picasso’s paintings tend to cluster objects at the center of his canvases while Braque’s work has a kind Greenbergian “all-over” effect.  Even within the exhibition itself, viewers will find these rules of thumb contradicted at particular moments, causing the visitor to ask just how typical these individual tendencies might be.  Take, for example, Picasso’s Chess (1911) or Fruit Dish (1912):  in both pictures, the lines and diagonals seem fairly evenly dispersed throughout the picture plane, though we have been led to expect this trait in Braque’s work, not Picasso’s.  Even the typographic elements in the latter painting that refer to “Mazagran Armagnac Café” manage to break the boundaries of the frame, spreading its objects beyond the scope of the picture itself. At the same time, Braque’s paintings Violin and Sheet Music: “Petit Oiseau” (1913) and Still Life on Table: “Duo pour flute” (1913 -14) condense their objects at the center insofar as the artist has enveloped the composition in an empty, marginal boundary area between the subject and its frame.  So aside from learning how to distinguish a Picasso from a Braque, much of the real pleasure of any cubist exhibition is the surprise of not being able to—as if one had stumbled serendipitously upon the pictorial truth that both men were seeking. 

Braque's "Bottle, Glass and Pipe"

            Earlier, I talked about a persistent “curtailment” of illusionism.  One instance when this at first seems not to happen is in a collage by Braque called Bottle, Glass and Pipe (Violette de Parme) (1914).  In this work a pipe is one of the “real” objects that is completely illusionistically depicted.  Yet the depiction, obvious as it seems, quickly becomes ironic the moment one notices that it has been negatively accomplished, a shape cut out of a collaged piece of paper whilst some black paint or charcoal has been used to shade the surface that is revealed—in the gap of the cut-out—in order to give the negative shape a belied volume.  In this way, even when illusionism is palpably deployed, it is done in a way that suggests it somehow hasn’t happened.  Rather, its devices are laid bare and we see illusionism as the shallow trick it always was.  Yet it comes back again and again, insistently, if mostly in fragments or flat signs:  mustaches, bottlenecks, saucers, the rims of cups, journal headlines, which bring me to the question of the “reality” of signs, signs that require no illusionistic space—only a conceptual space, and that of any size.  In cubist paintings the flatness and conceptual completeness of a typed letter or word is not undermined whenever they happen to fall off the headline of an illusionistic journal.  Indeed, they seem to become themselves on the surface of the painting as they fall out of depicted space.   Objects, too, begin to do as much, like the mustache in Picasso’s Head of a Man With a Mustache (1913):  drawn in charcoal on a newspaper page and suspended like a swinging pick head at the bottom of the picture, the mustache becomes the sign of itself.  Ironically, this painting, graphically depicted on a full sheet of newspaper reverses the collage formula by suggesting that traditional art media have invaded newsprint itself rather than the other way around.  Once again, we discover a kind of reciprocity of directions between art and life, or art media and mass media.  Both represent a kind of opportunity for and threat against the integrity of the other.  

Picasso's "Head of a Man
With a Mustache"

            Picasso and Braque were clearly equal partners in exploring the ambiguous terrain between illusionism and literalism and their work consistently exhibits a high degree of analytic seriousness.  Despite their semi-collaborative discovery of collage and their cultivation of a whole repertoire of modern techniques to call attention to the medium, the sometimes monotonous, earth-toned colors of the works suggest that the investigatory aspect of their aesthetic was sapping the natural effusiveness of pure color from the medium of paint.  Though many of the works undermine this claim, it is the painter Juan Gris who deliberately chose to express his brand of Cubism with colorful exuberance while also demonstrating the consummate craftsmanship of his art with its hard-edge lines, visual punning, and sophisticated gamesmanship.  He isn’t searching for a new form or medium the way the other two were; he has already found it and he takes the legacy of his predecessors to new heights.  The exhibition makes much of the cunning playfulness of Gris’ work, the visual punning and dramatic suspense often integrated into his works (see the bull head in Still Life with Checked Table Cloth (1915) or Gris’ doubled figures on the tablecloth of Book and Glass (1914)).  Yet the ones that appeal most favorably in this show are Gris’s early, more homogeneous cubist works:  more graphic than painterly, more painterly than collagist, like his blue painting of the Place Ravignan in Montmartre, or the swirling, almost futuristic portrait of his mother.

Gris" "Fruit Bowl" to accompany
Reverdy's poem

            Other works that have special significance for me are Gris’ works on paper that were originally part of a collaborative project with the poet Pierre Reverdy.  Poet and painter fell out before the project could be realized, but Reverdy, well after Gris’s death in 1927, managed to complete the project with the publication of his book Au Soleil du plafond using color lithographs of Gris’ original works to accompany the poems.  Critics have made much of the fact that the poems Reverdy ultimately paired with Gris’s images express a similarly “cubist” poetic but do not express a direct, ekphrastic response to the paintings (or vice versa).  While evidence exists that the poems Reverdy originally wrote in the nineteen teens were directly responsive to Gris’s paintings, the poet seems to have revised his works in the interval, perhaps to reflect his contention that the two arts are autonomous and that, although they might parallel each other, neither should refer to each other in any way that suggests dependency or imitation.[3]  This sense of autonomy is clearly adhered to in the case of Gris’ Fruit Bowl (Compotier in French), originally completed between 1915-16, and the poem Reverdy later paired with it for publication in 1955.  Viewers who actually read the Reverdy poem that accompanies Gris’s exquisite gouache painting on paper will be flummoxed by the rigor of the works’ insistent autonomy.  Aside from the poem’s “arrangement of fruit,” which seems to refer to the fruit bowl in the painting, where on earth are the “bees”?, the “fingertips”?, the “drop of blood”?, or the conspicuous “bowlful of lips” at the end?  We might see Gris’ conspicuous use of stippling in the painting as a possible source for the bees, or even the drops of blood, but the sense of direct influence seems strained.  What does seem parallel is the sense of desire provoked by the appearance of the fruit in the poem, its voluptuous plenitude in the painting, and the latter's rich, illusionistic softness or succulence--the sexuality of human flesh.  Once again, we find a “reciprocity of directions” in cubist art, but this time it’s between poetry and painting, evoking the restless movement of human desire, as Steinberg’s argument insinuates.  In both the poem and the painting there is a sexual shifting, as it were, between illusionistic explicitness and semiotic connotation. 

Leger's "Drawing for 'The Staircase'"

            Finally, there is Léger.  There is so much one could say of Léger’s work, and yet one rarely does after saying all one can about Picasso, Braque, and Gris.  The beauty of this show is the opportunity it occasions for studying Léger’s early work, its strong ties to Cubism, and the unique qualities of Léger’s style—a style that would soon take hold of and exaggerate the geometric character of physical forms to create a provocative machinic art just shy of Dada’s absurdist parodies of production.  Though Léger’s images are still painted, they nevertheless imply a brave new world of crowded, automated bodies—an almost comic assemblage of cylinders, cones, and spheres in a societal factory of dumb functionality.  See, for instance, his monumental “Typographer” (1918), or the “Aviator” (1920).  These heroic automatons are the forerunners of our strutting businessmen, bursting with a kind of amoral efficiency, fueled and buoyed on the banality of their vision of progress.  Unlike the other cubists, Léger’s paintings often step out of the intimacy of the studio to capture, with a futuristic dynamism, the noise and flux of the town, as suggested by The Village (1914), or the reliable chugging of our commercial infrastructure, as in The Tugboat (1918).  But even in works with titles suggesting a more traditional subject matter, one detects a Duchampian evocation of machinic movement, as in Study for “Nude Model in the Studio” (1912) or Drawing for “The Staircase” (1913)—except that Léger’s staircase is bustling with pedestrians.  These last works remind us of ourselves, pouring in droves through the Metropolitan Museum galleries and down its monumental staircase, where we exit the palace of art onto the hideous, new, David Koch Plaza, feeling restored and nourished on the bread (or crumbs?) of culture and well-pleased with the benevolence of our decision-makers.  

---

[1] Leo Steinberg, “The Polemical Part” in Art in America (March/April, 1979): 121.

[2] E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1969: 281-282.

[3] See Rene de Costa’s “Juan Gris and Poetry: From Illustration to Creation” in Art in America 71.4 (December 1989): 679; and Andrew Rothwell’s “Cubism and the Avant-Garde Prose-Poem: Figural Space in Pierre Reverdy’s Au Soleil du plafond” in French Studies 42.3 (July 1988): 302.  

Jean Baudrillard on Architecture

My translation of Jean Baudrillard's Architecture: Truth or Radicalism? Semiotext(e): Los Angeles, 2014. One of the Semiotext(e) editions on display at the Whitney Biennial, 2014, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, March 7 - May 24, 2014. 

Excerpt:

Beaubourg.  What does Beaubourg mean?  Art?  Aesthetics?  Culture?  No:  It means circularity, storage, flux, whether of individuals, objects or signs.  And that is what the architecture of Beaubourg says all too well, literally:  it’s a cultural object, a cultural movement of the obscure disaster of culture.  What is fantastic about it, if also involuntary, is that it brings out both culture and the thing to which it succumbs more and more, the thing to which it has already succumbed—the perfusion, surfusion, and confusion of all signs.  So too with the World Trade Center, the miracle of which is to give us, simultaneously, a fantastic spectacle of the city and its verticality and a flagrant symbol of that to which the city has succumbed, of that to which it has died as a historic form.  It’s precisely this that gives such architecture its power:  it is both a form of extreme anticipation and of retrospective nostalgia for a lost object. 

                  Here are just a few fragments of the primal scene of architecture as seen through the imagination of a savage.  You can interpret them both literally and in all senses, as Rimbaud said.  One of the possible senses being that there still exists, beyond all illusion or disillusion, a future for architecture—something I still believe in—even if this future isn’t exactly architectural.   There is a future for architecture for the simple reason that no one has yet invented the building, the architectural object, that will put an end to all others, that will put an end to space itself—neither the city that will be the end of all cities, nor the thought that will be the end of all thoughts, even if that’s everyone’s ultimate dream.  Though it can't be realized, there is still the hope. 

Translated by D. L. Sweet

Henri Michaux: "Seize the Landscape"

Surrealist poet Henri Michaux

My translation of “Empoigner le paysage” from Henri Michaux's Au Pays de la magie.  The French title of this untitled passage was taken from the description of it used in the "Table des matieres" of the French edition of Ailleurs.  I quote the prose poem in my upcoming book Alternative Futures: Avant-garde Travels in the Orient. 

SEIZE THE LANDSCAPE

They say that in most people who watch a landscape a capsule is formed.  This capsule is not as small as one thinks. 

            This capsule is the medium between the landscape and the observer.  If the observer were able to uproot this capsule and carry it off, he would be incommensurably happy, he would capture paradise on earth.

            But an extreme delicacy is required, a prodigious force and knowledge of what one is doing.  It’s like pulling up a tree in one yank with all its roots intact.  The little smart alecks who are using, just about everywhere, their mnemonic techniques, graphic representations, comparisons, analyses, and brutalities on the observed material, not only don’t know what I’m talking about, but they absolutely cannot recognize the marvelous and almost infantine simplicity of this operation that brings you, quite simply, to the threshold of ecstasy.

Translated by D. L. Sweet

EMPOIGNER LE PAYSAGE

Il se forme, disent-ils, en la plupart des gens qui regardent un paysage, une capsule.  Cette capsule n’est pas si petite qu’on croit. 

            Cette capsule est le medium entre le paysage et le contempleur.  Si le contempleur pouvait arracher cette capsule et l’emporter, il serait heureux incommensurablement, il conquerrait le paradis sur terre.

            Mais il y faut un delicatesse extreme, une force prodigieuse et savoir ce qu’on fait.  C’est comme arracher d’un coup un arbre avec toutes ces racines.  Les petits malins que usent un peu partout de moyens mnémotechniques, de representations graphiques, de comparaisons, d’analyses et de brutalités sur la matière observée, non seulement ne savent pas de quoi je viens de parler, mais ils ne peuvent absolument se rendre compte de la simplicité merveilleuse et presque enfantine de cette operation qui vous mène simplement au seuil de l’extase.

American Voices: T. S. Eliot

A Close Reading of Some Verses from The Waste Land [for my students]

ALLUSIONS, QUOTATIONS, FOOTNOTES, TRANSLATIONS

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two
lives, / Old man with wrinkled female breasts ...

DA

Dayadhavam:  I have heard the key[1]

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus[2]                            (ll. 410-416)

Simply by having read up to line 410 in the fifth and final section (“What the Thunder Said”) of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land will have the effect of instructing readers about the importance of reading footnotes, whether the ones supplied by Eliot himself or the those provided by Frank Kermode, who edited the Penguin edition of The Waste Land and Other Poems that is being used for this essay.  The Penguin notes—two of which I’ve reproduced here as footnotes for readers’ convenience—provide invaluable information for explaining the passage quoted above. 

For instructional purposes, let’s proceed as if we were reading the poem without notes—at least at first.  The first words one sees are foreign, hence meaningless to the average English reader:  “DA/ Dayadhvam.”  Clearly, there is nothing to be said about them without reference to more notes, which appear earlier in the text but which we’ll get to later.  On a hunch, however, this writer is guessing the words are Indic, probably Sanskrit, the study of which, as any student of Western languages knows, was crucial for the discovery of what linguists call the Indo-European family of languages, indicating an interesting pre-historic linguistic connection between some otherwise very distant peoples living at almost opposite ends of the Eurasian land mass.  

            By contrast with the first words in the passage (DA, Dayadhvam), the rest of the verse is in English, hence perfectly comprehensible:  The speaker in the poem, referring to him or herself as “I,” has heard a key turn in the door, but it turns once only.  The key could be opening or locking the door, one cannot tell, but the words (“turn once only”) sound ominous.  This ominousness is confirmed in the following lines in which the speaker shifts into first person plural (“We”), hence, presumably speaking for a group or even all of us (i.e., we readers).  The lines become both more concrete (by referring to a prison) while also becoming more speculative (by suggesting that each one of “us” inhabits a kind of prison).  The idea that we all inhabit our own sort of prison cell is reinforced by the reference to “nightfall,” yet also thrown into doubt by the mention of “aethereal rumors” that “Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus.”  It doesn’t sound hopeful—rumors reviving a “broken” person for just a moment, thus implying false hope.  Most educated readers will recognize the fact that Coriolanus is the title of a play by Shakespeare, though many would, if pressed, have to admit they have never read it.  Either way, one can probably guess that Coriolanus is a tragic figure, certainly not comic, given his brokenness and his momentary, hence false hope.  In short, the passage is suggesting that the speaker has been locked away in isolation, a sort of broken Coriolanus with only false glimmers of hope. 

            Now let’s turn to the notes.  Eliot himself gives his readers the source for line 411:  some lines—in Italian—from Dante’s Inferno.  If we then consult the Penguin notes by Kermode, we are given a translation of the reference:  “and from below I heard the door of the horrible tower being locked.”  The editor then informs readers that the lines refer to a character named Ugolino in one of the lower pits of Hell who, in life, was locked in a tower with his sons by his enemies and starved to death, though in the process of dying he also ate the bodies of his sons to delay his end.  Yuck!  (Incidentally, there's a huge Beaux Arts statue of him in one of the sculpture galleries at the Met.)  We don’t learn here why he was put in Hell (the Inferno), but cannibalism seems a pretty terrible thing, perhaps worthy of eternal damnation (if one believes in that sort of thing).  In the rest of the note, the editor reminds us that Eliot also refers (in his notes on these same lines) to the philosophy of F. H. Bradley, about whom the poet wrote a dissertation while enrolled at Harvard University.  Eliot’s own note concludes by quoting Bradley himself, a quote that ends with the statement:  “the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.”  Indeed, our Penguin notes link Bradley’s philosophy with Eliot’s image in a way that indicates “suffering isolation.” 

            “Suffering isolation”:  now we’re onto something.  Each one of us is locked up in his or her own mental prison, perhaps even living on scraps (or ideas) that some of us would hurl away in horror if we knew what they actually consisted of or implied.  The final reference to Coriolanus confirms this by mentioning that the hero of Shakespeare’s play was “broken and exiled through his own pride and unwillingness to ingratiate himself with the mob; he revived—for a moment—when given the chance to fight against Rome, his own country.”  The note suggests another kind of tragic cannibalism, this time in the form of rebellion against one’s own country or people.  Now we understand the fragment that reads “each confirms a prison/ Only at nightfall,” suggesting that it takes a great loss or tragedy (a kind of “nightfall”), perhaps even a war, to remind us that we are each living, suffering, in isolation and that such consolatory notions as “family,” “country,” “community,” or even the possibility of communication, are illusory:  appearances that make us feel safe, secure, free and loved.  Such things are at best “aethereal rumors,” transitory, lightweight things that are not to be taken seriously and which might even harm us by encouraging false hopes. 

            Okay—now let’s try to tackle the words in Sanskrit.  Again the notes will help to explain Eliot’s purpose and methods as a poet.  The words “DA” and “Dayadhvam” refer back to the title of the fifth and final section of The Waste Land: “What the Thunder Said.”  Eliot is referring to one of the Upanishads, a series of sacred texts that form part of the huge corpus of Sanskrit books in Indian culture and religion—the adherents of which are the same people to whom Western Europeans are linguistically connected.  In the episode Eliot is alluding to, various gods, demons, and men ask their Creator to speak to them, to which He responds with the same answer in the voice of thunder:  “DA.”  Each group interprets the word/sound in its own way, yielding the three words “Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata.”  Eliot himself translates these as give, sympathize, and control (the latter perhaps more in the sense of “self-control”).  Now we realize that the story of Ugolino is being associated with the word dayadhvam, “to sympathize.”  Though we might think “self-control” would be more suited as a recommendation for Ugolino, not only are we being asked to “sympathize” with someone like this tragic hero (whose damnation doesn’t minimize the injustice of his horrible death), but also with someone like Coriolanus.  Both of these heroes are proud, misunderstood figures—at least they are depicted that way by Dante and Shakespeare.  Furthermore, the word “sympathize” (dayadhvam) implies that there is some primal cultural importance to sympathizing in general, i.e., with all others—even across borders—by breaking the self-imposed prisons of, say, delusion, pride or other forms of mental isolation.  We start to see connections with other passages in “What the Thunder Said,” passages introduced by the two leftover Sanskrit words, words that now seem both foundational in terms of understanding how languages evolve, but also in terms of a wider, human ethos of mutual understanding and self-restraint.  

            Are there other passages that hearken back to or foreshadow the horror of Ugolino’s predicament, or at least that of the speaker, whose situation is being compared to Ugolino’s?  One that immediately comes to mind is the first epigraph to Eliot’s entire poem, a quotation in Latin (with a little Greek thrown in) from Petronius’s Satyricon, according to the Penguin edition.  Kermode translates the epigraph for the reader (unlike Eliot himself who prefers to leave his modern readers in the dark and thus compels them to confront the foreignness of foreign languages).  The epigraph, of course, describes how some boys in ancient or mythic times used to rattle on the cage of the famous Cumaean Sybil and ask her what she wanted, to which she replied that she wanted to die.  As many of us already know, the Cumaean Sybil was granted everlasting life by the god Apollo, but not eternal youth and beauty, basically because she forgot to ask for it.  Now she’s a withered shadow of herself, a prune.  In short, she’s a prisoner of her own poor communication skills, and even the epigraph seems to point this out since, in the poem, not only is her own Greek not translated into Latin, it’s not even transliterated from the Greek alphabet (though again, the Penguin editor does it for us in his notes; if he hadn’t, most of us might still not know that she wants to die). 

            Miscommunication is certainly one of the things that greatly impede sympathy and understanding, but actual language barriers can be even worse in this regard since people can’t begin to understand each other if they don’t have at least some sort of linguistic conventions in common.  Just as other generations of people might once have asked why different people couldn’t all speak the same language to avoid misunderstandings and conflicts, so might we, as readers of Eliot, ask why the poet didn’t write his entire poem in a single language, preferably English, for those of us who are comfortable speaking it.  Just as the poem seems to be a bunch of fragmented images that the readers somehow have to reconnect with each other (perhaps on the basis of myths or tradition—things supposedly shattered by modern experience), so is the poem also linguistically broken up—a series of quotes from foreign-language texts as well as fragments translated into English, perhaps inaccurately or even distortedly.  Hence it’s also a literary text that requires supplementary reading, research, translation, and interpretation in order just to BEGIN to understand it.  Eliot certainly could have translated all the foreign language passages himself, and indeed he actually did in many instances.  But the point of all this difficulty seems to be that if people read the poem only in translation, they will have little conception of the real difficulty of understanding foreign languages and the foreignness of foreign texts, not to mention the difficulty of understanding other people (sometimes) in one’s own language.  
            Aside from the fractured images, such pampered readers would miss a whole other level of meaning—the problem of living in a world of multiple, competing languages and literary cultures.  In short, translating the whole poem into English would make it too easy, would isolate English language readers in their Englishness, though the Penguin editor, Kermode, goes as far as possible to do just that: i.e., to make it easy!  Nonetheless, the consequence of making things too easy (just like making things too hard) is miscommunication, and the consequence of miscommunication can be terrible, so translation and meticulous citation, like Goldilocks’ particular choice of porridge (just right), seem viable, practical solutions to extremes and to overcoming fears of otherness (though Eliot himself seems vulnerable to such fears when he writes of “hooded hordes swarming/ Over endless plains” (ll. 369-370)).  Much as Eliot’s narrator says that, at the end of the poem, “These fragments [he has] shored against [his] ruins,” so might Kermode be saying, “These footnotes and translations I have shored against Eliot’s readers’ incomprehension.”  The favor is appreciated.

            But are Kermode’s concerns the same as Eliot’s?  Though Eliot did, himself, provide various notes as well, they are sometimes ironic and misleading, as if he were getting revenge against the publishers who bullied him into adding them to later editions of his great poem (or against Ezra Pound, the poet who cut all of the original “explanatory” passages from the original poem).  On the other hand, translation itself becomes an issue in the ultimate lines of the poem that follow the allusions to Ugolino and Coriolanus.  As if he wanted to accelerate his poetics of fragmentation (even if some credit for this must also go to Pound, whom Eliot called “il miglior fabbro” [see notes]), Eliot’s last lines are even more fragmented than what has preceded.  The result is the following: 

                                                I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling

            down

Poi s’ascose ne foco che gli affina

Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you.  Hieronymo’s mad againe. 

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

            Shantih shantih shantih                                   (ll. 423-433)

It’s quite a jumble:  four languages altogether, and some of the English spellings are not standardized, suggesting an older literary epoch.  I won’t explain all of the fragments, though there is obviously some more Dante in Italian, some French (from Gérard de Nerval describing a disinherited hero and a ruined tower), as well as more Sanskrit at the end.  The famous “fragments … ruins” line is, of course, vital for interpreting the poem as a whole, according to many critics.
            But what is one to make of “Why then Ile fit you.  Hieronymo’s mad againe”?  The fact that the line is in the English reader’s own language doesn’t seem to help us much.  Though I remember that the line is from The Spanish Tragedy, a pre-Shakespearean play by Thomas Kyd, I don’t remember the plot, except that it was a revenge play.  As the editors’ notes happily inform us, the subtitle of that play is “Hieronymo’s mad againe,” referring to the revenge-getting protagonist of the play (we have to wonder if the play wasn’t a sequel to some other play about Hieronymo’s first bout of madness).  What is interesting for our purposes, however, is the fact that “Why then, Ile fit you” is spoken by Hieronymo when, as Kermode againe tells us, he is “given the opportunity offered by an invitation to stage a court entertainment,” an opportunity that will allow him to get revenge for the death of his son.  “Why then, Ile fit you” is what he says when those supposedly guilty of his son’s murder request that the “entertainment” (or play), originally written in Latin, Greek, Italian and French, “be set down in English, more largely, for the easier understanding to every public reader” (IV, iv, 18-19).  “Ile fit you,” indicates that Hieronymo is willing to do so, i.e., willing to translate the different parts into English.  However, it also means, “I’ll give you your due.”  In other words—as Shakespeare wrote in another play—“the play’s the thing wherein we’ll catch […] the king…” and thus give the guilty their due by making it possible for one who is wronged to get revenge.  
            Perhaps if those characters listening to Hieronymo’s words had understood this alternative meaning, they would not have stayed to watch the play they so eagerly desired to understand in their own language.  Maybe the advantage, then, of knowing other languages, or at least attempting to understand them, is the avoidance of “ruin” (WWI had been concluded a few years before), or at least the avoidance of Eliot’s personal ruin (Eliot’s “I can connect nothing with nothing” as against E. M. Forster’s “only connect”), and the possibility of peace:  “Shantih shantih shantih.” 

            In short, the poem does (in language) what it’s about—enacts the sometimes tragic discontinuities of the modern world, some proofs of which were World War I and its aftermath.  Eliot—as a sort of disinherited, expatriate American living in London and working in a small office in the basement of Lloyd’s Bank for up to fifteen hours a day before returning every evening to his mentally-disturbed wife—understood too keenly the madness of modern experience and the need to re-establish connections between its broken parts and its over-specialized disciplines (this is one of Habermas’s arguments for Communication Theory).  Though the solutions Eliot would later enunciate—Anglo-Catholicism, Classicism, and Royalism—seem rather pointless, anachronistic responses to modern problems, we don’t doubt that Eliot’s original, literary diagnosis was largely correct, given subsequent twentieth-century developments. 

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[1] [note 13 in Penguin edition] the key: Eliot refers to Dante, Inferno, XXXIII.46: “ed io sentii chiavar l’uscio di sotto/ all’orribile torre” (“and from below I heard the door of the horrible tower being locked”).  The words are spoken by Ugolino, who devoured his children when starving in captivity.  The key of the tower was thrown into the river.  Eliot adds to this image of suffering isolation a quotation from the work of a philosopher he had intensively studied as a Ph.D. student, F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893), p. 346.  Eliot’s note offers an important clue to what he is doing in such poems as “Gerontion” and The Waste Land. 

[2] [note 14 in Penguin edition] Coriolanus: Eliot greatly admired Shakespeare’s play of this title (ca. 1608) and later wrote the unfinished poem “Coriolan” (the title of Beethoven’s overture), first published in 1936.  Coriolanus was broken and exiled through his own pride and unwillingness to ingratiate himself with the mob; he revived—for a moment—when given the chance to fight against Rome, his own country.