essay
fleeting, trembling
and clear light:
Philippe Jaccottet centenary
Tess Lewis
Few poets are as attuned to light as Philippe Jaccottet. His Seedtime journals, like his poetry, are an extended celebration of light in its many shades, hues, tones and variability. The light he dwells on and describes in these journals is protean: it is intimate, weak, glaring, cool, searing, bruised, muddled, radiant, spectral, warm and raw, tempered by leaves, glittering, dazzling, gentle, brittle, limpid, clouded, serene, clear and cold, fossilized, fleeting, milky, vibrant, hard, hazy, intense, solemn, familiar or strange, trembling, dusty, resplendent and more. It is golden, pink, blue, white, gray, rusty, blue, silver, yellowish green and ashen. It is molded into clouds, it is a shaft, it is suspended like drops from heaven. It is a veil lifting, it is water.
Yet Jaccottet was also intimately acquainted with darkness. In fact, darkness—from faint shadows to complete obscurity—was essential to his poetry. While translating the first volume of the Semaison, I was intrigued by an entry dated March, 1966 which mentions a narrative he wrote in his mid-thirties.
After I spoke to V. about my dream of harmonizing the best and the worst in a poem, the subtle Professor B. told me he believes such dreams impossible today. He prefers my narrative “Obscurity” to my poems. Yet more and more often, I hear the lies of speech, which paralyze me. I wish misery would expose them. This is just a wish. I am neither uncouth nor simple.
The novella Obscurity, written in 1960 at a time of poetic crisis, embodies that poetic effort to harmonize the best and the worst in the form of two men who meet again after several years’ separation. The ‘worst’ is despair, falsehood, accidie, and lethargy of spirit. The ‘best’ is hope, the ability to remain open to beauty and truth in the world and not abandon faith in the essential goodness of man despite evidence to the contrary. The novel’s overt action is minimal. A young man returns to his native city after several years abroad in search of a man he calls his master. He had been a disciple of this brilliant philosopher until the master insisted the young go out into the world to put his teachings into practice. While he was gone, the master abandoned his wife and child and moved into a squalid one room flat, cut off from his former life. The disciple tracks him down and spends an entire night listening to his former master’s bitter denunciation of the ideals they had shared. The second part of the book is the young man’s attempt to make sense of his master’s ‘philosophical suicide’.
This can be read a dramatization of Jaccottet’s dark night of the soul. Two sides of his creative self confront each other in darkness—the skeptical but hopeful self who can still believe in the goodness of man and the despairing self, embittered by the extent of suffering in the world and the finality of death. The young man emerges from this ordeal, spiritually battered but whole. An author’s note dated June 1961 in a second edition of La Promenade reveals the autobiographical basis for the novel. Jaccottet wrote that he had suffered a “crisis of opacity” in the late 1950s during which he was unable to write poems. He turned to prose in “sad contemplation of the deepening obscurity that would perhaps end up erasing all traces; realizing for the first time that once can lose oneself definitively.” This intellectual drama offered him a way out of his despair. A notation from his first Semaison, dated April 1960—the very time he was writing Obscurity—captures the conflicting intellectual and emotional forces that drive the narrative: “Speak of a waning power, follow vanished poetry. Fidelity and defiance.” Through fidelity to his poetic vision and defiance of doubt, Jaccottet achieved in this novel an uneasy harmony that so often eludes him. Significantly, the first volume of poetry that followed Obscurity, a luminous collection entitled Airs, is filled with light and air.
Four decades later, light and air along with the hope and continuity they symbolized for this poet of physical and spiritual luminescence endure. The final entry in Semaison III, from September 1998, is a condensation of light, color, warmth and rigorous hope.
All the pinks, all the roses of winter, clouds, foliage and smoke, blooming in the cold as the sun prepares to sink beneath the horizon. Burning relays handed on. A scepter passed from hand to hand, furtively, perhaps just a baton enflamed by the pink of evening.
Do not let go of it too soon.
Yet Jaccottet was also intimately acquainted with darkness. In fact, darkness—from faint shadows to complete obscurity—was essential to his poetry. While translating the first volume of the Semaison, I was intrigued by an entry dated March, 1966 which mentions a narrative he wrote in his mid-thirties.
After I spoke to V. about my dream of harmonizing the best and the worst in a poem, the subtle Professor B. told me he believes such dreams impossible today. He prefers my narrative “Obscurity” to my poems. Yet more and more often, I hear the lies of speech, which paralyze me. I wish misery would expose them. This is just a wish. I am neither uncouth nor simple.
The novella Obscurity, written in 1960 at a time of poetic crisis, embodies that poetic effort to harmonize the best and the worst in the form of two men who meet again after several years’ separation. The ‘worst’ is despair, falsehood, accidie, and lethargy of spirit. The ‘best’ is hope, the ability to remain open to beauty and truth in the world and not abandon faith in the essential goodness of man despite evidence to the contrary. The novel’s overt action is minimal. A young man returns to his native city after several years abroad in search of a man he calls his master. He had been a disciple of this brilliant philosopher until the master insisted the young go out into the world to put his teachings into practice. While he was gone, the master abandoned his wife and child and moved into a squalid one room flat, cut off from his former life. The disciple tracks him down and spends an entire night listening to his former master’s bitter denunciation of the ideals they had shared. The second part of the book is the young man’s attempt to make sense of his master’s ‘philosophical suicide’.
This can be read a dramatization of Jaccottet’s dark night of the soul. Two sides of his creative self confront each other in darkness—the skeptical but hopeful self who can still believe in the goodness of man and the despairing self, embittered by the extent of suffering in the world and the finality of death. The young man emerges from this ordeal, spiritually battered but whole. An author’s note dated June 1961 in a second edition of La Promenade reveals the autobiographical basis for the novel. Jaccottet wrote that he had suffered a “crisis of opacity” in the late 1950s during which he was unable to write poems. He turned to prose in “sad contemplation of the deepening obscurity that would perhaps end up erasing all traces; realizing for the first time that once can lose oneself definitively.” This intellectual drama offered him a way out of his despair. A notation from his first Semaison, dated April 1960—the very time he was writing Obscurity—captures the conflicting intellectual and emotional forces that drive the narrative: “Speak of a waning power, follow vanished poetry. Fidelity and defiance.” Through fidelity to his poetic vision and defiance of doubt, Jaccottet achieved in this novel an uneasy harmony that so often eludes him. Significantly, the first volume of poetry that followed Obscurity, a luminous collection entitled Airs, is filled with light and air.
Four decades later, light and air along with the hope and continuity they symbolized for this poet of physical and spiritual luminescence endure. The final entry in Semaison III, from September 1998, is a condensation of light, color, warmth and rigorous hope.
All the pinks, all the roses of winter, clouds, foliage and smoke, blooming in the cold as the sun prepares to sink beneath the horizon. Burning relays handed on. A scepter passed from hand to hand, furtively, perhaps just a baton enflamed by the pink of evening.
Do not let go of it too soon.
Читать перевод на русский язык – «Ускользающий, дрожащий и чистый свет: к столетию Филиппа Жакоте»
