Leftovers...

This is something I started to write for the blog last year, and abandoned. Perhaps rightly.

...

I’ve been trying to snatch moments between coaxing the thesis along and working on the journal to read up more on Cezanne. Our deadline for submissions for the next issue having just passed, bringing with it a rush of tasks, this hasn’t been easy, especially when combined with making urgent decisions about moving or not moving house. I have at least worked out what I want to read when I can, though. More so than Courtauld’s (see blog entries below) the true modernist encounter with Cezanne (leaving aside actual painters, of course) was perhaps that of Rilke. As for Courtauld (and for me, nel mio piccolo), Cezanne’s art seems to have revealed itself to Rilke in a kind of epiphany, only after he had already been grappling with it for some time. When that moment came, Rilke believed himself able at last to see Cezanne's paintings because, as he put it, “I had just reached it [the turning point] in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, after having been ready for a long time, for the one thing which so much depends upon”. For Rilke, Cezanne was starting afresh from the bottom up, clearing away the sentimental stylisations of the visible that clogged so much contemporary art. There is an interesting, more detailed discussion of Rilke’s engagement with Cezanne by Michael Heller, here.

Cezanne's favourite poem was Baudelaire's ‘La charogne’ (‘Carrion’), where dead flesh is made beautiful. Rilke dwells on this in one of his letters.

Here are the first three stanzas of Baudelaire’s poem:

Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
Ce beau matin d'été si doux:
Au détour d'un sentier une charogne infâme
Sur un lit semé de cailloux,

Les jambes en l'air, comme une femme lubrique,
Brûlante et suant les poisons,
Ouvrait d'une façon nonchalante et cynique
Son ventre plein d'exhalaisons.

Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,
Comme afin de la cuire à point,
Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature
Tout ce qu'ensemble elle avait joint

And here’s Roy Campbell’s translation of those stanzas:

The object that we saw, let us recall,
This summer morn when warmth and beauty mingle —
At the path's turn, a carcase lay asprawl
Upon a bed of shingle.

Legs raised, like some old whore far-gone in passion,
The burning, deadly, poison-sweating mass
Opened its paunch in careless, cynic fashion,
Ballooned with evil gas.

On this putrescence the sun blazed in gold,
Cooking it to a turn with eager care —
So to repay to Nature, hundredfold,
What she had mingled there.

There have been at least four translations into English of this poem (you can see them here) and

probably many more. Of the four I looked at, Roy Campbell’s was the only one I could go for once I got to line five. The other translations of “Les jambes en l'air, comme une femme lubrique” are “Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman” (William Aggeler); “Its legs raised like a whore's in lubric play” (Jacques LeClercq); and “Legs in the air, like a lascivious woman” (Geoffrey Wagner). The first is hopelessly colourless, and the third is similarly anaemic and lacking in any emulation of the rhythmic thrust of the original. The second is better. Does ‘lubric’ sound overly medical-scientific? Would ‘lubricious’ be better, and has he gone for lubric to keep meter? Reading it again, perhaps I’m being unfair – maybe ‘lubric’ works well precisely because of the coupling of its vicinity to ‘ludic’ with its coldblooded gynaecological feel. But what I really like about Campbell’s, and what the others throw into relief, is how the very fall of the line contains and communicates an excess of wearied comprehension that cannot overwrite physical shock. This is prosody as cognition: the shorter, obscenely jutting phrase before the comma, then the drawn-out, far-gone after, stretching the line out to a hendecasyllable. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

I know how hard this is to get right – I had to go back and look at my own translation of Elsa Morante’s poetry the other day, and it is painfully poor, full of moments as bad as any of these, and others far worse: I really repent of having let myself be persuaded into going ahead with publishing it before I was happy with it, or even properly knew why we were doing so. That said, the decision was entirely my own – I don’t want to give the impression I was bounced into anything. But even back then, though I knew it wasn’t ready, I wasn’t aware of how clunking it was: and on the other hand it’s probably true that I might never have let it be published at all if not then. And different kinds of translation serve different purposes: I suppose the LeClercq translation of ‘La charogne’ might perhaps be best for someone such as myself, with extremely dubious French, trying to grapple with the original. But as a poem in English that also gives you something of an idea of how the French might be, the Campbell stands out. It’s the only one that sounds remotely English. The Morante translation I think now, is not really a translation at all; at best it’s a useful crib for the reader with shaky Italian.

L'Etang des Soeurs Osny

Visiting the Coutauld Gallery over the weekend (a couple of weekends ago now - this should have gone up before) I 'got' Cezanne, or felt like I did, for the first time. Cezanne, for me, has always had an aura about him as the philosopher's artist (specifically, Merleau-Ponty's). As a philosophy undergraduate who knew only this, but couldn't get any visceral purchase on his work, even after reading Merleau-Ponty's essay 'Cezanne's Doubt', I always felt intimidated by it, and this probably obscured it from me even further. The short, grouped, sloping brush strokes in a lot of the paintings didn't cohere, yet at the same time were too solid, not gesticulatory enough to leave the eye free to impart movement to the images, as paintings by other impressionists and post-impressionists did. I was so frustrated by my sense of wholly missing something, and something important, that I nearly chose to write my undergraduate thesis on M-P and Cezanne, in order to get at what it was I wasn't getting. Walking into the second room of the Courtauld, though, not yet really properly tuned in to looking at pictures, this one grabbed hold of me before I'd had a chance to think about it.

The painting shows a view of a footpath running along the banks of a wooded pond, and was painted while Cezanne was visiting Pissarro in Osny. This reproduction inevitably doesn't do the painting justice, but what is especially muddied is the deep glittering clarity of the water, and the weight of the shadows in the foreground, which give the painting much more of a layered property than is clear here. The depth - as I wandered into the room, I dropped into the painting's planes, and didn't want to clamber out. Now I shall have to go back and read Merleau-Ponty again. I know that probably nothing I've written here suggests that I've 'got' Cezanne at all: it would be better to say that a Cezanne got me.

The Courtauld is my favourite gallery in London, despite its being next door to King's. Samuel Courtauld played a vital role in the reception of Cezanne in Britain. Cezanne was controversial in England in the 1920s. In May 1922 the Burlington Fine Arts Club mounted an exhibition, 'The French School of the Last Hundred Years', which brought about a significant change in attitudes towards the post-impressionists, and Cezanne in particular. It was here, apparently, that Courtauld was 'converted' to Cezanne's art, describing how 'at that moment I felt the magic, and I have felt it in Cezanne's work ever since'. It was uncanny reading of Courtauld's conversion just after experiencing my own. Another modernist encounter (Courtauld's, not mine), perhaps not quite up there with Eliot's poking at people with his umbrella during the premier of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, but still telling.

Much much more to be said on this, and much better, but as ever, the thesis calls.