French Poetry As Antidote

In my other life, I was a French literature major and read stacks and stacks of novels and essays over those four years, most of which I disliked intensely probably because it was so very difficile.  Don't ask me to say anything in French except perhaps for La Marseillaise (the French National Anthem) which I strangely committed to memory back in the seventh grade.  Le jour de gloire est arrivée. Obviously, the later laboring over tenses and conjugations and idiomatic expressions and the history of French linguistics for four years prepared me for a life of great financial success and acclaim, and even though I can't carry on a conversation in French, I can read the poetry with relative ease and even remember some of my favorites.  It's been an odd day today, so why not think about my skill and love of French poetry? With the possible exception of Jack Gilbert and William Carlos Williams (Asphodel, That Greeny Flower), there are few English-speaking poets who can rival the French in expressions of love as far as I'm concerned. Here's what I mean:

Les roses de Saadi

J'ai voulu ce matin te rapporter des roses;
Mais j'en avais tant pris dans mes ceintures closes
Que les noeuds trop serrés n'ont pu les contenir.

Les noeuds ont éclaté. Les roses envolées
Dans le vent, à la mer s'en sont toutes allées.
Elles ont suivi l'eau pour ne plus revenir;

La vague en a paru rouge et comme enflammée.
Ce soir, ma robe encoure en est toute embaumée...
Respires-en sur moi l'odorant souvenir.


The Roses of Saadi

I wanted to bring you roses this morning.
There were so many I wanted to bring,
The knots at my waist could not hold so many.

The knots burst. All the roses took wing.
The air was filled with roses flying,
Carried by the wind, into the sea.

The waves are red, as though they are burning.
My dress still has the scent of the morning.
Remembering roses. Smell them on me.

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
1786-1859

Old Books, Old Memories, Fresh Paint

Haysoos, Maria and Josef!

I'm having the old homestead painted for the first time since we moved in nearly fourteen years ago. Those are only some of the books that I had to pull down from only some of the shelves. Oliver told me that I had too many, and Henry reached up for the ones on the tallest shelves and wondered if I'd read any of them lately. Probably not, I told him. But they are who I am. I could give a flying foo-foo about that Mondo Londo woman who tells you to get rid of everything unless you can say that it brings you joy. The little French paperbacks of Balzac and Sartre and Rimbaud brought me nothing but agita when I read them thirty years ago, but when I run my fingers down the yellow pages and bury my nose, I remember Dey Hall and how hot it was in the fall without air-conditioning, how insane Dr. Daniel, with his American South French accent, pounded on the table and shouted OUI, OUI, OUI, HELL OUI! if we answered a question correctly, and how hard Sarah and I laughed when we quizzed one another on idiomatic expressions -- all 350 of them -- useless then and now. Il n'y a pas un chat dans la rue! we'd repeat, over and over, downing our Tabs and Mello Yellos, Sarah's curls riotous and as disheveled as her backpack whose contents slipped out and left a trail wherever she walked. I read La Nausee while swinging on a hammock on the rickety porch of a house we called The Shanty where I lived with my friends Missy, Hilary and Julia during my junior year. I felt literally nauseous while I read, the first time the body met the mind and one recognized the other and the exhilarating freedom of being alive. I'd meet my boyfriend Luke under the trees whose arching boughs had convinced me to give up my spot at the University of Virginia -- I loved the UNC campus, not the UVA grounds, loved the brick of Dey Hall, not the formal colonial architecture of Jefferson -- and we'd lie there on the grass in the quad, reading Auden and Williams and Yeats, Li Po and Tu Fu. They are who I am.

Cast my memory back there Lord, sometimes I'm overcome.

Flaubert, violent and original

Not dreaming of Flaubert, 1985

I read him in college -- in French -- as part of my notorious double major in English and French literature. I can't say I cared much for him then, but I recently finished the Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary, and had a sort of delayed reaction. I was, in short, blown away.  I don't feel like being a literary critic here, though. I'm going to face it and state that literary criticism is beyond me. I was in a book group once in New York City with five other people, all men. We were always reading books like Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and di Lampedusa's The Leopard. Aside from that scene in Pynchon with urine and a glass-topped coffee table, I don't remember much about those books or even what those men had to say about them. I remember thinking meekly at the time that the point of reading was to sustain oneself, and listening to these men, all brilliant, expound -- well -- I wanted to scream, DID YOU LIKE IT OR NOT? 

So, I liked the Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary, and that might have to do with the fact that I really, really like Lydia Davis' short stories and was aware of them and her unique style even while reading a nineteenth century French classic, or it might have to do with the fact that I was reading it in English as opposed to French (so very, very difficult) or it might have to do with the fact that I'm much, much older and can better appreciate what the hell the story is about.

Or I can just say, I LIKE IT!

It was Gustave's birthday yesterday, and I read a couple of quotes attributed to him that I loved. Here they are:

Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.

and this one:

To be stupid, selfish and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

French intellectuals, lesbians, red vines and me

So, I don't think I'm ready for a lesbian relationship, yet, but the movie was pretty decent for a French intellectual one. Just in case you've forgotten, I was a French major in college and while I found myself ever deeper into the commitment of it -- advanced linguistics! idiomatic expressions! medieval poetry! the existentialists! Pascal! Baudelaire! -- I was unable to extricate myself even as I found all the reading and the writing miserable. French literature never did get me, or pull me in or dig down deep into my soul, with the possible exception of Sartre's Nausee that I read while swinging in a hammock on the front porch of the shack I lived in at the time in North Carolina. That book actually made me feel nauseous which I guess is as good a reaction as any to a piece of literature. As for French movies, with the possible exception of Jules et Jim and those Manon des Sources ones, as well as an early infatuation with Gerard Depardieu (who's gone utterly bonkers, evidently, but when he was young -- oh, when he was young!), I'm hard put to remember a single one that didn't make me squirm uncomfortably. Maybe it's the peasant Italian in me or something, but the intellectual pretensions of the French irritate the hell out of me, and and even sexual couplings, in French, leave me cold because they seem so conscious and studied. Even Last Tango in Paris appealed to me because I adore Marlon Brando and there's no real talking in it other than get the butter. Does that make sense? In any case, Blue is the Warmest Color has some of the most graphic sex scenes that I've ever seen in a movie theater (I won't tell you about the time I went to a porn drive-in with a boyfriend and batted away mosquitoes that kept flying through the car window that we had to leave open to hear the moaning of the actors on the big screen), and it was weird to sit and watch them, alone, with a big bucket of popcorn and some Red Vines. The two stars were beautiful and really good actors, the story was intensely romantic (the French did invent the expression coup de foudre), but there was an air-brushed quality to it, too, and I was aware the entire time that a man filmed it. Because one of the women characters was an Artist, there was some requisite art criticism which I find unbearably painful in any language, but there was some great smart talk about literature, too. But those sex scenes -- whew! Long and -- well -- long. There were many lesbians in the movie theater, and I felt like a big dork, to tell you the truth, but it would have been worse if the theater were filled with a bunch of heterosexual males.

Anyhoo. That's the extent of my review of Blue is the Warmest Color, and I think I'll stick with the Javier Bardem fantasies.

As an aside, the photo above is Oliver and Henry who took a Metrolink train down to Orange County to visit some friends yesterday while their mother went to the French intellectual lesbian movie and ate a bucket of popcorn and a package of Red Vines.