Levi the Memorious: A Survivor's Tale

The Complete Works of Primo Levi (2015)

I think that the first time I actually read anything by Primo Levi was around the turn of the millennium, when a colleague of mine extracted a chapter from If This is a Man for inclusion in an anthology of readings for our then-new "Life Writing" course.

I knew the name, of course, and had seen The Periodic Table and other books of his displayed on many bookshelves. I don't know quite why I hadn't opened any of them up till then.

Fear, I suppose - fear of the horrors they might contain. I'd read a number of books and watched a great many documentaries about the Holocaust by then, and it was getting harder to persuade myself to endure all that again each time - shameful though that undoubtedly sounds.

I still remember my shock at reaching the last line of Levi's chapter 13: "October 1944":

Primo Levi: If This is a Man (1947)

Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.
Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas-chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking anymore? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again?
If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.

Everything else in the chapter - in the book, even - is described so calmly and dispassionately, that the last line explodes like a bomb.

You begin to get some idea of the sheer pressure of need for expression of the events and sights in his book. It's not a masterpiece because of the scenes it depicts. Nor is it a masterpiece in spite of the author's closeness to his material. No, it's a masterpiece because of what it is: the organic expression by an exceptionally alert intelligence of a series of horrors almost beyond communication.

Primo Levi: If This is a Man / The Truce (1947 / 1963)

After that I began to collect Levi's books - in a rather desultory way. I guess I thought that since nothing could possibly top the white-hot intensity of If This is a Man, his other works must be some kind of comedown just in the nature of things ...

The Truce was very good also, though: completely different from his first book about the concentration camp, but equally absorbing.

Primo Levi: The Periodic Table (1975)

On top of that, The Periodic Table and The Wrench both do a great job of communicating the absorbing interest of the world of work to dedicated professionals: chemists and construction workers, respectively.

Primo Levi: The Wrench (1978)

So it did come as a bit of a shock to me to realise that I'd somehow missed any announcement of the sumptuous, three-volume edition of his Complete Works in English pictured at the head of this post.

And even more of a shock when, before ordering it, I checked out some of the online reviews. Here's William Deresiewicz in The Atlantic Monthly (December 2015):

Three volumes, 3,000 pages: The Complete Works of Primo Levi, in its very girth and exhaustiveness, asserts a claim about the man whose oeuvre it collects. Best known for his Holocaust memoir, If This Is a Man, as well as for The Periodic Table — a book about his life in, with, and through chemistry — Levi should be seen, as the collection’s publicity material puts it, as “one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.” Novels, stories, poems, essays, science writing, science fiction, newspaper columns, articles, open letters, book reviews: His every word is worth preserving, translating, purchasing, pondering. To read them all together, the collection insists, is to see the man anew.
I say this with reluctance — The Complete Works, which was 15 years in the making, is clearly a labor of love, meticulously edited by Ann Goldstein and seamlessly carried over from Italian, in fresh renditions, by a team of 10 translators — but the claim, on the volumes’ own evidence, is manifestly false. Levi is a great writer. He is a vivid writer, an unflinching writer, an indispensable writer. But he is also a limited writer, both in talents and in range. It does no favors, to the reader or to him, to try to rank him with the likes of Joyce, Proust, Kafka, and Beckett. His achievement, in his work about the Holocaust and its aftermath — If This Is a Man, The Truce, and The Drowned and the Saved, as well as parts of Lilith and The Periodic Table — is significant enough. Surrounding that achievement with masses of ephemera only obscures it. A selected works, at half the length for half the price (The Complete Works lists for $100), would have served him better.

$100? Try $US30.49! One of the reasons I was so quick to order the book was that I couldn't believe how cheap it was. Reviews such as the one above must have been pretty effective in killing any appetite for this edition, swollen - as Deresiewicz alleges it is - 'with masses of ephemera'.

Not all the reviews were in this vein, mind you. Here's a nice, rather more subtly reasoned one by Robert S. C. Gordon from the website Public Books (15 January 2016):

This unity-in-variety is the Ariadne’s thread that helps lead a way through the labyrinth of Levi’s complete oeuvre. Not all his readers will be willing to follow the thread along all its meanderings; indeed, responses to the Complete Works have already divided somewhat between those willing to listen to the modulated, lighter, more elfin tones in some corners of this volume and those who, perhaps understandably, prefer to split the work into his greater and lesser achievements and pass over his forays into occasional writing, science-fantasy, zoomorphic poetry, and the rest.
The thread is worth following, however. The harmonies and dissonances between the modes of Levi’s work are, to a significant degree, what make him such a distinctive, subtle, and compelling ethical writer, one who ponders how to live in the face of both the extraordinary and the everyday, not through abstractions but through fragments of stories and vignettes of sentient experience and intelligent invention.
The Complete Works facilitates the task by restoring the chronology of publication of Levi’s books.

To sum up, then, let's complete our hat-trick with Michael Dirda in the Washington Post (23/9/15):

For such a gift as The Complete Works of Primo Levi, one should probably do little more than express thanks. The captious, however, might complain that Levi’s autobiographical writings are somewhat repetitive, his essays a bit dry and his fantasy fiction rather labored. Still, these are just cavils. Whether as witness or imaginative artist, Levi stands high among the truly essential European writers of the past century.

With friends like that, who needs enemies? "Repetitive ... dry ... laboured" - these are not bookselling adjectives. Nor is Robert Gordon's mention of the "lighter, more elfin tones" of some of his more fanciful stories particularly enticing.

Primo Levi: The Mirror Maker (1989)

Is it true? Or rather, is there truth in it? I fear so. They're not just making it up out of whole cloth. It isn't all part of an anti-Levi conspiracy. Some of his slighter stories - and there are a great many of them - are a bit ephemeral. Nor does much of his "science-fantasy" reach the dizzying heights of fellow survivor of the Nazis Stanisław Lem.

Primo Levi: The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

It's tempting just to leave the matter there - to conclude that Levi is a writer whose primary value lies in his autobiographical testimony as an Auschwitz survivor, and that the rest is simply window-dressing. Tempting, yes, but fundamentally wrong. The story is much more complex than that.

Primo Levi: Opere Complete (2017)

Opere Complete. Ed. Marco Belpoliti in collaboration with Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi. Introduction by Daniele Del Giudice. 2 vols. 1997. Nuova Universale Einaudi. Torino: Einaudi, 2017.

Vol. I:
1. Se questo è un uomo ('If This is a Man', 1947)
2. Se questo è un uomo (1958) e appendice
3. La tregua ('The Truce', 1963)
4. Storie Naturali ('Natural Histories', 1966)
5. Vizio di forma ('Flaw of Form', 1971)
6. Il sistema periodico ('The Periodic Table', 1975)
7. La chiave a stella ('The Star Wrench', 1978)
8. Appendice [Appendices]
9. Note ai testi [Notes on the text]
Vol. II:
10. La ricerca delle radici ('The Search for Roots', 1981)
11. Lilít e altri racconti ('Lilith and Other Stories', 1981)
12. Se non ora, quando? ('If Not Now, When?', 1982)
13. Ad ora incerta ('At an Uncertain Hour', 1984)
14. Altre poesie ('Other Poems', 1984)
15. L'altrui mestiere ('Other People's Trades', 1985)
16. Racconti e saggi ('Stories and Essays', 1986)
17. I sommersi e i salvati ('The Drowned and the Saved', 1986)
18. Pagine sparse ('Scattered Pages', 1947-1987)
19. Appendice alle pagine sparse [Appendices to the scattered pages]
20. Note ai testi [Notes on the Text]

In 1997, ten years after Levi's death, Marco Belpoliti assembled a two-volume edition of Levi's Complete Works in Italian. This gave readers everywhere a good overview of the basic canon of his works, including scattered articles, poems, and other uncollected pieces.

Ann Goldstein (1949- )

It also inspired American editor Ann Goldstein, more famous as the translator of Elena Ferrante's bestselling Neapolitan Novels, to attempt a more-or-less complete English version of Primo Levi. As Wikipedia puts it:

The effort of obtaining translation rights took six years, while its compilation and translation took seventeen years ... Goldstein oversaw the team of nine translators and translated three of Levi's books.

Primo Levi: The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology (1981)

The one significant absence from the English edition is the anthology above, which is included in the Italian version. This does make a certain amount of sense. A number of the passages chosen by Levi were originally written in English and other languages, and in cases where the Italian translations diverge from their originals - as they often do - it's a difficult decision whether to correct or simply transcribe the results.

The book is, in any case, already available in a 2001 translation by Peter Forbes.

Which brings us to the question of whether all of these new translations are actually improvements on the original English versions? You'll recall that passage I quoted above, from the end of Chapter 13 of Levi's If This is a Man in Stuart Woolf's 1960 translation? Here it is again in the new 2015 edition:

Primo Levi: Complete Works: I (2015): 123-24.

Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk, on the top level, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his cap on his head, his torso swaying violently. Kuhn is thanking God that he was not chosen.
Kuhn is out of his mind. Does he not see, in the bunk next to him, Beppo the Greek, who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow, and knows it, and lies there staring at the light without saying anything and without even thinking anymore? Does Kuhn not know that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty - nothing at all in the power of man to do - can ever heal?
If I were God, I would spit Kuhn's prayer out upon the ground.

There are a lot of small changes here. Kuhn's beret has become a 'cap'; he thanks God that he was not chosen, rather than thanking him because he has not been chosen; he's out of his mind rather than out of his senses; a number of phrases have been shifted around, greatly increasing the number of commas. All these are fairly standard consequences of revisiting a piece of your own prose.

What I did not expect, however, was that change in the last sentence of the chapter. That is significant. This is how it read in 1960:

If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.

And this is how it reads in 2015:

If I were God, I would spit Kuhn's prayer out upon the ground.

Ten cutting, powerful words have become 13, with a subjunctive added and some extraneous 'ground' to spit on, as well ... But then, how does the sentence read in the original Italian?

Se io fossi Dio, sputerei a terra la preghiera di Kuhn.

A literal translation of that would be: "If I were God, I would spit to earth the prayer of Kuhn."

So, much though I personally prefer the first version of Woolf's translation of this sentence, I'm forced to agree that his revised take on it is far closer to what Levi actually wrote.

Primo Levi (1940s)

On the minus side, then, Stuart Woolf is not necessarily a better stylist after fifty years of brooding on the book than he was in his first flush of enthusiasm. On the plus side, though, he has contributed a fascinating afterword to this new edition in which he reveals just how closely he worked with Levi while preparing that original version.

He also explains that the book's long history of revisions and reprintings has necessitated a number of changes simply to keep up with its author's latest intentions. He is, after all, the only one of the original translators of Levi's works to have been asked to re-vision his work for the new edition. It's hard to imagine anyone else having Levi's work so close to his heart.

So, yes, many analogous quibbles could be made about these new translations of Levi's principal works. Many of them are significantly less idiomatic and more pedantic in tone: careful to preserve the original italian idioms and wordplay even when this has the effect of interrupting the narrative or the train of thought.

But that's what comes of declaring him a 'classic'. All of a sudden the tiniest details seem more significant - it's not just a matter of a temporary publishing boom, but rather of providing reliable details for readers and scholars now and in the future.

Something has been lost, but more - I would say - has been gained in the process. After all, those older editions are still in existence. They haven't been superseded by the new super-edition. Speaking personally, though, I think this new Complete Works will be the mainstay of my own Levi reading from now on.

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Art Spiegelman: Maus (1980-1991)

The title of this blogpost was meant as a kind of double-barrelled pun. On the one hand it references cartoonist Art Spiegelman's celebrated graphic novel Maus: A Survivor's Tale, which first appeared, piecemeal, chapter by chapter, in Raw magazine, the comics journal he co-founded with his wife Françoise Mouly, and which was subsequently collected in two volumes: 'My Father Bleeds History' (1986), 'And Here My Troubles Began' (1991).

Jorge Luis Borges: Funes el memorioso (1942)

However, it also makes a nod towards Jorge Luis Borges' great story 'Funes the Memorious', which records the strange fate of one Ireneo Funes, who hits his head in a fall from his horse, and is thereafter cursed to remember absolutely everything which has ever happened to him. He dies shortly afterwards, but first spends a long night describing his plight to the narrator, a somewhat stylised version of Borges himself.

Gustave Doré: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1875)

Like Funes, Levi was forced to remember. He had no choice in the matter. And, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner - a comparison he made himself more than once: in fact it supplied the title for his 1984 book of poems Ad Ora Incerta ['At an uncertain hour'] - he had 'strange power of speech,' as well as a compulsion to seek out listeners.

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.

Reading this new edition of Primo Levi puts us in the almost unique position of watching a man not bred to the trade in the process of learning how to write. There are the inevitable stumbles and false starts as he moves from the white-hot assurance of his first memoir into the stories and essays which gradually became the mainstay of his life as a modern 'man of letters.'

Those two first volumes of stories, Natural Histories and Flaw of Form, are particularly telling in this respect. The stories are, at times, quite painfully bad - but each one teaches their author something, and gradually they begin to improve. They all have something, some germ of a complex and interesting idea, but it takes some time for him to reach the more sustained accomplishment of a book such as Lilith and Other Stories.

This is a development almost entirely obscured until now by the piecemeal appearance of his fiction in English translation. Four volumes of miscellaneous stories and essays in Italian became a bewildering labyrinth of partial English reprints, translated at different times by very different people. For this alone we should be grateful to the new edition.

Finally, then, I'd have to say that in a case like this I certainly believe that more is better. Would 'a selected works, at half the length for half the price' really 'have served him better', as William Deresiewicz claims in his review above? It might have made Levi seem more of a careful stylist, but I'm not sure that it would have done justice to the more complex and exacting details of his literary legacy.

Primo Levi: If Not Now, When? (1982)

In my case, for instance, having read in Carole Angier's 2002 biography of the lukewarm reception of Levi's one full-length novel, If Not Now, When?, I never even felt tempted to read it until running into it here, in volume 2 of this chronologically arranged edition.

But that would have been a great loss, because it's a wonderfully nuanced and accomplished piece of work. Clearly it was not to the taste of many readers in 1982, who were expecting a repeat of If This is a Man, but that's probably because it's composed more in the style of one of the great classics of European realism.

It echoes Tolstoy's Sebastopol Tales, or Väinö Linna's Finnish war novel The Unknown Soldier - even Jaroslav Hašek's Good Soldier Švejk - far more than the standard-issue Holocaust book that was expected of him. Levi had, in any case, made it clear that he considered the camps an inappropriate subject for fiction. No Boy in the Striped Pyjamas or Life is Beautiful for him.

In any case, readers will now be able to decide any and all such matters for themselves, without the no doubt well-intentioned Bowdlerising tendencies of critics such as Deresiewicz.

Primo Levi (1980s)

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Primo Levi (1930s)

Primo Michele Levi
(1919-1987)

1. If This Is a Man / The Truce. [‘Se questo è un uomo’, 1947/58 / ‘La tregua’ 1963]. Trans. Stuart Woolf. 1960 & 1965. Introduction by Paul Bailey. 1971. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.


2. The Periodic Table. [‘Il sistema periodico’, 1975]. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. 1984. Essay by Philip Roth. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000.


3. If Not Now, When? [‘Se non ora, quando?’, 1982]. Trans. William Weaver. 1985. An Abacus Book. London: Little, Brown and Company (UK) Limited, 1992.


4. The Wrench. [‘La chiave a stella’, 1978]. Trans. William Weaver. 1986. London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1987.


5. Moments of Reprieve. [‘Lilìt e altri racconti’, 1981]. Trans. Ruth Feldman. 1986. Introduction by Michael Ignatieff. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002.


6. Other People’s Trades. [‘L'altrui mestiere’, 1985]. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. 1986. London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1989.


7. The Drowned and the Saved. [‘I sommersi e i salvati’, 1986]. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. 1986. Introduction by Paul Bailey. London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1988.


8. Collected Poems. [‘L'osteria di Brema’, 1975 / ‘Ad ora incerta’, 1984]. Trans. Ruth Feldman & Brian Swann. 1988. London: Faber, 1991.


9. The Mirror Maker: Stories & Essays. [‘Racconti e Saggi’, 1986]. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. 1989. London: Methuen, 1990.


10. The Sixth Day and Other Tales. [‘Storie naturali’ (as Damiano Malabaila), 1966 / ‘Vizio di forma’, 1971]. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. 1990. Abacus. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1991.


11. The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology. [‘La ricerca delle radici’, 1981]. Trans. Peter Forbes. 2001. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002.


12. The Black Hole of Auschwitz. [‘L'asimmetria e la vita: Articoli e saggi 1955-1987’, ed. Marco Belpoliti, 2002]. Trans. Sharon Wood. UK: Polity Press, 2005.


13. [with Leonardo de Benedetti]. Auschwitz Report [‘Report on the Sanitary and Medical Organization of the Monowitz Concentration Camp for Jews (Auschwitz - Upper Silesia)’, 1945]. Trans. Judith Woolf. UK: Verso, 2006.


14. A Tranquil Star. [‘Vizio di forma’, 1971 / ‘Lilìt e altri racconti’, 1981]. Trans. Ann Goldstein & Alessandra Bastagli. 2006. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008.


15. The Complete Works of Primo Levi. Ed. Ann Goldstein. Introduction by Toni Morrison. 3 vols. Liveright Publishing Corporation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Inc., 2015.
    Vol. 1:
    1. If This Is a Man. Trans. Stuart Woolf (1947)
    2. The Truce. Trans. Ann Goldstein (1963)
    3. Natural Histories. Trans. Jenny McPhee (1966)
    4. Flaw of Form. Trans. Jenny McPhee (1971)
    Vol. 2:
    5. The Periodic Table. Trans. Ann Goldstein (1975)
    6. The Wrench. Trans. Nathaniel Rich (1978)
    7. Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1949-1980. Trans. Alessandria Bastagli & Francesco Bastagli (2015)
    8. Lilith and Other Stories. Trans. Ann Goldstein (1981)
    9. If Not Now, When? Trans. Anthony Shugaar (1982)
    Vol. 3:
    10. Collected Poems. Trans. Jonathan Galassi (1984)
    11. Other People’s Trades. Trans. Anthony Shugaar (1985)
    12. Stories and Essays. Trans. Anne Milano Appel (1986)
    13. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Michael F. Moore (1986)
    14. Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1981-1987. Trans. Alessandria Bastagli & Francesco Bastagli (2015)

Interviews:


16. [with Tullio Regge]. Conversations. ['Dialogo', 1984]. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. 1989. Introduction by Tullio Regge. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.


17. The Voice of Memory: Interviews, 1961-1987. [‘Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987’, ed. Marco Belpoliti, 1997]. Ed. & Trans. Robert Gordon. 2001. New York: The New Press, 2001.

Secondary:


18. Anissimov, Myriam. Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist. 1996. Trans. Steve Cox. 1998. London: Aurum Press Ltd., 1999.


19. Angier, Carole. The Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography. 2002. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.


20. Thomson, Ian. Primo Levi: The Elements of a Life. London: Vintage, 2003.

Martin Argles: Primo Levi

John Clare / Charles Baudelaire

William Hilton: John Clare (1820)

It's not really that I'm trying to be particularly original or provocative in comparing these two poets (perish the thought). They belong to completely different phases of the Romantic era, for a start: John Clare, the peasant poet, born in poverty in 1793 - a contemporary of Keats and Byron; Charles Baudelaire, the original poète maudit, born in the stifling heart of the bourgeoisie in 1821, and dead of alcoholism and self-abuse at the age of 46.

Étienne Carjat: Charles Baudelaire (1863)

Clare was (and remains) the patron saint of pastoral poets everywhere: a soul so pure he seemed to have come from another sphere, the pre-enclosure, peasant world of organic village life, free of the affectations of civilisation.

Baudelaire, by contrast, is the poet of drugs, sex, industrialism, city life, and the principal inspiration for the figure of the flâneur, the idle (but preternaturally observant) dandy - what the Russian critics called 'the superfluous man.' He was impecunious, self-destructive, vindictive, and relentlessly critical: of himself more than anything.

And yet, and yet. They didn't do anything quite as convenient as die in the same year, but they weren't far from it. John Clare died at 70 in 1864, Baudelaire three years later, in 1867. But then Clare spent the last 25 years of his life locked up in an asylum (from which he briefly escaped in 1841). Baudelaire, by contrast, suffered a massive stroke in 1866 and spent the last two years of his life in a succession of hospital wards.

In other words, neither of them could last in the world much beyond their mid-forties. The difference is, of course, that Clare experienced an extraordinary burst of creativity in his madhouse years - some poems written under his own name, others under that of Lord Byron, whom (some of the time) he believed himself to be.

So far so unconvincing. I agree that I haven't made a strong case, as yet, for considering them together. It's just that the other day I was reading The Wood is Sweet, a little selection of John Clare's poems made for children, and ran across one of his most famous poems, 'The Skylark':

Thomas Bewick: The Skylark (1797)

The Skylark (1835)

The rolls and harrows lie at rest beside
The battered road; and spreading far and wide
Above the russet clods, the corn is seen
Sprouting its spiry points of tender green,
Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake,
Like some brown clod the harrows failed to break.
Opening their golden caskets to the sun,
The buttercups make schoolboys eager run,
To see who shall be first to pluck the prize —
Up from their hurry, see, the skylark flies,
And o'er her half-formed nest, with happy wings
Winnows the air, till in the cloud she sings,
Then hangs a dust-spot in the sunny skies,
And drops, and drops, till in her nest she lies,
Which they unheeded passed — not dreaming then
That birds which flew so high would drop agen
To nests upon the ground, which anything
May come at to destroy. Had they the wing
Like such a bird, themselves would be too proud,
And build on nothing but a passing cloud!
As free from danger as the heavens are free
From pain and toil, there would they build and be,
And sail about the world to scenes unheard
Of and unseen — Oh, were they but a bird!
So think they, while they listen to its song,
And smile and fancy and so pass along;
While its low nest, moist with the dews of morn,
Lies safely, with the leveret, in the corn.

This is a fairly typical Clare poem. He tends to write in standard metres - in this case heroic couplets, at other times ballad measure. His rhythms and versification tend to the traditional and unadventurous also: no sudden breaks in the iambic line, no startling rhymes (unlike his hero, Lord Byron).

So why do we love him so much? It's the detail of the lines, the sudden flashes of careful insight and genuine knowledge that one glimpses from time to time in his choice of phrases or adjectives that gives his verse its peculiar distinction.

On the one hand, it sounds a bit like a setpiece description by another of his models, James Thomson's The Seasons (1730), but the moment one goes below the surface, strange moments of vision start to appear:

Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake,
Like some brown clod the harrows failed to break.

Clare, the 'whopstraw man,' a labourer whose job it was to harrow the harvested corn, is yet intensely aware of that 'squatting' hare - nor is it the beauty of the creature he chooses to emphasise, but its terror.

The schoolboys running to catch buttercups seem pretty conventional figures, too, until we realise that Clare is using them to construct the intense metaphor which governs the last half of his poem:

Had they the wing
Like such a bird, themselves would be too proud,
And build on nothing but a passing cloud!

They imagine themselves like the skylark, but see it solely in terms of the clouds its flight encompasses. They cannot imagine the truth that it, too, is ruled by fear and the constant threat of destruction of what it holds dearest: its nest.

So think they, while they listen to its song,
And smile and fancy and so pass along;
While its low nest, moist with the dews of morn,
Lies safely, with the leveret, in the corn.

Well, clearly the obvious comparison here is with Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark", whose first five or so lines virtually everyone who's ever read a poem in English can quote by heart:

P. B. Shelley: To a Skylark (1820)

The "schoolboy" comparison seems fairly apt, also. Shelley was 29 when he died, 27 when he published 'Ode to a Skylark.' Clare, in his mid-forties and at the heart of his powers, must have felt that he knew a good many things about birds which the younger poet had never had the chance - or possibly the desire - to learn. Even his strongest defenders would have to admit to a certain tendency towards abstraction in Shelley's verse. Clare's may be far less accomplished technically, but the precise and concrete was - in the end - all that interested him.

Let's take another tack on this poem of his, then. Here's Baudelaire's "The Albatross": :

Catherine Réault-Crosnier: L'Albatros

L'Albatros (1861)

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

If you click on this link, you can find a selection of English verse translations of this immortal poem by the likes of Roy Campbell, George Dillon, and various others. Rather than add to them, I thought it might be best to provide a simple prose crib. There's a reason why many regard Baudelaire as the greatest European poet since Dante, and it isn't because he dyed his hair green and contracted syphilis: it's the sheer beauty and ease of his writing. Many of the translations on the site are very skillful, but they're still not Baudelaire.

The Albatross (1861)

Often, to amuse themselves, the crewmen
catch albatrosses, vast sea birds
who follow, indolent travelling companions,
the ship as it glides across the bitter gulfs.

Hardly have they dumped them on the deck,
than these kings of the blue, clumsy and ashamed,
let their great white wings trail pitifully
beside them like oars.

This winged traveller, how weak and foolish he is!
He, lately so beautiful, how comic and ugly!
One teases his beak with the stub of a pipe,
another mimes, limping, this invalid who once flew!

The Poet resembles this prince of the clouds
who haunts the storm and laughs at archers;
exiled on earth in the midst of catcries,
His giants' wings impede him from walking.

Just as one can hear, faintly, at the back of Clare's poem, an echo of Percy Shelley's, similarly, here, one senses the presence of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Baudelaire was pretty well-read in English literature, a pioneering translator of Poe and De Quincey (among others), and he could hardly have been ignorant of the most famous albatross in poetic history:

'God save thee, ancient Mariner,
from the fiends that plague thee thus! —
Why look'st thou so?' - With my crossbow
I shot the albatross.

Gustave Doré: Illustrations to the Ancient Mariner (1876)

That comment about how Baudelaire's ideal poet resembles the bird "qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer" [who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer] is surely a reference to the crossbow-wielding mariner himself. But where exactly is Clare in this equation?

I guess it's in the reversal of expectations which dominates each poem. In Clare's case, the marauding schoolboys imagine that the skylark must nest in the clouds, since that's what they would do. Actually, though, it hides its nest as low down as it can, below eye level, in the corn with the rabbit and the other creeping creatures.

In Baudelaire's, the albatross is mocked because of its inability to master such simple, everyday arts as walking without stumbling across a deck. In fact it is because of its other great gifts, its giants' wings, that it cannot fit easily into a crowd, but the desire to simplify, to drag everything down to the level of the lowest common denominator is what leaves it so cruelly exposed.

Baudelaire's albatross was born to fly, and lacks the gifts for anything else. Clare's skylark is similarly gifted, but uses its flight to distract its enemies from what it most longs to protect. Both poets write out of an aching sense of loss and unbelonging. In Baudelaire's case this is expressed in loud outrage, in Clare's by the desire to hide and to escape.

If you want to understand John Clare, the first thing is to stop thinking of him as some simple, instinctive personality, lacking the art of his more self-conscious and educated contemporaries. His academy was every bit as rigorous as theirs, and his poetry - vast and uneven a bulk as there is of it - repays the same pains.

Similarly, reading Baudelaire for the cheap thrills of his iconoclasm and diablerie is mostly a waste of time. Those things are there, but it's the penetrating intensity of his intelligence and insight that gives his work its enduring power.

In both cases, paradoxically, it's sometimes best to approach these poets through their own prose. John Clare's "Journey out of Essex" - his heartbreaking account of his 1841 escape from the asylum to find his lost love, Mary Joyce (already dead for three years) - is fascinating enough. But his autobiographical and other prose notes on his life and the countryside he grew up in also have an indescribable charm of their own.

Baudelaire's prose is more multifaceted and complex, but his analyses of the paintings in successive salons show the concentrated critical intelligence which enabled him to revolutionise French - and, eventually, world - poetry. He was never really the idle druggie of legend, but rather a disciplined mind modelled on, but eventually surpassing, his hero, Edgar Allan Poe.

Both are poets not so much to read, as to reread. As soon as you've reached the end of each poem or journal entry, it's time to turn back to the beginning and start again. Only then does the peculiar light of their insight begin to communicate. These are not bodies of work one could ever exhaust.

I conclude, as usual, with a brief list of the books by each I've managed to accumulate in the last thirty-odd years of reading both:

Iain Sinclair: Edge of the Orison (2005)

John Clare
(1793-1864)

1. Geoffrey Grigson, ed. Poems of John Clare’s Madness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949.


2. J. W. & Anne Tibble, ed. John Clare: The Prose. 1951. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.


3. Eric Robinson & Geoffrey Summerfield, ed. John Clare: The Shepherd’s Calendar. Wood Engravings by David Gentleman. 1964. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.


4. Eric Robinson & Geoffrey Summerfield, ed. John Clare: The Later Poems. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964.


5. J. W. & Anne Tibble, ed. John Clare: Selected Poems. Ed. J. W. & Anne Tibble. Everyman’s Library, 563. London: J. M. Dent, 1965.


6. David Powell, ed. John Clare: The Wood is Sweet. Introduction by Edmund Blunden. Illustrated by John O'Connor. Poems for Young Readers. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966.


7. Eric Robinson & Richard Fitter, ed. John Clare’s Birds. Illustrated by Robert Gillmor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.


8. Eric Robinson & David Powell, ed. John Clare: The Oxford Authors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.


9. Eric Robinson, ed. John Clare: The Parish, A Satire. Notes by David Powell. 1985. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.


10. Geoffrey Summerfield, ed. John Clare: Selected Poems. 1990. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2000.


11. Robinson, Eric, & David Powell, ed. John Clare By Himself. Wood Engravings by Jon Lawrence. 1996. Fyfield Books. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002.


12. J. W. & Anne Tibble, ed. John Clare: The Letters. 1951. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.


13. Mark Storey, ed. John Clare: Selected Letters. 1985. Oxford Letters & Memoirs. 1988. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.


14. J. W. & Anne Tibble. John Clare: A Life. 1932. Rev. Anne Tibble. London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1972.


15. Edward Storey. A Right to Song: The Life of John Clare. London: Methuen, 1982.

•

Édouard Manet: Jeanne Duval (1862)

Charles Pierre Baudelaire
(1821-1867)

1. Y.-G. Le Dantec, ed. Baudelaire: Oeuvres. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1. 1934. Paris: Gallimard, 1944.


2. P. Schneider, ed. Baudelaire: L’Oeuvre. Les Portiques, 16. Paris: Le Club Français du Livre, 1955.


3. Antoine Adam, ed. Baudelaire: Les fleurs du mal: Les Épaves / Bribes / Poèmes divers / Amoenitates Beligicae. Édition illustrée. 1961. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1970.


4. Yves Florenne, ed. Baudelaire: Les fleurs du mal: Édition établie selon un ordre nouveau. 1857. Préface de Marie-Jeanne Durry. Le Livre de Poche, 677. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1972.


5. Melvin Zimmerman, ed. Baudelaire: Petits Poèmes en Prose. 1869. French Classics. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968.


6. George Dillon & Edna St. Vincent Millay, trans. Baudelaire. Les Fleurs du Mal: Translated and Presented on Pages Facing the Original French Text as Flowers of Evil. With an Introduction and an Unusual Bibliographical Note by Miss Millay. 1936. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1962.


7. Louise Varèse, trans. Baudelaire: Paris Spleen. 1869. A New Directions PaperBook, NDP294. 1947. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1970.


8. Francis Scarfe, trans. Baudelaire: Selected Poems. The Penguin Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.


9. Clark, Carol, & Robert Sykes, ed. Baudelaire in English. Penguin Classics: Poets in Translation. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.


10. P. E. Charvet, trans. Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists. 1972. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.


11. Edgar Allan Poe. Histoires Extraordinaires. Trans. Charles Baudelaire. Préface de Julio Cortázár. Collection Folio, 310. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1973.


12. Enid Starkie. Baudelaire. 1957. Pelican Biographies. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.


13. Claude Pichois. Baudelaire. Additional Research by Jean Ziegler. 1987. Trans. Graham Robb. 1989. London: Vintage, 1991.

Charles Baudelaire: "Spleen: I am like the king of a rainy country ..." (1861)

John Clare: "Lines: I Am" (1848)