This year, my first year back in Charlottesville, Virginia, I had the opportunity to participate once again, both as a reader and an audience-member, in the annual Virginia Festival of the Book. Of all the book festivals I've ever attended, this one is my absolute favorite. It always has stellar poets and writes of all kinds, and I leave it feeling uplifted and inspired. Among my favorite readings this year was one given my Mary-Sherman Willis. Witty, smart, and entertaining, Willis mesmerized the audience as she read from her new book of translations of Jean Cocteau's prose poems, Grace Notes. I was so happy when she agreed to an interview.
NA: I heard you read from Grace Notes at the New Dominion Book Shop at this year’s Virginia Festival of the Book, and I was enchanted both by your translations of Jean Cocteau’s prose poems and by your reading and explanations of his work. When and where did you begin translating Grace Notes?
MSW: It was a very happy accident that led me to find him in the poetry section of a small bookstore in a seaside town in Normandy a few years ago. We’d been visiting friends who put us up in what was essentially a garden shed. You had to walk through the greenhouse to get to the bathroom, working your way through hanging grape vines, with slugs and centipedes climbing the walls. I thought it was magic, everything alive like in Belle’s boudoir in Cocteau’s beautiful film, La Belle et la bête—the original 1946 version of “Beauty and the Beast.”
Then I spotted Appoggiatures on the shelf. I saw that they were prose poems. I don’t write prose poems, so I thought I might translate them and learn something.
NA: Could you talk about the title, Appogiatures?
MSW: It’s a term from opera, appoggiatura, meaning the little added note the singer inserts before the principal note, a flourish that delays the note and heightens it. In English it’s a grace note.
This was Jean Cocteau’s thirteenth book of poems, published in 1953 when he was 64 years old. (He would publish 23 books of poems before his death ten years later, to add to his astonishing list of artistic works.) He’d survived two world wars. The first he’d spent “volunteering” on the Belgian front (the army had rejected him) in a uniform stitched together by a costume designer. In WWII, he was in Paris under Nazi occupation as an openly gay opium addict living with his muse, the actor Jean Maret. He was making films, writing, painting, and doing what it took to survive.
By 1953, although his living circumstances were stable for the first time in his life, his health was poor and he was feeling his mortality. A wealthy divorcé had turned over her villa in St. Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera to him and his “adopted” lover Edouard Dermit. His work was coming smoothly and his reputation was secure. So he wrote about death with wit and irony, and disaster as fateful caprice or even a joke.The poems are short scenarios that capture the surreality of ordinary life, where there’s a thin membrane between states of consciousness, between life and death. Poems are the artistic flourish that heightens the experience of life, in full awareness of death. They have a kind of Gallic duende, if you can apply Federico Garcia Lorca’s term of art.
NA: What was it about Jean Cocteau that particularly attracted you to him and his work?
MSW: I’ve loved Jean Cocteau since 10thgrade, when somebody gave me his scandalous memoir, Opium, The Diary of a Cure.
We were feeling French and cool, and thought you needed to suffer and get high to make art. He had written the book during one of his many opium “cures,” long stays at a clinic in the country with meals and quiet, usually funded by friends like Coco Chanel. These stays would result in outpourings of work—a novel, some painting, a book of poems—before he was sent home. That sounded like a life to me!
Later, it was the films, especially La Belle et la bête, which was on heavy video rotation when my kids were small. The poems came later, as they’re not much translated in the US.
NA: I would love you to pick one of the poems from the book, post it here, and then talk about it—as a way of introducing us to the book.
MSW: Let’s start with this one, about the risks and dangers of artistic creation, and the artist disappearing into his work. Typically, the imagery is cinematically precise. This makes sense; Cocteau had been a busy filmmaker for almost two decades by the time this book appeared. He’s describing a miracle as if it were a documentary.
I admire the control he keeps over his syntax. His sentences are plain and declarative until the final one, a sequence of paratactic clauses that mimics the skater’s self-annihilating tour de force.
THE SKATER
The skater launched himself on the virgin ice compelled to reproduce with his weaponized feet the inextricable meander of a line that he carried inside himself, from which nothing could release his soul, straightjacketed as it was and under police interrogation. He would be free if he chiseled at great speed a surface from which the gash threw off shavings of snow. A masterpiece that the spectators applauded as if it were a simple acrobatic exercise. Sometimes he left behind several images of his body that would then rejoin him, preceding him and inviting him to join them. With crossed arms, he leaned, straightened up, sped ahead fast, turned, took off, careful never to break off his calligraphy. For an hour he inscribed his curled upstrokes and downstrokes without a single error. Suddenly, in the middle of the rink and standing still, his scarecrow arms outstretched, he spun into himself, a speeding tornado, until he became a translucent like a spinning propeller, with one difference: he passed through the zone of the visible and
disappeared.
NA: How did you go about translating this collection? Did you have a particular technique? Did you read a lot of Cocteau’s other works? Did you consult with other translators?
MSW: At first I was just translating these poems for fun. I was in France and just started knocking off one or two a day as we travelled. I’d grown up speaking French as a girl and always intended to try a French translation project but never found the right poet.
Cocteau interested me as soon as I began to channel his voice into English. He writes a rather formal French, but his ideas are so
wild! He blends irony, wordplay, humor and melodrama into these short pieces in ways that have no parallel in American culture. I just loved being in his head.
My first pass was to paraphrase the meaning and capture the elevated diction of his French. But then I worried that I’d taken too many liberties, and did another complete revision by translating literally—what’s known to translators as a trot. That produced a stilted mess with the life drained out of his words.
The final revisions looked for a middle way, keeping the meaning but dropping in as much as possible of the original syntax, word order, and sound. When those were done, I showed the manuscript to three native French speakers who extracted all sorts of clever double-entendres and idiomatic expressions that had slipped right by me.
While I was working on this, I read biographies and translations of Cocteau’s other work. Richard Howard’s translations of Cocteau’s autobiography, Professional Secrets is particularly great I found a Gallimard annotated edition of Cocteau’s complete poems and discovered that the fifth edition of Appogiaturesthat I was working from differs from the first. So I ordered a first edition from Paris, the only one published during Cocteau’s lifetime, and adjusted the discrepancies. I also found a 1982 translation of the book from a small San Francisco press—with enough errors in it that I felt justified in doing a new translation.
NA: What were some of the biggest challenge of translating these prose poems? Could you give us an example of a passage or prose poem that simply does not translate well into English?
MSW: Being French, and a genius, and probably manic, Cocteau could not resist a pun or a word game. Many of these poems hinge on double meanings. For instance, in the poem “The French Language,” a countess utters a declaration to her young lover: “Vous ne supposiez tout de même pas que je le susse!”He bursts into giggles and accuses her of being obscene. She becomes enraged and banishes him, “a victim of love and the French language.”
The joke in the poem depends on a problem of conjugation. “Que je le susse”is the literary imperfect subjunctive tense of savoir, to know. The sentence translates, “You don’t really suppose I should have known it!”
But to the young fool, it sounds as if she’d said, “ . . . que je le suce,”as in “You don’t really suppose that I should suck it.” (No wonder the countess becomes unhinged!) I stayed with the first meaning of the verb, since it was the countess speaking and using fancy verb tenses. Notes at the back of the book give the alternate readings.
Cocteau also composed by stream of consciousness, using a rhyming word game popular with French children. Several of the poems, for instance “Art” and “Crime of Passion,” are particularly surreal in English because their French version is in rhyming soundplay. Luckily, my publisher, Word Works Press, agreed to a bilingual edition for readers who want to sound out these poems.
NA: During your reading, you referred to Cocteau’s movie, The Beauty and the Beast, as a film that might have some current as well as historical relevance. Could you elaborate on that?
MSW: While immersed in this project, I became interested in the plight of artists in Paris during Nazi occupation, and the choices artists make under oppressive regimes. The Germans admired French culture, but some artists still did things to survive and work which would come to haunt them after the war, when the slur of “collaborator” was being flung around. Cocteau himself made alliances with culture-loving Germans in high places. He made some inoffensive films throughout the war, getting past Vichy censors with relative ease. So his decision in 1946 to make his first post-war film be an old fairy tale was no accident, I believe.
“Beauty and the Beast” is about a pure young girl whose love redeems a prince transformed by a curse into a beast. Belle is able to see beyond the Beast’s terrible exterior to the good man inside, and her reward is a prince restored to himself. This girl is a familiar figure to the French: brave Marianne, symbol of the French Republic immortalized by Delacroix and painted in town halls across the country. So I believe that Cocteau was offering an allegory of redemption to the French to remove the stain of collaboration.
These days, the story has been Disneyfied into a cartoon that even appropriates the living statues and dancing teapots of Cocteau’s original movie. But how powerful that magic still is!
NA: How has translating Cocteau changed you as a poet?
MSW: I’m writing prose poems lately, after not really seeing the point before. If you’ve got a powerful tool like the linebreak for punctuating your sentences into poems, why give it up for prose? Although he was considered a surrealist, Cocteau was quite traditional in his form. His poems were usually in quatrains in alexandrine meter in abab rhyme. Typically French. So this book was a departure for him too.
But after channeling Cocteau’s voice for a few months, I started playing with his associative process to assemble poems. Around 3 a.m. if I can’t sleep, I wait for a line, and then another. Pretty soon I have a little vignette, little flash fiction delivered from the unconscious. That’s new for me. (It beats worrying in the wee hours!)
NA: Could we close with a short poem from the book?
MSW: Here’s the last poem in the book, a sort of coda. The juxtaposition of beauty and decay, the swan, the sewers, the Chopin waltzes, and the orange gown of sunset on the sea—are pure Cocteau.
Elsewhere
How sad he was while writing his lines, proactively coated with swan fat on a lake of birdshit and iridescent mud. How sad he was. He navigated on the ink of pens that had leaked into the pockets of travelers at high altitudes. He navigated and smiled a sort of rictus that fooled no one but the blind reading the Travel News in braille. The fingers of the blind themselves were sad. The reading ended with Chopin waltzes and the hospital echoed with the sadness of their fingers. It was a night when the days grew shorter and dragged upon the sea in a long orange gown. It was a night when the lake became increasingly iridescent next to the seaside sewers. He felt he should follow the vanishing day and sing his death song elsewhere.
Mary-Sherman Willis, translator of Jean Cocteau’s book of prose poems, Grace Notes / Appogiatures, is the author of two poetry collections and numerous essays and reviews on poetry. She has taught at George Washington University and NYU/Shanghai. She earned an MA science writing from the University of Maryland, and an MFA in Poetry from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Her poems and reviews have appeared in the New Republic, The Plum Review, the Hudson Review, the Iowa Review, Shenandoah, Archipelago.org and Poet Lore, Beltway, Gargoyle and the Southern Poetry Review. Her poetry has been published in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's column, "American Life in Poetry." She lives in Virginia.
Comments