The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry; A Bilingual Edition

by Paul ValTry, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody (Translator)

Overview

Discover the poetic mastery and intellectual depth of Paul Valéry, the symbolist heir and modernist godfather who bridged the 19th and 20th centuries.

In this fresh look at the monumental work of one of the major French literary figures of the twentieth century, The Idea of Perfection presents both sides of Paul Valéry: the craftsman of sublimely refined verse, and the fervent investigator of the limits of human intellect and expression. This collection intersperses his three essential poetic works—Album of Early Verse, The Young Fate, and Charms—with incisive selections from the Notebooks, the 28,000 pages of prose fragments that reveal Valéry's restless intellectual quest, as unguided yet as persistent, rigorous, and uncontainable as the sea that is so often their subject.

Masterfully translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, with careful attention to form and a natural yet metrical contemporary poetic voice, The Idea of Perfection breathes new life into poems that are among the most beautiful in the French language and the most influential of the twentieth century. It finishes with the prose poem "The Angel," offering a disfigured glimpse of a vast and fragmentary "exercise of thought."

A resounding voice in European literature, Paul Valéry stands as a bridge between the tradition of the nineteenth century and the novelty of the twentieth, a poet with thousands of readers and few followers, great resonance and little echo. Discover the symbolist and lyric poetry, insightful essays, and illuminating notebooks of one of France's most celebrated poets and thinkers in this landmark literary collection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374713959
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/14/2020
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

One of the major figures of twentieth-century French literature, Paul Valéry was born in 1871. After a promising debut as a young symbolist in Mallarmé’s circle, Valéry withdrew from public view for almost twenty years, and was almost forgotten by 1917 when the publication of the long poem La Jeune Parque made him an instant celebrity. He was best known in his day for his small output of highly polished lyric poetry, and posthumously for the 28,000 pages of his Notebooks. He died in 1945.

Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody was born in Columbus, Ohio. He has translated the work of French and Belgian poets, including Benjamin Fondane, for which he was awarded the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation. He is the author of two volumes of poetry in French and one in English, and has worked as a typesetter, a programmer, and a private tutor.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Introduction: Paul Valéry, the Life of a Mind
Translator’s Note
A Note on the Text

Album de vers anciens, 1890–1900 / Album of Early Verse, 1890–1900 (1920)
From the Notebooks, 1894–1914
La Jeune Parque / The Young Fate (1918)
From the Notebooks, 1915–1921
Charmes / Charms (1921)
From the Notebooks, 1922–1945
L’Ange / The Angel (1945)

Rewriting the Past: A Note on Album of Early Verse
Index of French Titles and First Lines
Index of English Titles and First Lines

Editorial Reviews

“Amazing modernist work . . . Rudavsky-Brody’s translations . . . are patient, thoughtful and often imaginative.” —Michael Wood, London Review of Books

“Taken together, the prose and verse configure Valéry as a writer and thinker tipped into the new century, which picked up speed with Futurism and Dada . . . Valéry was a poet who came close to neoclassical perfection, as well as a modern thinker who understood how elusive perfection would always remain.” —Allan Graubard, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody’s new selection of Valéry’s poems is welcome indeed. His translations are fresher than any previous English versions . . . The beauty and power of [Valéry’s] best writing is undeniable, and the human dilemmas his work addresses—mortality, embodiment, the longing for perfection—remain with us.” —Mark Scroggins, Hyperallergic

"[Rudavsky-Brody] has made newly available, in assiduously balanced and nuanced translations, all the significant poems of this now overlooked titan of French letters, and along with them, rousing extracts from Valéry’s extraordinary, posthumously published notebooks . . . Valéry’s literary legacy may be like the Roman mosaic recently discovered beneath an Italian vineyard, culturally defining but not presently alive. But the relation of his Notebooks to his published work is more like that of the vineyard’s root system to its vines: they underpin and allow—they create, in fact—everything of which Valéry’s reputation consists." —Claire Messud, The New York Review of Books

“FSG’s handsome bilingual edition of Paul Valéry . . . intersperses the major poems with passages from the notebooks – a smart way of staging Valéry’s dissatisfaction with received form, while drawing attention to his repetitive, heartbreaking obsession with lost futures.” —Hannah Sullivan, The Times Literary Supplement

“Rudavsky-Brody’s version of Valéry brings the work closer to our age and thus, to our ears. [It] manages to hold on to the incantatory sense of the French.” —Sean Nam, The Dublin Review of Books

“A gratifying affirmation of Valéry’s central place in 20th-century literature . . . occasionally [Rudavsky-Brody's] lines are more striking than their French originals.” —Adrian Nathan West, The Washington Examiner

"The passages from the notebooks were a revelation . . . A fascinating introduction to a major poet in his selection of work." –Edmund Prestwich, The Manchester Review

From the Publisher