Images

 Modern poetry has been derided as unintelligible; but there are things that seem incomprehensible because they do not actually have anything to say—like much modern academic writing in the humanities—and then there are things that seem incomprehensible because people expect them to say things that they never had any intention of saying—like much Symbolist and modernist poetry. Would you say that the lush imagery of Rimbaud is incomprehensible, for instance? William S. Burroughs thought not. In one of his interviews in the collection The Job, he offers a series of extracts from the academic and literary intellectual organs of his day, bloated with jargon and empty phraseology. Here, he implies, is the truly incomprehensible. He then contrasts it with a series of words and images quoted from Rimbaud. Here, he says, is lucidity. Even if Rimbaud is not "understandable" in the sense of offering a linear narrative or structured logical argument, nevertheless, at the level of language—in terms of his ability to convey an image to the reader's mind—he was the model of clarity. 

Burroughs could have said the same of Nobel Prize-winning poet St.-John Perse, who also reportedly influenced Burroughs's literary development. I have just been reading Perse's Anabasis—an epic prose-poem set in an aestheticized ancient world reminiscent of Flaubert's Salammbô or the Temptation of Saint Anthony. Here is a work of poetry that is "incomprehensible," if one seeks narrative resolution or strictly rational development. But, in the sense in which Burroughs found Rimbaud to be comprehensible, Perse too is an eminently clear writer. He fulfills the criterion that Burroughs set for all language: it should approximate as closely as possible the technique of the hieroglyphic. It should communicate an image for a concrete thing, not an abstraction; and it should send it straight to the mind, with minimal ideological or conceptual filtration. The more abstract language becomes, Burroughs says, the further away it gets from truth; the more it can deceive and mislead. And there is nothing abstract in Perse's poem. 

Once I had accepted that I was not going to find a linear development in the poem, and that it should be appreciated on the same level at which Burroughs appreciated Rimbaud, I suddenly found Perse a great deal more enchanting. I started to underline certain images that the poet conveyed. Many of them are indeed startling. A child is glimpsed in one scene who is "as sorrowful as the death of apes." Why of apes, specifically? Don't overthink it: the line would not work half as well, nor be so strangely evocative, if it were the death of anything else. There is another passage in which a landscape is described as being "more chaste than death." Here is aesthetic romanticism in the finest Flaubertian sense (the Flaubert of the historical novels, that is; not the Flaubert of the realist works). Here is Flaubert's immense "melancholy of antiquity," translated into poetry. 

Here as in other passages, the poem is intensely visual. It even managed to evoke my surroundings here in Iowa. In one of his poems, John Berryman speaks of Iowa as a "pastless" state "with one great tree in it." I wonder if he had been reading Perse—for here the poet speaks of "a great/ land of grass without memory," and near it is to be found "the Place of the Dry Tree." Berryman (who taught for a time at the University of Iowa, and evidently conceived a distaste for it) wrote of Iowa's "pastlessness" (read: "without memory") with disdain. But Perse, like the Australian novelist Gerald Murnane, is evidently a writer who could appreciate the romance of empty, memory-less grasslands (Murnane returned to the theme in both The Plains and Inland). As Perse writes of the beauty of grasslands—ancestral home of all humanity on the Savannah, after all—"Plough-land of Dream! Who talks of building?—I have seen the Earth parceled out in vast spaces[.]" And I seem to see amber waves of Iowa grain swaying before me. 

I have been quoting, by the way, from the definitive T.S. Eliot translation, which introduced the poem to an English-speaking public. But I am not beholden to Eliot's poetic muse alone for extracting these images from the poem. In fact, reading through the French original—which is helpfully published side-by-side with Eliot's translation—some images struck me much more forcefully in the French version than they had in the English. Partly it's that my French is so terrible and only half-remembered from high school, that the occasional wholly-comprehended phrase had greater impact simply for being interpretable. But there were also places in which the imagery and vocabulary in the original seemed frankly superior to Eliot's rendition—more vivid and direct. Nor was this due exclusively to certain untranslatable felicities that can only be achieved in French. Occasionally, the problem seemed to be more with Eliot's own prudishness. 

There were two places in particular, in which Eliot's delicacy seemed to force him to adopt euphemistic and value-laden terms in place of the raw and concrete image in the original. And what makes this particularly objectionable is that it introduces precisely the element of abstraction that Burroughs regarded as fatal to all language and meaning. It takes what was a concrete image with a clear referent in the original and turns it into a verbal construction, laden with ideas and value-judgments having nothing to do with the pure content. Take, for instance, the passage in which Perse describes "les lois contre le goût des femmes pour les bêtes." In the original, goût could be translated merely as "taste." At a stretch, it could be taken in context to mean "lust" or "desire." But in either case, the term appears value-neutral. Yet Eliot renders it as "depravities," which introduces an aspect of moral condemnation that is not present in the original. Perse's pure image—presented without editorializing or narrative context, in the spirit of the Symbolists of earlier generations—becomes in Eliot's hands something far more abstract. (Then there is Eliot's euphemistic "made water," which delicately translates Perse's much more visceral "urinaient.")

This is the sense in which the really quite limpid imagery of the Symbolists and the moderns can be made to seem "incomprehensible." People confront these images, and they want to know what the poet thinks about them. They want to know whether he approves. Even Eliot, so often derided as an image-mad incomprehensible modern himself, falls prey to this tendency. He wants to introduce a note of editorial comment. But the poem works much better if we resist this impulse. When reading this sort of poetry, we shouldn't assume it is doing something other than what it is. We should strive to read it in the spirit of hieroglyphics. We should take the Burroughs approach, and see in its words the concrete image of the thing itself—not the thing as processed through human concepts or ideology. We should approach these poems as an opportunity for a direct confrontation. We can escape the urge to ascribe meaning that isn't there; let go our restless craving for "interpretation," and simply let the poem be itself. As Archibald MacLeish put it: "a poem should not mean but be."