Guillevic/Levertov: The Poetics of Matter

Abstract

Denise Levertov's introduction to and translations of the French poet Eugene Guillevic in her volume Guillevic: Selected Poems are revealing of her own poetics, most particularly in terms of her relation to nature. Indeed, a poet's take on another poet usually reveals as much about the former as it does about the latter, and often is motivated by what the former wishes to take away from those materials, or reinforce in herself. Guillevic's interest is in and to a great degree so is Levertov's, although for her is often placed into the context of other researches. The term nature, however, begs the questions relevant to what is being invented in these poetries, and why it might be that Levertov found Guillevic's poetry engaging enough to spend her time translating it. First of all, nature here seems to mean objects, both manufactured ones that still bear the traces of their original mineral identity, and unworked ones that comprise part of the world of non-human force: in short, objects are things that present themselves as heavy, dense, opaque, and real, over and apart from human identity and use. But also means immediacy, a reference not only to presence but also to a present tense that, it is held, we can actually grasp by relating to a past: which means, in this case, by relating it to the eternal, to the fact that it always was, and will be, as if presence itself were a proof of the eternal. But above all, what is of interest in these two poetries is the invocation of in terms of a notion of the unconscious, as if there were a way in which the raw materials of the physical world were not merely alien activities but parts of ourselves still beyond our reach. Rather than locating the unconscious in some mythical elsewhere, or in a psychic compartment that, if one is lucky, one might come into contact with only through speech, these poets locate the unconscious, to slightly alter the context of a Husserlian formula (but only slightly), in the things themselves. A provocative thought--that the unconscious lies in the raw materials and physical objects that surround us. I suspect that sculptors and painters are more aware of this possibility than are others. Guillevic is that rare serious poet who thinks he sees a limit to language, a point at which poetry gives way to the contemplation of things as they are--a point Levertov herself simultaneously posits and desires to go beyond. Born in 1907, Eugene Guillevic is generally thought of as one of the major French lyric poets of his generation, along with, perhaps, Jean Follain. His principal collections of poetry include Terraque (1942), Executoire (1947), Gagner (1949), Carnac (1961), Sphere (1963, Avec (1966), and Euclidiennes (1967), from which Levertov's selections are drawn; Ville (1969), Paroi (1970), Inclus (1973), and Du Domaine (1977) all appear later. Guillevic is not, in any traditional way, an especially difficult poet, as is for example his contemporary Rene Char (they were born in the same year); nor for that matter is he as good a poet as Char, at least in terms of interrogating language. During the occupation Guillevic joined the Communist Party, and a fair portion of his poetry is of a directly political nature. Chiefly, however, he has been regarded as a poet of and often as a poet who can illuminate nature's darker tones. What seems to impress Levertov--and what no doubt leads her into the translation of Guillevic, with the implicit support and insight such translation could lend to her own writing--is the promise of vision. In Voir (To See, GSP 6) Guillevic writes: Il s'agit de voir Tellement plus clair, De faire avec les choses Comme la lumiere. Levertov renders this quite literally: It's a question of seeing so much clearer, of doing to things what light does to them. (GSP 7) Compare this to section S of Relearning the Alphabet (RA 118), the poem which I take to be the finest of Levertov's career: I turn in the forest. …