Category Archives: French Literature

Things Happen

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The Family, 1988 by Paula Rego

This weekend, finally, Paula Rego’s retrospective at the Tate Britain, the first time I’ve seen most of these extraordinary paintings outside of books. Spanning seven decades from the surreal to the austere, the experience was as powerful as seeing Goya’s black paintings in Madrid for the first time, the same feverish intensity. The same day, the first visit in almost two years to the Royal Opera House for Leos Janácek’s Jenůfa, also the first time I’ve seen and heard a live performance of the first opera I bought on CD when still a teenager (for reasons I no longer recall).

Asmik Grigorian as Jenůfa and Karita Mattila as Kostelnička in Claus Guth’s staging of Janáček’s opera at the Royal Opera House

Reading this weekend took the form of drifting between Virginia Woolf’s essays, Geoffrey Hill’s Now and Collected Poems, 1952-1992, Jacques Roubaud’s essays on poetry, and slowly rereading Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. I’m also continuing to languidly thin my library, aiming for a collection that is both smaller and more concentrated.

Ovid in the Third Reich

By Geoffrey Hill

non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare,
solaque famosam culpa professa facit.

Amores, III, xiv

I love my work and my children. God
Is distant, difficult. Things happen.
Too near the ancient troughs of blood
Innocence is no earthly weapon.

I have learned one thing: not to look down
So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,
Harmonize strangely with the divine
Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.

Getting away from the gang (Pascal Quignard)

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[..] fleeing at full speed whenever I catch sight of bodies that have any sort of faith in any sort of institution or being; fleeing the feebleminded and atrocious conviviality of our time; building a lesser dependency within a small network of polite expressions,
of harmonies between grammatical tenses and musical instruments,
of small softer regions of the skin,
of certain berries, of certain flowers,
of rooms, of books and of friends,
this is to what my head and body devote the essential part of their reciprocal, always unadjusted, finally almost rhythmic times.

Pascal Quignard, The Hatred of Music, translated by Matthew Amos and Fredrik Rönnbäck

Deaths (Michel Serres)

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We no doubt became the humans we are from having learned – will we ever know how? – that we were going to die. . . But, by ending up destroying our lives, death constructs them: without the stiff cadaver it leaves behind, without the sex it was long believed to imply or the irreversible time it brings about, would we ever have painted the walls of caves, lit fires, sung within the lacework of language, danced for the gods, observed the stars, demonstrated geometrical theorems, loved our companions, educated children, lastly lived in society?

Michel Serres, Hominescence, translated by Randolph Burks

Autumn Lament (Mallarmé)

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Thus, my favourite time of the year is those last, lazy days of summer which immediately precede autumn, and my favourite time of the day for walks is when the sun perches for a moment on the horizon before setting, casting yellow copper rays on the gray walls and red copper rays on the window panes. Similarly, the literature my spirit turns to for pleasure is the dying poetry of Rome’s last moments, so long as the verse gives no whiff of the revivifying Barbarian invasion to come, and there’s no hint of the first Christian prose pieces.

Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, translated by Barbara Johnson

Literary Language (Maurice Blanchot)

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It seems that literature consists of trying to speak at the moment when speaking becomes most difficult, turning toward those moments when confusion excludes all language and consequently necessities a recourse to a language that is the most precise, the most aware, the furthest removed from vagueness and confusion—to literary language.

—Maurice Blanchot, Kafka and Literature, translated by Charlotte Mandell