[Wgcp-whc] A. Russo on M. Deguy, Gisants (minutes)

Wed May 6 21:16:03 EDT 2009

French School Boy:                 "What do you think about when you  
write a poem?"

Michel Deguy:     "About the poem, and more precisely, about the poem  
I'm writing."

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8u4t8_metropolis-michel-deguy_news

Cher Tous,

On Friday, May 1, 2009, the WGCP met with Adelaide Russo to discuss a  
segment of her book-in-progress on the French philosopher and poet,  
Michel Deguy. The chapter under consideration is provisionally  
entitled "La poésie limitrophe: Michel Deguy's Gisants" which, as the  
title says, develops a consideration of the trope (linguistic figure)  
as limit or boundary in, among other texts, Deguy's prize winning  
collection, Gisants (1985) which is available in Wilson Baldridge's  
English translation by Wesleyan University Press (2005)--some of  
these poems were circulated prior to the session, in French and in  
English.  The essay/chapter in question may eventually take part in  
Adelaide's next book, a much-needed, English language monograph on  
the works of Deguy, the working title of which, is _Michel Deguy's  
Perspicacity_.

Discussing the work-in-process of a regular group member provided  
those unfamiliar with Deguy an opportunity to gain some entrance to  
his complex work. And, for Adelaide, the session served as a sounding  
off, a testing out of the problems and questions she is encountering  
in reading Deguy, and in presenting his work to an exclusively  
Anglophone audience. By the end of the session, in a gesture that  
nicely encapsulated the dialogue we shared, it was proposed that the  
challenge of presenting Deguy's work to an American audience was  
three-fold: one needs to account for Deguy's position and evolution  
as philosopher; one needs to account for Deguy's craft and  
investments as a poet; one needs to contextualize and give relief to  
the historical implications of Deguy's contributions to French  
(indeed, global) intellectual culture throughout his lifetime (he was  
born in 1930).

Very briefly, some of the important contributions highlighted in the  
introductory segment of our session included : Deguy's longstanding  
role as a reader for Seuil (one on France's most prestigious  
publishing houses); his founding and continued editorial role in the  
influential journal _Po&sie_; his early collaboration with Les Temps  
Modernes and later with the journal Critique; his presidency of the  
Collège International de Philosophie; his collaboration with J.  
Roubaud in anthologizing translated American poetry (_Vingt poètes  
américains_, Seuil, 1980); his numerous books of poetry (only two of  
which have been translated into English, the aforementioned, and  
_Donnant donnant_ [_Given Giving_, trans. Clayton Eschleman, intro.  
Kenneth Koch] U California Press, 1989]); his numerous books of  
philosophy (none of which have been translated into English; one must  
mention, at the very least, _La poésie n'est pas seule_ (1987)  
[Poetry is not alone] and _La raison poétique_ (2000) [Poetic Reason]).

Another way of accounting for the Deguy's influence and evolution is  
to think critically about various modes of correspondence and  
exchange present in his work as well as in his biography. In addition  
to mentioning his frequent visits to the States (and dialogues with  
writers in Buffalo, NYC, and elsewhere), Adelaide was careful to  
insist on Deguy's early admiration for, and direct appropriation of,  
the poetic legacies of Joachim du Bellay, Charles Baudelaire,  
Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry; these allegiances betray a  
concerted effort by Deguy to inscribe for himself a place in the  
canonical pantheon of French poetry, and precisely in such a way as  
to take cognizance of his historicity as a poet and, perhaps even  
more importantly, to inscribe into his becoming as poet the traces of  
this tradition, elements of which Deguy sets in relation to the  
limits of figuration, often informed by questions in phenomenology.  
Deguy's volume of poetry entitled _Tombeau de du Bellay_, for  
example, might be approached as a kind of recapitulation not only of  
the defense and illustration of a new poetic language (French was  
just coming into its own 1549 when du Bellay championed its merits),  
but also of the tombeau, the touchstone elegiac genre recursively  
reworked by Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry, having since become the  
test-piece most capable of registering poets on the ledger of the  
singularly distinguished.

This remark led to a inquiry of the tombeau-poem as a peculiarly  
French literary genre. Does American writing have any comparable  
tradition?  We have plenty of elegies, but with few exceptions (e.g.,  
the heavily French-influenced Hart Crane), American poets seldom  
write poems on the subject of tombs per se.

One of the central problems Adelaide presents in the chapter we  
considered is the importance of the recumbent (le gisant) as a poetic  
genre, or modality of lyrical expression: Or, to cite the questions  
directly from Prof Russo's essay, " what are gisants, and, if there  
are not enough thematic and formal constants to propose a generic  
designation and description, what do these poems have in common?" A  
second citation may also be useful, if only to indicate the extent to  
which the seven poems entitled 'Recumbents' (en)act in concert thanks  
to their very name; here are the terms in which Adelaide explains and  
contextualizes the title itself: "The word gisant, a substantive  
derived from the verb gesir, refers to a funerary effigy which shows  
a figure in a reclining posture, distinguishing it from an orant or  
priant, funerary statues in which the subject is depicted kneeling.  
Through the ages the representation of death in gisants has changed.  
In the thirteenth century, they were idealized visions depicted as  
living, their eyes open, waiting for resurrection. After the scourge  
inflicted by the Plague in the late fourteenth century, they became  
images of the passage from life to death, 'le gisant transi,'  
emaciated skeletons that suggest destruction instead of the hope of  
rebirth." While we were not able to discuss all seven "Recumbents"  
during the session, it was suggested that mourning and intimacy are  
elements that unite these poems, and that serve as a unifying thread  
throughout this collection poetry, if not also as emblems of the  
boundary line demarcating life and death, presence and absence,  
presentation and representation that is recursively figured in  
Deguy's writing, if not most fundamentally, in his thinking of and  
through the poem at each instance of its composition.

Among the many biographical correspondences we highlighted in Deguy's  
corpus, none piqued so much the interest of our group as his  
conversation with translators, or our conversation with Deguy in—and  
against—translation. Translation, in the metaphoric sense, that is,  
in the sense of bridging the distance between two worlds, appears to  
be a central concern for Adelaide in writing her monograph, not only  
because she, as critic, has taken on the task of interpreting a  
French poet for an Anglophone audience, but also because the inquiry  
of transposing thought in poetry (and vice versa?) is a perpetual  
movement for Deguy. In addition, the more grounded, literal sense of  
translation, is also omnipresent in the work and has, according to  
Adelaide, long animated Deguy's thinking not only about poetry, but  
also about the very condition of being (a poet) in a global (and  
multi-lingual, multi-cultural) context. To this end, much heated  
discussion erupted around an anecdote mentioned in passing in the  
poem "Traduction" : reportedly, while attending an international  
poetry festival about translation, Deguy asks a Bengali poet if she's  
been translated into the conference's lingua franca (English, of  
course) to which she replies: "what matters to me is that my poem be  
read by millions in Bengali."

A number of group members raised various issues concerning Deguy’s  
seeming enthusiasm for the (still nameless) Bengali woman’s position:

-       To what degree does this rejection of globalization or this  
defense of cultural “specificity” entail an implicit (and potentially  
problematic) attachment to an explicit (or implicit) nationalism?

-       How is such a national-languague-ism complicated by the  
relative hierarchy of various world languages (French, we needn't be  
reminded, is also a colonial language) … comparison between the use  
of French in former colonies (e.g. Algeria) and the current  
international dominance of English as the language of globalization

-       The French language has many speakers (as does Bengali, for  
that matter), but what about poets working in languages with very few  
speakers, such as Nahuatl? For those poets, translation might take on  
a different kind of importance.

If Deguy sees translation as deeply problematic, it is particularly  
in the context of international poetry festivals, where poets have to  
provide versions of their poems that can be easily translated into  
English for the benefit of the judges--like Roubaud, one of his  
concerns is the erasure of difficulty and singulrity. He sees this  
process as fatal to poetry… and thus, in the poem "Translation" Deguy  
ominously meditates (and finger points): "Will America carry off the  
earth into its dream, in its Funeral Protection, into its after life"?
Returning then to “Translation,” it was suggested that prior to  
dealing with national identity, like Deguy's Gisants, this poem  
resituates the problem of alterity and, taking that a bit further, we  
might figure Deguy as poet of difference.  Opting to leave  
"difference" aside, Adelaide preferred the figure of "distance" in  
talking about Deguy, for to her mind it better characterizes the  
space between an original and a translation, and would be useful in  
figuring other forms of the liminal in Deguy's work.

Reflecting on what the discussion was showing her, Adelaide  
characterized herself as a close reader by nature; but, she observed,  
the nature of translation problematizes the issue of “close reading,”  
particularly in the case of Deguy’s works. When asked to say what  
particularly engaged her in Deguy's poetry, what constitutes him as a  
major French poet of his generation, Adelaide spoke of the  
metaphysical stakes of his writing and an energy based on despair  
that is, somehow, paradoxically (or not) a testimony to, or a  
conjugated echo of, a "harmony one might call divine."

Jean-Jacques Poucel

& Caitie Barrett, compilers of notes

The Beinecke Library / Whitney Humanities Center Working Group in  
Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets every other Friday at 3:00pm in  
room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, 55 Wall  
Street (the corner of Church and Wall). To receive announcements  
about the WGCP’s meetings and events via e-mail, subscribe to the  
group’s list-serv at :
http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/working-group-in-contemporary- 
poetry/

A couple more links:
"Prose"  http://france.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/ 
cms_module/index.php?obj_id=2133

A Deguy poem translated into English for an international poetry  
festival :
http://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/pub.php/en/Revista/ 
ultimas_ediciones/71_72/deguy.html

M. Deguy reads and speaks in English at the European Gradaute School,  
with formal introduction by Alain Badiou
  http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=michel 
+deguy&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox- 
a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=6PcBSpa9GOSVlAfOpPDmBw&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&res 
num=4&ct=title#

"Heiddeger said the poet and the philosopher are two brothers living  
on very distant mountain tops… in Michel Deguy, both are dwelling in  
the same person"

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