Paul Valéry has been compared with T.S. Eliot as a poet who stands, as the introduction to The Idea of Perfection puts it, “as a boundary stone where the old culture passes into the new.” The fresh translation by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody is a bilingual edition with the original French text facing the English renderings of the poems (a cross-section spanning the 1890s through 1940s) but with excerpts from Valéry’s extensive Notebooks in English only. Not unlike the recently published journals of Allen Ginsberg, poetry arises from the prose Notebooks.
But it’s for poetry that Valéry is remembered outside France. He emerged from the fin de siècle Symbolists and seldom entirely eluded their influence for long. In his own words (an irony?), he expressed the desire to go “beyond the reach of words,” past the “imperfect likenesses” of reality’s surface.
