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Anthology too big for its own good

Saturday, 30 April 2005

The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, edited by Mary Ann Caws. Yale University Press, 2004. 646 pages, $35 To begin, it must be stated that The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry is an absolutely necessary book. The last major anthology of French poetry came out all the way back in 1986 (The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, edited by Paul Auster), and this volume fills a much-needed gap and brings readers up to date. It also must be said that Mary Ann Caws is a deft translator, and one of the foremost scholars of modern French literature alive today. The task of putting this volume together was certainly daunting, and its publication is an important achievement. That said, it’s time to move on to what’s wrong with this book. Its first problem, and this leads to many others, is that The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry is too ambitious, too sweeping for its own good. Professor Caws has included as many poets as she could. She did not confine herself to poets working in France, but includes Francophone poets from all over the world. This is worth doing, but because of the desire to include so many poets, very few are well represented. Financial constraints probably prevented this anthology from being presented in two volumes, but the public would certainly have been better served. The material is presented chronologically, with introductions for each era. Within each delineated era, the poet’s work is presented in alphabetical order. Poets who appear in one section does not appear in any other, no matter how long and productive their careers were. Poets who had long careers might be represented with three poems, at most, from any period in their writing lives, but they are pigeonholed in the book, placed in the era in which their careers began. To offer one good example that illustrates the limitations of Professor Caws’ methods, there is the great poet and novelist, Louis Aragon. Aragon, along with Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault, was one of the founders of surrealism. He was publishing poetry until his death in 1980. Aragon is represented by three poems, none of which appear in the recent French selections of his work. Two of the poems are from the surrealist period; the other, from 1970, is about the surrealist period. The only way to find out that the third poem was written 50 years after the others is to consult the acknowledgements at the end of the book. The fact that Aragon’s poetry was important in the Second World War, and that after the war he wrote some of the most beautiful and complex love poems of the last century, is overlooked. It is probably a mistake to assume that many of the poets presented in The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry have had their careers shown in a similarly truncated fashion, but one must suspect that, especially when most poets are represented with only two or three poems. There are some other problems as well. The introductory sections focus perhaps too much on how the French writers have influenced American poetry rather than on their worth for their own sake. There is a great emphasis on theories and movements and not much on how well any movement produced poetry. Still, this anthology does accomplish much. It whets a reader’s curiosity, which is probably the main function of any compilation. The translations are graceful, for the most part, and the original French is presented on the facing page. The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry is up-to-date and inclusive. Still, it’s only a starting place, and the English language reader doesn’t have that many places to go for contemporary French poetry. Mark J. Mitchell’s poems can be seen in the anthologies Line Drives, Oenopoetica and Hunger Enough.

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