Paul Valéry

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His mind was his material and his method
GREAT BOOK
Symbolist brilliance

Selected Writings of Paul Valery
Paul Valery
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Monsieur Teste

ASIN: 0811202135

Customer Reviews:

His mind was his material and his method .......2006-01-26

This volume consists in selections of Paul Valery's writings. Valery was a thinker and poet whose own intellectual path was a unique one. He began by writing poetry but then in his early twenties decided to abandon poetry completely in order to devote himself to the study of his own mind, the study of his own creative process. And so he began that lifework of every morning sitting down and writing down his observations, his thoughts about his creative process. Early on he had the hope that this will lead him to something like a mathematically complete system of understanding of the mind. Later on, his ambitions became more modest.
After twenty years of poetic silence he at the urging of others resumed writing poetry and wrote among other things 'La Jeune Parque' which is in this volume. This work made him famous , something he regarded as a very mixed blessing. But the fame enabled him to find new ways of making a living when his work for the Defense Department of France, terminated.
This present volume contains 'Le Cimitiere Marin' 'Le Jeune Parque' excerpts from 'Monsieur Teste ' and the drama 'Mon Faust'.
In the essays one feels Valery's unique and great aphoristic powers, powers which are felt even more strongly in his Notebooks.
Valery is a concise, precise, thought- provoking writer. He is an intellectual figure of great integrity and singular determination.
He is also inspiring. Reading these words of his many years ago I too felt myself' thinking in aphorisms'.
I conclude here with a section from Joseph Epstein's outstanding review of the English translated edition (in five volumes) of Valery's 'Notebooks'.

"Rilke once remarked that what drew him to Paul Valéry's writing was the "finality" and "composure" of its language. His lucidity on complex subjects is what excites; his ability to capture the essence of the questions, issues, and problems that the rest of us find puzzling if not impenetrable is what amazes-and that he was able to do so with an almost assembly-line regularity is itself astonishing. "

What gives Valéry's prose its gravity, lucidity, and chasteness is what he excludes from it. He disliked irony, except in conversation, and felt that it chiefly gave a writer an air of superiority, adding that "every ironist has in mind a pretentious reader, mirror of himself." He also had a distaste for eloquence, "because eloquence has the form of a mixture, adapted to a crowd. It has not the form of thought." He cared more for precision than profundity, and precision was only accessible through the utmost clarity: "the kind that does not come from the use of words like `death,' `God,' `life,' or `love'-but dispenses with such trombones." No trombones, no trumpets, no brass section in Valéry's prose; a solo cello, deep strings played under perfect control and superior acoustical conditions, is all we ever hear."

GREAT BOOK.......2005-05-04

I'm very glad I discovered Paul Valery. He is a source
of enlightened wisdom equal to any Zen master. While
I suspect that some of the translations (the book contains
multiple translators of multiple items) may be a bit ponderous,
if you have patience you will find incredible wisdom in this
GREAT BOOK. Valery wrote from the point of view of the absolute
center of consciousness...tempered by the experience of mortality.

Symbolist brilliance.......2000-04-05

When Valery was writing, the Symbolist movement had already died down, but he was nonetheless accurate in defining, describing, and practicing it. The essays contained in this edition are exquisite. The prose is probably the closest thing to Pater you'll find in French--despite Symons' declaration that the brothers Goncourt were the French Paterians, I found more of that in Valery than in the Goncourts. The poetry is also interesting, although to a lesser extent.

Master and Friends: The Collected Works of Paul Valery (Bollingen Series)

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Master and Friends: The Collected Works of Paul Valery (Bollingen Series)
Paul Valery
Manufacturer: Princeton Univ Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0691098433

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Paul Valery: An Anthology
Paul Valery
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Art of Poetry
Paul Valery
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Paul Valery: An Anthology
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Mallarme in Prose

ASIN: 0691018804

Book Description

All of Valery's major meditations on the theory and practice of poetry are included in this volume. T.S. Eliot writes in his introduction that Valery "invented, and was to impose on his age . . . a new conception of the poet." In Valery's own words, the poet is characterized as a "cool scientist, almost an algebraist, in the service of a subtle dreamer." Valery focuses his attention on the deliberate formal work that transforms the dream into the poem, in his own poems, as well as in analyses of La Fontaine, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, the Symbolists, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and others.</p>

Monsieur Teste
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High modernism and source of theater of the absurd

Ancient Truth surfaces again

Monsieur Teste
Paul Valery , and Jackson Mathews
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Art of Poetry

Paul Valery: An Anthology

Selected Writings of Paul Valery

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ASIN: 0691018790

Book Description

The famous opening line of Monsieur Teste -- "Stupidity is not my strong suit" -- is typical of Monsieur Teste, and of Valery as well. Although not autobiographical in any usual sense, the book is profoundly personal. Valery said he could not imagine the existence of the novel, vet he could not resist the character living in his mind. On the one hand. Monsieur Teste reflects Valery's preoccupation with the phenomenon of a mind detached from sensibility; on the other, he is an ordinary fictional character seen from many viewpoints. This volume also includes '"The Snapshots of Monsieur Teste, " excerpts from Valery's Notebooks.

Customer Reviews:

High modernism and source of theater of the absurd.......2003-08-22

According to the introduction of Jackson Mathews, translator, Valery saw everything from the point of view of intellect. He was preoccupied with the pursuit of consciousness. The conscious mind was his obsessive center. Valery reports he had a reckless desire to understand. He says that writing requires a sacrifice of the intellect.

In the novel MONSIEUR TESTE it is stated that a superior man is a man who has deceived himself. The character tries to seek out inner masterpieces amid the brilliance of published discoveries.

My introduction to this work occurred years ago when I was a college student. I half understood the French in which the class was conducted. I struggled. I surmised the work was brilliant through the lecturer's description. I now ratify that judgment.

The work MONSIEUR TESTE is filled with arresting ideas. The narrator in the story seeks to know Monsieur Teste, to copy him. He is careful not to classify him among the mad.

Monsieur Teste says that he is at home in himself. In his room there is not a book in sight. There is a strong impression of the ordinary. Valery portrays a great refusal similar to my mind of that undertaken by Marcel Duchamp who in the latter years of his life refused to practice his art and only played chess. In fact there is a reference to chess in this work. Valery's work dates from 1896, predating, of course, the shape of the artistic career pursued by Marcel Duchamp.

Madame Teste describes her husband's moods as uncertain. She reports that their priest has compassion for Monsieur Teste, for a man so isolated. He says the Monsieur Teste's faces are innumerable. He believes that Monsieur Teste is cut off from both good and evil.

In his log book Monsieur Teste notes that he is not made for novels or plays. His goal seems to be an individual regulated by his own powers of thought. It is observed that in Paris the French have stored all of their ideas in one enclosure. In Paris there is a great concentration of literature, the sciences, the arts and politics. The chaos of a multitude of minds is tiring. "[S]uperiority is merely a solitude situated at the present limit of a species." Monsieur Teste is the man who thinks continually.

Up until a rather mature age Monsieur Teste is not aware of the singularity of his mind. He states he is not turned toward the world. His face is to the wall. An intellectual's end is a funeral march of thought. A snap shot from the notebooks yields the notion that admiration for genius is due to attributing to it the power of working miracles without fatigue. Another thought set out is that of trying to describe a man camped in his life. It is asserted that there is no perfect correspondence between feelings and the verbal-conceptual system.

Monsieur Teste thinks his mind is partly instinctive, partly scientific. His quickness of thought is in accord with absention from action he observes. Intelligence is the power of substitution. The mind moves by images. Images and change are inseparable. Education leads to including ones self with others. The most agonizing punishment to be imposed on anyone is to treat him with rigorous objectivity. The brain, too much occupied internally, deals brutally with external things. Monsieur Teste is a mystic and a physicist of self-awareness. The statement that the isolated eye amuses itself gives a flavor of the book. Notes are found at the back of the book.

Ancient Truth surfaces again.......1998-05-01

This book gives us what paul Valery thinks, and what he thinks is the forgotten basis of many thoughts

The Art of Poetry. Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume Seven (7)

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The Art of Poetry. Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume Seven (7)
Paul Valery
Manufacturer: Pantheon / Bollingen
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000I73DWC

The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag

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The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag

Manufacturer: Hoover Institution Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Labor Policy | Popular Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0817939423

Book Description

Until now, there has been little scholarly analysis of the Soviet Gulag as an economic, social, and political institution, primarily owing to a lack of data. This collection presents the results of years of research by Western and Russian scholars. The authors provide both broad overviews and specific case studies as they examine <ul>

The various forms of coercion and the channels through which coerced labor was distributed under Stalinism's heyday, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s</li>

Why the Gulag emerged and its perceived economic rationale</li>

The chronology of the Gulag from the first major projects—such as the White Sea-Baltic Canal—to the unfinished plans of the 1950s</li>

The day-to-day costs of maintaining the Gulag and the great hidden cost of coercion—the loss of productivity</li>

How the Soviet leadership desperately sought to find the right balance between extreme coercion and extreme material incentives for the labor force—and how material incentives played an increasingly greater role in later years</li>

How Stalin's death provided the excuse for radical reform and the end of the Gulag</li> </ul> Seen together, these contributions present an extraordinary portrait of a major aspect of the Soviet approach to economic achievement whose results should provide an invaluable lesson to future generations.</p>

The Collected Works of Paul Valery: Degas, Manet, Morisot (Collected Works of Paul Valery, Degas, Manet, Morisot)

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The Collected Works of Paul Valery: Degas, Manet, Morisot (Collected Works of Paul Valery, Degas, Manet, Morisot)
Paul Valery
Manufacturer: Princeton Univ Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0691098395

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Degas, Manet, etc.
David Paul , and Paul Valery
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | History & Criticism | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0691018820

Book Description

The full text of Valery's book on Degas, with a long essay on Corot, others on Berthe Morisot, Manet, and Daumier, a personal recollection of Renoir, and writings on sculpture, portraiture, Italian painting, and several minor arts.

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Important translation of an obscure masterpiece.

LA Jeune Parque
Paul Valery , and Alistair Elliot
Manufacturer: Bloodaxe Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1852243872

Customer Reviews:

Important translation of an obscure masterpiece........2000-12-01

This book is close to being a model for the presentation of translated material. (Only close: the absence of line numbers, and other such quibbles, make it fall short of the ideal.) Elliot's text is a single long poem (512 lines) published in 1917 by the French poet Paul Valéry (1871-1945), whom some call the last of the Symbolists. The poem took the author four years to write, and it immediately established his reputation as a major figure in French poetry.

Meticulously crafted and ineffably musical, but alas fearsomely difficult, the text was considered obscure even by the author - so what hope have we got? Much more now, given Elliot's rendering and his judicious though not copious notes.

What of the translation itself? I thought it was fresh and modern: perhaps often too modern and too easy, for such a work of scintillating surfaces and unfathomed depths. Given that the translator does not circumscribe his choices by the burden of rhyming (though the original is composed in rhymed Alexandrine couplets), one might have hoped for more soigné workings, more true to Valéry's own wonted register. But then, maybe I'm just old-fashioned!

I am preparing my own translation of this poem, and it is to be in rhymed pentameters throughout. This is indeed possible, and it will not (despite Elliot's opinion) take 16 years! Here, for comparison, are three versions of the first six lines:

Valéry:

Qui pleure là, sinon le vent simple, à cette heure

Seule, avec diamants extrêmes?... Mais qui pleure,

Si proche de moi-même au moment de pleurer?

Cette main, sur mes traits qu'elle rêve effleurer,

Distraitement docile à quelque fin profonde,

Attend de ma faiblesse une larme qui fonde,

Elliot:

Is that the simple wind? If not, who's crying

There at this hour alone with furthest diamonds?

Who's there, so near me at the point of crying?

This hand, dreaming its way across my features,

Distractedly obeying some deep order,

Looks for a tear to melt out of my weakness -

Me:

Who's weeping there? Or could it simply be

The wind that weeps, so very close to me

When I, alone with diamond stars, would weep?

Distracted by some purpose pure and deep

This hand is resting where it dreams it strokes,

All poised to catch the tear this hour provokes...

Elliot says in his introduction that he has met only one other person who has read La Jeune Parque. There should certainly be many more now, thanks to his efforts, on which I heartily congratulate him.

Authors:

Authors

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