Claudel later said of Connaissance de l’Est that “a threat hangs over the book
like the extreme lucidity of days before typhoons”. Its title, rendered by
Lawler as Knowing the East, contains an untranslatable etymological pun on
birth and knowledge – “Co-naissance” – and the pangs of Claudel’s
self-parturition as a poet and a Catholic are everywhere evident in the
psychomachia that plays itself out over the course of the volume. During his
initial years in China, he seriously considered taking holy orders, and
during his ten-month leave of absence in France in 1900 – the very year the
Boxer Rebellion erupted – he visited the monasteries of Solesmes and Ligugé
(where Huysmans would be received as an oblate the following year), but was
not accepted. On the ship back to China, Claudel fell passionately in love
with Rosalie Vetch, the model for the character of Ysé in his 1906 tragedy
of erotic entanglement, Partage du midi, and on his return to Fuzhou, set up
house with his femme fatale, her husband and their four children. News of
this irregular domestic arrangement and of Claudel’s purportedly shady
business dealings with the husband, François Vetch, eventually reached the
Quai d’Orsay and, although the matter was hushed up by Claudel’s protector,
Berthelot, he was discreetly placed on administrative leave in early 1905.
Back in France, he pursued the obscure object of his desire, now the mother
of his illegitimate child and living with another man, to Brussels – which
led to further denunciations. The following year, having decided to settle
into the safety net of a conventional marriage, he was reassigned to China
where he served as consul in Tianjin from 1906 to 1909 while writing the
Pindaric Cinq Grandes Odes that would establish him as a major poet.
It was in Tianjin that Victor Segalen (1878–1919) first met the author of
Connaissance de l’Est, a work that had been of signal importance in
determining his vocation as a sinologist. Segalen had been trained as a
doctor at the École de Santé Navale in Bordeaux, working on a thesis on the
role of synaesthesia in the writings of French Symbolism and Naturalism. In
1902 he sailed for Tahiti with the French navy; forced to spend two months
in San Francisco convalescing from an acute case of typhoid, Segalen made
his first discovery of Chinese culture (and, more importantly for him, of
its writing implements) in the city’s Chinatown. He arrived in the Marquesas
Islands in 1903, just a few months after the death of Gauguin: out of this
one-and-a-half-year stay in French Polynesia would grow his later Hommage à
Gauguin (1918) and the novel Les Immémoriaux (1907), a tribute to the
vanished Maori civilization, composed from the point of view of a fictional
native bard – the prosopopoetic voice of the Other here serving as a
pointed ethnographic reply to Pierre Loti’s colonial Tahitian exoticism. On
his return to France via Ceylon (where he studied Buddhism) and Djibouti
(where he tracked down traces of Rimbaud), Segalen published articles on
music and poetry in the Mercure de France and became friends with Debussy,
to whom he proposed the libretto “Siddhartha” and a project on the myth of
Orpheus, both stillborn. In 1908 he began seriously studying Chinese at the
École des Langues Orientales and the Collège de France, passing the exam
that certified him as an official naval “élève-interprète” of the language
the following year.
When Segalen arrived in Peking in mid-1909, he lost no time in contacting
Claudel in nearby Tianjin. The meeting, however, proved to be a major
disappointment: having admired the latter’s paean to the Chinese written
character in his celebrated prose poem “The Religion of the Sign” (a text
that bears comparison to Pound’s or Michaux’s later meditations on the
ideogram), Segalen was shocked to discover that his literary idol, by his
own admission, knew barely a word of the language; and as for the hint of
“abyssal” Taoism that he thought he glimpsed in Connaissance de l’Est, he
now realized that it was all based on a second-rate French translation of
Lao Tze – in short, when it came to a knowledge of the traditional culture
and philosophy of the Middle Kingdom, the consul was a rank amateur, filled
with contempt for the innate “mediocrity” of the Chinese. Segalen, by
contrast, was in the process of reinventing himself as an expert sinologist,
hoping to combine his career as a doctor with that of a scholar, explorer
and literatus. In late 1909, he set off on a major journey on horseback into
northern and western China in the company of his wealthy adventurer friend,
Gilbert de Voisins; the two would return to Shaanxi province on an
archaeological expedition five years later, discovering not only what was at
that point the oldest surviving piece of Chinese sculpture (the “Horse
Treads on the Hun” statue associated with the Han dynasty general Huo
Qibing), but also locating the tomb of the First Emperor, Qin Shihuang – the
site of the buried Terracotta Army, first excavated in 1974 and now one of
the most visited tourist attractions in the world.
As Segalen later observed in a letter, the China that fired his imagination
was radically different from Claudel’s: whereas the latter had only
superficially peeled off the southern coastal rind of the great orange,
Segalen instead wanted to squeeze out its full continental juices,
especially the archaic pungencies of its half-forgotten dynasties. Like the
Central Asia of Saint-John Perse (whose 1925 poem “Anabase”, composed while
on diplomatic assignment to Peking, grew out of his travels in Outer
Mongolia and the Gobi desert region), Segalen’s China is a place of vast
expanses traversed by the traces of nomadic cultures, a gateway to Turkestan
or Tibet, a portal on to an ever-mysterious, ever-elusive “arrière-monde” –
certainly not the cloying sweet-and-sour sauce served up by what he
derisively referred to as Claudel’s Cantonese cuisine. But as Briques et
tuiles and Équipée, his posthumously published travelogues of these 1909 and
1914 expeditions show, what sets off Segalen’s China from Claudel’s is not
merely the spatio-temporal opposition between North and South or between
proud imperial past and degraded colonized present; rather, two distinct
epistemologies are at work. Whereas the poet of Connaissance de l’Est never
managed to escape from an egotistical sublime founded on the ecstatic fusion
– or apocalyptic “co-birth” – of subject and object, Segalen’s exposure to
the Idealism of Kant instead encouraged him to develop what in his “Essay on
Exoticism” he defined as an “aesthetics of the diverse”, that is, a
sceptical and relativistic acknowledgement that the beauty of the Other as a
Ding an sich resides precisely in its refusal to be understood (or, for that
matter, colonially appropriated) by the Same.
Segalen’s deepest quarrel with Claudel, however, revolved around the latter’s
aggressively proselytizing brand of Catholicism (even Benedetto Croce, his
Italian translator, called Claudel a “guerrilla for Christ”). Segalen’s
strict religious upbringing in Brittany had rendered him violently allergic
to the Church, and indeed to all forms of institutionalized religion. In
1913, for example, he sketched out an antinomian drama entitled Combat pour
le sol, a fiercely sarcastic rewriting of Claudel’s 1901 mystery play, Le
Repos du septième jour, which had illustrated the traditional Jesuit
argument that Chinese religion (such as it was) merely prefigured the more
genuine and universal revelation of Christianity to come and that the figure
of Son of Heaven (that is, the Chinese Emperor) served only to announce the
arrival of the true Son of God before being historically fated to disappear.
As for the inevitable demise of the Chinese Emperor, even though this seemed
to be borne out by the recent revolution of 1911, Segalen’s pro-Manchu
novel, Le Fils du ciel (a French translation of an imaginary Chinese text by
a make-believe court chronicler of the last days of the Qing Dynasty), held
on to the obstinate belief that, without the “admirable fiction” of the Son
of Heaven, the entire symbolic edifice of the Middle Kingdom would collapse
– hence his enthusiastic support for China’s new Napoleon, the generalissimo
Yuan Shikai, to whose son he served as personal physician in 1912–13.
Segalen’s notion of “fiction”, formulated to counter the damnable “lie” of
organized religion, was inspired by his readings of Nietzsche (or at least
the Nietzsche of his turn-of-the-century French popularizer, Jules de
Gaultier). In a series of letters written to Claudel in 1915 in response to
the latter’s missionary attempts to save his soul, Segalen outlined a credo
based on “la doctrine spectaculaire et l’esthétique essentielle”. Refusing
the idea of a personal God and the possibility of redemption by anyone other
than oneself, he instead insisted on “le grand illusionnisme du monde, la
prestidigitation des apparences sur lesquelles on a soufflé et qui s’en
vont”. This Nietzschean view of the world as a theatre of beautiful and
fleeting illusion, he remarked, was close to that of Taoism – “cette vision
ivre de l’univers: d’une part, la pénétration à travers les choses lourdes,
et la faculté d’en voir à la fois l’avers et le revers; d’autre part, la
dégustation ineffable de la beauté dans les apparences fuyantes”.
With the exception of his anti-novel, René Leys (recently reissued by New York
Review Books) and his studies of Chinese art (The Great Statuary of China
and Paintings), most of Segalen’s writings on China – which come to some
1,000 pages in his two-volume Oeuvres complètes – remain untranslated into
English. Stèles, first published privately in Peking in 1912 and then
revised in 1914, has been better served in English translation, no doubt
because its poetry offers a late Symbolist counterpart to Ezra Pound’s
contemporaneous Cathay: previous translations include those by Nathaniel
Tarn (1969), Michael Taylor (1987) and Andrew Harvey and Iain Watson (1990).
But it is only with Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush’s handsomely
produced new critical edition that English-speaking readers can at last get
a sense of the book’s exquisite layout through their en face facsimile
reproduction of its original mise en page. As a physical objet d’art, the
Peking edition of Stèles is an Oriental rarity worthy of the library of Des
Esseintes – fin-de-siècle aestheticism here taken to extremes by its
author’s fetishistic attention to the material textures of book production
and design. Segalen had the first three dozen copies of the book printed on
Korean imperial tribute paper made from silk floss and mulberry bark, the
better to register the bleeding of type into the page. These pages were in
turn pasted together to form a single long sheet of paper which was folded,
concertina-style, on to itself – a technique traditionally used for Buddhist
sutras but which also alludes to the infolded hymen or “unanime pli” of
Mallarmé’s ideal inviolate Book. The volume was then bound with boards of
camphor wood tied up with two ribbons of yellow silk and engraved with the
title in both French and Chinese (the characters Gu jin bei lu, “A Record of
Steles Old and New”). Segalen restricted the initial print run to eighty-one
copies (nine times nine, the number of tiles on the roof of the inner palace
of the Forbidden City) and, in the second edition, included sixty-four poems
(eight times eight, the number of hexagrams in the Book of Changes). The
silence that greeted the volume on its initial publication in 1912 was near
total: Claudel, to whom the volume was graciously dedicated, took a year and
a half to reply, and then only with faint praise; the only person to have
fully grasped Segalen’s bibliographical experiment in cultural
cross-dressing was the ever-alert Remy de Gourmont.
The sixty-four steles displayed in Victor Segalen’s imaginary museum, each
poem-tablet lineated into short prose paragraphs and framed by a rectangular
rule, are thematically divided according to the spatial coordinates of
traditional Chinese cosmography. The initial “Steles Facing South”, spoken
in the persona of an emperor of the fictional Kingdom of the Self, mock the
various foreign religions that had implanted themselves in China – Nestorian
Christianity, Manichaeism, Buddhism – in world-weary tones that recall the
ironic fatalism of Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians”. The subsequent
section, “Steles Facing North”, explores the opaque relation between Self
and Other on a more personal level – the vagaries of male friendship,
unrequited desires. “Oriented Steles”, perhaps the weakest section of the
book, in turn moves into lyrical poems of praise of the beloved, with
fragments lifted from the Confucian Books of Odes and Li Po, here recomposed
into the sensual, anaphoric cadences of the Song of Songs. In “Occidented
Steles”, the devotion the poet feels for his Sovereign Lady is translated
into the loyalty the soldier shows to his Prince even in the face of death:
the fundamental conflict between Subject and Object is here dramatized in
epic fashion as the battle between Warrior and Foe. The following “Steles by
the Wayside”, many of which are spoken by the stone tablets themselves,
apostrophize various passers-by in celebration of spirits of the place,
while the final section, “Steles of the Middle”, leaves two-dimensional
space altogether in order to delve into the netherworld of the innermost
(and most ineffable) Empire of the Self – the domain of the Hidden Name, a
secret realm beyond all representation and (in an obvious slap at Claudel’s
Connaissance de l’Est) inaccessible to all forms of knowledge.
The various cultural and epistemological impasses explored in Stèles – the
Self’s inability to comprehend the Other or, obversely, its narcissistic
misrecognition of itself as a doppelgänger instance of the Same – are in the
end only resolved at the purely aesthetic level of the text. Indeed, when
asked to define the purport of these poems, Segalen inevitably characterized
them as experiments in sheer form. Writing to his mentor Jules de Gaultier
in 1913, he observed:
"The Chinese stone steles contain the most tiresome of literature: the
praise of official virtues, a Buddhist ex-voto, the pronouncement of a
decree, an exhortation to good conduct. It is therefore neither the spirit
nor the letter, but simply the “Stele”-form itself that I have borrowed. I
deliberately seek in China, not ideas, not subjects, but forms. I thought
the “Stele”- form might lend itself to a new literary genre, which I’ve
tried to establish with a few examples: a short text, bordered by a kind a
rectangular frame in the mind and presenting itself to the reader in frontal
fashion."
Above all conceived as a “mould” into which he might pour his thoughts, a
“Stele” for Segalen is therefore an empty rectangular surface (or blank
face, as it were) awaiting inscription, a site ready to receive the lapidary
traces of the (Chinese) Other and reflect them back at the (Western) reader,
who in turn will supply the shifting mental frames for their beholding. At
their most modernist (and most conceptual), Segalen’s Stèles can be seen as
a kind of combinatoire – serial variations on a pre-established matrix or
grid whose abstract signs (as he notes in his preface) “do not express; they
signify; they are”. At their most traditional, their “new” genre rejoins the
ancient practice of epigram – whether this harks back to the incised
compactions of Martial or Maurice Scève or to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sense
of the sonnet as “a moment’s monument”, carved in time.
But as this new and handsomely annotated edition of Stèles eloquently
demonstrates, the “form” in which Segalen is most fundamentally working is
in fact that of translation – Walter Benjamin around this period was among
the first to speak of translation as a (neo-Kantian) “form”. Segalen had
initially thought of presenting the volume as a collection of
(pseudo-)translations along the lines of Pierre Louÿs’s “Sapphic” Chansons
de Bilitis or Prosper Mérimée’s “Illyrian” La Guzla, but decided in the end
that he would rather leave the status of Stèles “equivocal”: it would
ultimately be up to the reader to decide whether these were translations or
original compositions. One of the great merits of this edition is to
underscore just how pervasively these poems deconstruct the hierarchical
distinctions between original and copy through their elaborate intertextual
play of quotation, adaptation, plagiarism, pastiche and, of course,
translation. Billings and Bush have surpassed all previous editors of the
book in sleuthing out all its Chinese sources, as well as the various French
or Latin translations of the dynastic texts the poet was working from:
sinologists will discover the Borgesian archive of Segalen’s vast readings
in Volume Two of this edition, conveniently available online. What emerges
out of all this is the radically bilingual nature of Segalen’s poetics, for
this edition asks that we read his Chinese seriously and not just
decoratively (particularly the idiogrammic epigraphs that flank the titles
of each poem and the various calligraphic punctuations of the text) while at
the same time attending to his thereby deterritorialized French.
Yeats once commented that in some of Pound’s Imagist lyrics it seemed as if
the poet “were translating at sight from an unknown Greek masterpiece”. The
same uncanny impression is frequently created by many of Segalen’s Stèles,
as Haun Saussy points out in his brilliant foreword to this edition,
subtitled “How to Translate from a Nonexistent Original”. For just as
Segalen spoke of transferring “the Empire of China into the Empire of the
Self”, that is, of derealizing China into a purely imaginative, purely
allegorical topos of his own transplanted identity, so in Stèles he manages
to produce poems that hover somewhere between actual and virtual
translation, producing what Saussy calls a “parallax or interlanguage”
through the unstable encounter of two semiotic – and cultural – systems.
This, as Benjamin argued, was the highest and most messianic mission of
translation – to release that “reine Sprache”, or “sheer language”, that
lies in the space in between (and beyond) the mutual estrangements of all
human utterance. To the extent that Segalen’s Stèles are already engaged in
this task of translation at every point within the reticulated inscriptions
(or in Chinese, wen) of their own stone tablets, the en face English
versions by Billings and Bush can only look on helplessly from a distance,
obviously overawed by the enigmatic aura of the Sino-French originals.
Richard Sieburth’s editions of Ezra Pound’s Poems and Translations and
Pisan Cantos appeared in 2003. His new translation of Georg Büchner’s Lenz
was published in 2005.
