April Harvest, Swans, and Joys

April Harvest, Swans, and Joys is an English-language translation of the first, second, and fourth books of poetry by Francis Vielé-Griffin (AD 1864-1937): April Harvest (Cueille dʼavril, 1885), Swans (Les Cygnes,1887), and Joys (Joies, 1889) from the early years of the French poetʼs life.

Francis Vielé-Griffin was an American by birth, having been born in Virginia. As a boy of seven or eight years old, he was sent to France to attend school; he remained. By 21 years old, and fully proficient in French, he was an adherent, and one of the principal and early practitioners, of the Symbolist movement in poetry, which grew out of the Decadent movement. A close friend of Stéphane Mallarmé, he was also a great believer in free verse.   

In his own words, Griffin says this (from Joys): “The verse is free verse; – which means nothing more than that the ʻoldʼ Alexandrine with one or more ʻcæsura,ʼ with or without ʻrejetʼ or ʻenjambment,ʼ is abolished or done away with; but, more generally, [it means] that no fixed form is considered as the necessary mold anymore for the expression of all poetic thought; that from now on, consciously free this time, the Poet will obey the personal rhythm that must be, without M. de Banville or any other ʻlegislator of Parnassusʼ intervening; and, finally, that talent shall resplend in different ways than by the traditional or illusory ʻvanquished difficultiesʼ of rhetorical poetics: Art is not merely learnt, it recreates itself continually; it does not live by tradition, but by evolving.” 

In the appendix is an extant chapter (“His Thought”) from Francis Vielé-Griffin: Son Oeuvre, Son Pensée, Son Art, by Jean de Cours. 

Early Poetry by Auguste de Villiers de lʼIsle-Adam (AD 1838-1889) was first published in 1859 (as Premières poésies in French). It contains, as explained in the preface, Villiers' poetry written before his twentieth year: “The author of this volume is nineteen years old. – It is... with a certain modesty that he releases these first pages.” He need not have been so modest. The poetry is mature in execution and thought, rich in feeling and imagery; Romantic by and large, it anticipates the Decadents; it is something that a more seasoned poet would have been proud of, with the sometimes added benefit of the enthusiasm of youth.

The poetry speaks for itself:

Muse, what an admirable and rare privilege!

By instinct, she shrugged her shoulders white as snow 

Before all that life offers with its impure ennuis; 

Like a statue of sovereign forms, she accepted,   

With a withering smile the human miseries 

   And sorrows of obscure days.

Anguish and terrors had rocked her before: 

As for solitude, she was weary of it; 

Our vain words, sorrows, sufferings, regrets, 

Brushed her without leaving any more of a trace 

Than a flight of vultures leaves on the surface 

   Of the Ocean with its dark secrets. 

 – From “Song the Third: Compassion,” Hermosa 

Windows and Doors is Richard Robinsonʼs third book of poetry, written between 2022 and 2024. The poetry is both modern and not so modern. You could compare it to a book of sacred and profane verse cowritten by Robert Herrick and Ezra Pound while both are half-inebriated and imitating Arnaut Daniel and Paul Verlaine (anachronically, of course). A sample would be illustrative: 

I am so utterly alone, and pathetic, 

My heart bleeds like St. Teresaʼs 

In Richard Crashawʼs poem;
 

Of friends I have none, save you, 

O my Lady, and a questioning heart 

That prizes you and fears you.
 

My enemies are multiple and fleet, 

They do not come to the temple 

And worship at her conquering feet.
 

My wife and son, my mother 

And brothers, all friends and lovers –   

Are all so furiously against her... 

I am so utterly alone, and pathetic, 

My heart bleeds like St. Teresaʼs 

In Richard Crashawʼs poem. 

A Silver-Grey Death (银灰色的死 in Chinese) and Drowning (沉沦), both by Yu Dafu (郁達夫), are short stories written and published in 1920 and 1921 respectively. Both tell the story of a young man, a Chinese national, living and studying in Japan in the early 20th century. Both are based (in part) on experiences in the authorʼs life.   

Yu Dafu is perhaps unique, among Chinese writers of the period, as an author of decadence – in the literary sense, and in ways that should interest (if not please) Western readers. In both stories are themes of loneliness, desire (for the opposite sex), frustration, heavy drinking, and (in at least one of the stories, if not both): death. Both are succinct in their descriptions and both are beautifully written, sometimes hauntingly so. The narratives move at a clip.

Drowning is hands-down Yu Dafuʼs best-known work (in the West and in the East). It is the story of a young Chinese national who leaves his motherland, China, to study abroad in Japan. A loner by temperament, he soon finds himself “feeling pitifully lonely...” A self-styled poet, he recurs to nature, taking long walks in the countryside outside Nagoya. But dwelling frequently in nature and reading books all alone only go so far for a young man who regularly practices onanism in his room, immediately regrets it, fantasizes about his landlordʼs daughter, and is sexually attracted to just about every girl he meets. It is only a matter of time before he finds himself in a Japanese “tavern” where a young Geisha girl with bad breath serves him too much sake. You can imagine the rest, or you can read the story.    

The Ride of Yeldis & Other Poems by Francis Vielé-Griffin (AD 1864-1937) was originally published in 1893 in France (under the title of La chevauchée dʼYeldis et autres poèmes). This is the first English-language edition of the work, by the pre-eminent French Symbolist poet, whose dreamy style recollects Rimbaud, and also, strangely, Wallace Stevens. Griffin was born in the U.S., but emigrated with his mother to France at the age of seven or eight, not long after the Civil War ended. 

The poetry speaks for itself: 

The turrets that covered Her with their shadow 

Rose like organ pipes against the sky, 

Those evenings in June, with countless voices; 

And, really, all the music 

That vibrated on the terraces rich in honey, 

Throughout that slow, sun-drenched June, 

Was like one long canticle, 

Of many voices, filled with wonder... 

  * * * 

In an odor of tossed hay, 

In a murmur of the rustic ford, 

Through the diaphanous shade, 

Come: oblique shadow, 

The hay smells of love, 

The waterʼs song is tender, silent, grave 

Like a distant canticle 

– The year has made its round. 

Enamels and Cameos, by Théophile Gautier (AD 1811-1872), was originally published in 1852.  Théophile Gautier was an incredibly gifted, influential, and popular French author of the period, who wrote novels, short stories, plays, ballets, poetry, and travelogues. Today he is best known, at least to the English-speaking public, for his poetry. The poetry he wrote could be called Romantic, or it could be considered in reaction to Romanticism. However qualified, it is lyrical, inventive, and highly imagistic. One can see the influence he had on such poets as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Villiers de lʼIsle Adam. He is known to have influenced Oscar Wilde and Ezra Pound. Here is an example of his poetry, from “Obelisk Nostalgias,” in this volume:
  

  Scraping the motionless azure, 

  With my vermillion pyramidion, 

  With my shadow, on the sand, 

  Sketching the sunʼs progress!
 

And this from “Secret Affinities”: 

  You before whom I burn and tremble, 

  What rosebush, what pediment, what wave, 

  What dome has known us together, 

  Pearl or marble, flower or ringdove?
 

This edition also contains, in appendix, a critical essay entitled Théophile Gautier by Charles Baudelaire, the famous French poet and critic, who was a contemporary and acquaintance of Gautier.   

The Good Song (originally La Bonne Chanson) was the third book of poetry written by French poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896). Originally published in 1870, The Good Songʼs theme is love. More particularly its theme is love for, and anticipation of marriage with, his future child-wife, Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville. It includes all the concomitant feelings one might expect from the poet: love, joy, elation, doubt, fear, nuptial desire or passion, to name only a few. Their romance took place with the Franco-Prussian War in the background. Having appeared during the war, it was according to Victor Hugo “a flower in a shell.” It represented, according to Edmond Lepelletier, a “transformation,” a “change in poetic matter” and “a transition piece... the passage from objective, descriptive, plastic, externalized poetry to personal expression, to a confession of the soul, to the notation of battles of the heart or excitations of the brain.”    

Included with this translation, in the appendix, is an extant excerpt of chapter VII, “Marriage – The Good Song (1869-1871)” from Edmond Lepelletierʼs “official” biography of Paul Verlaine: Paul Verlaine: His Life, His Work. 

Poems Saturnian (2nd Edition: English-French) by French poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) is the first book of poetry that the “Prince of Poets” wrote. This is the book that launched his career. First published in 1866 under the title of Poèmes Saturniens, the influences are clearly Romantic and Parnassian: Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Leconte de Lisle principally, but also Théophile Gautier, Catulle Mendès, Théodore Banville, and Albert Glatigny even.   

The poetry speaks for itself.  

   Memory, memory, what do you want from me?    

   In the fall, thrushes fluttered through the atonal air,  

   And the sun was shooting a monotonous arrow  

   Through the yellowing woods where the bise blared. 

  We were alone, and we were walking while dreaming,  

   Our hair and our thoughts to the wind, she and I.  

   When, turning her face to me, she said, suddenly,    

   “What was your finest day?” in a voice golden and lively.   

   Her sweet and sonorous voice, with its angelic timber.  

   A discreet smile of mine gave her the answer, and  

   Devotedly, I kissed her pale white hand.   

   – Ah! the first flowers, how sweetly scented they are!  

   And what a charming sound the first “yes” makes  

   When it exits the lips and mouth of the beloved! 

Septentrion by Jean Raspail is a dystopian novel set in the year 2041. Itʼs a story of beauty and sadness, a story of the ugly things that happen in the world, and the courage of an elect few who happen, against all odds, to hold a line, to preserve a culture, a civilization, a way of life that they love and embody, but which is on the verge of extinction, assaulted. The enemy: the demos, the grey masses, todayʼs people. Unwilling to compromise, and unlikely to succeed, they flee – north, the only place left to escape to – on a train, through the dark forests and the snow-clad steppes of Septentrion.  

“The signs were accumulating, all across the north of the country, far from the capital and its golden steeples, without our noticing their exact consequences. Vaguely we understood how, without really knowing why. Everything happened so quickly... We understood barely that a sort of different eternity was advancing rapidly, in an inform and inexorable way. Nothing would be the same, nothing would ever change again, once it happened.”  

“One cannot be a man, fully, from the moment one admits that others exist. For one is no more than a copy, a vague facsimile drawn from a billion examples. One mustnʼt know anything about others, or at least by ruthless choice, unless it is how to invent oneself on oneʼs own, – everything has been so repeated.” 

Fêtes Galantes & Songs Without Words are the 2nd and 4th books of poetry by French poet and author Paul Verlaine.  

Fêtes Galantes (Fêtes Galantes in French) was originally published in 1869. A common theme running through these poems is the scenes, characters, and props of French comedy, semi-civilized pastorals, and commedia dellʼarte, – figures like Harlequin, Colombine, Pierrot, Leandre, Innamorati, etc., against natural backdrops and Watteau-like dreamy landscapes, with all the appurtenances that one might expect: mandolins, lutes, masques, moonlight, prettily clad women, moss-covered benches... – interfused with the sentiments, melancholy, amorous longings, joys and regrets of the poet.  

Songs Without Words (Romances sans paroles in French) was originally published in 1874. The common theme in these poems is the amorous and sentimental love lost, found, and lost again between the poet and his childhood female cousin, or his child wife, or his new-found friend and fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud against a backdrop of the Ardennes, the Belgian countryside, Brussels, and London. It includes perhaps Verlaineʼs most famous poem: “Il pleure dans mon cœur...”

Cull of April (Cueille dʼavril in French) is the first book of poetry written by Francis Vielé-Griffin (1864-1937). It was first published in 1885, when Griffin was 21 years old. Griffin was American by birth, born in Virginia. As a boy of seven or eight years old, he was sent to France to attend school; he remained. 

Cull of April is said to show influences of the Decadent school of poetry, which was in vogue at the time.  

Here is what Émile Goudeau says about the Decadents, in his whoʼs who of Belle Epoque poets and artists, Ten Years a Bohemian: “The newcomers rallied around master Verlaine, or chief Mallarmé, and from there come the Decadents (of which the Deliquescents are nothing but parodists), the Symbolists, and the Instrumentalists.... the word decadent implies, beyond affectation of style, a certain disorder fundamentally, hybrid blend of old religions and refined mores; that was also what the decadents strived for; a particular sadism where Catholic incense is detected in loathsome places, and where the sanctuary has foul smells of face powder or even washbasin water.” 

Perhaps he was right, hereʼs a line from “Euphonies,” in Cull of April, which would seem to corroborate: 

I ramble on return from vain lassitudes, 

Have we not dreamt of other beatitudes? 

Ourigan, Oregon is a collection of poems, divided into two distinct groups, distinct in terms of time and temperament, but also wildly different in style, influence, and purpose. They were written by two different authors over two hundred years apart: William Clark of the Corps of Discovery, in 1804-1806, and an anonymous author, possibly posthumous, and seemingly from Portland, Oregon, in the years 2017-2019. Where the two meet is in the places and things found up and down and along either side of the Columbia River, the lifeblood of Oregon, from as far east as Dog River (modern-day Hood River) or even the Dalles, to the western shores of the U.S., where the Columbia River vomits sweet water into the brine of the “great Pacific Octean.” To say that William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame, wrote poetry in his journals sounds far-fetched: he wrote in a prose that is, however, highly poetic in places. These are the Ourigan poems, co-authored, or rather edited, by Richard Robinson. They are 95% pure Clark: misspellings, warts, poetry and all; and 5% Robinson: editing, meter, rhythm, and rhyme where it works. The anonymous poems – the Oregon poems – are written, seemingly, as recollections in tranquility by an author whose background and whereabouts are equally uncertain. The poems were written in the same places along the river that Clark visited. But their themes, although similar, are wildly different. There is, in addition, a very particular pinch of modernness to them, which some might call depravity.    We leave it to the readers to judge for themselves whether this collection of poetry coheres, or abruptly falls apart and dies, like water over an edge, or like autumnal leaves dropping, one by one, into the river, as they quietly “mend their way south” and “keep far from the strand.” 

The School of Women, by Nicolas Chorier (1612-1692), is an erotic novel written and published in the mid to late 17th century France. It has a convoluted history, much of it made up: Luisa Sigea, a female Spanish poet, had purportedly written the original in Spanish (Sotadic Satire on the Mysteries of Love and Venus); later Johannes Meursius, a Dutch classicist, purportedly translated it into Latin (Elegantiæ Latini Sermonis...). From there, it made its way into French and later English, multiple times.

This translation in English, from the French, contains the first 5 of 7 dialogs between two young women protagonists, Tullie and her younger companion, Octavie. The plot is simple: Tullie, the more experienced of the two women, has been asked by Octavieʼs mother to instruct her daughter on how best to satisfy her future husband in bed. Unsurprisingly, the dialogs themselves take place in bed. Itʼs a coming of age story of sorts for Octavie, and a paean to tribadism as well as to the heterosexual love between a man and his wife.

Very graphic in nature, – if written today, it might have had a subtitle of “How to please your man in bed, while practicing on a woman.” Highly erotic – it is definitely not a book for children, and may not be a book for some adults even.   

The Pornographer (Le Pornographe), written by Restif de la Bretonne and published in 1770 originally, is a novel, in epistolary format, that includes a serious proposal of rules for prostitution, at a state level, to address the problem of syphilis ravaging Europe at the time, as well as a counteractive to the degradation of public morality.

To say that French author Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne (1734–1806) was ahead of his time is, for anyone who knows his work, – and they are few – so platitudinous itʼs not funny. The man had an uncanny ability to synthesize history as far back as ancient Greece, and that of his own pre-Napoleonic era, and to project it onto our present, his future, as easily as a man casting a shadow on the ground at 3 pm. His ideas on the inequality of the classes, for instance, as a main cause of modern prostitution are both simple and brilliant. His strong words against the poor treatment of Native Americans immediately after the discovery of the New World, from which event syphilis was imported into Europe, is painfully relevant. His support of the working class (the “third estate”) and womenʼs rights over that of nobility, Church, and males anticipated ideas later encoded in the laws of Western societies, and the struggles today to keep said laws “honest.” Would it surprise any one of his readers that he probably coined the term “Pornographer,” over two hundred twenty-five years before the popularization of the Internet? With an eerily hyper-modern, politically correct, opinion on many things – he would have fit in most perfectly in this third decade of the twenty-first century, making many of us modern folk appear old-fashioned and dull – as perhaps no other 18th-century man of letters of France, or of any European country for that matter, could.  

Two Novellas: Francine Cloarec's Funeral & Benjamin Roses – published in 1881, and written by Léon Hennique – are two delightful sketches or snapshots capturing French life during the French Second Empire or early Third Republic.   

The author, Léon Hennique (1850-1935), studied painting as a young man before turning to writing. This will be of little surprise to readers of Francine Cloarecʼs Funeral, which feels like a painting: one steps back in time into a tableau by Monet or Renoir on reading it. Benjamin Rozes is of similar style, but also different. Both stories are light, entertaining, charming, and endearing.   

Léon Hennique was a friend of, and collaborator with, Émile Zola, the founder of Naturalism, as well as with J.-K. Huysmans, with whom he co-authored a theatrical play, Pierrot sceptique (not included).   
 

This is a large-print edition. It is also available for Kindle. 

Theresa the Philosopher & The Carmelite Extern Nun: Two Libertine Novels from 18th-Century France, 1748/47. 

Theresa the Philosopher, by the marquis dʼArgens (purportedly), was published in 1748, over 270 years ago – before the modern era, before the Napoleonic phenomenon, before the Directorate, before the French Revolution. It is a happy tale with a happy ending, with not a little bit of hanky-panky slapped in between. Compared to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, published in 1740, which was the first modern (albeit English) novel, whose characters are more than two-dimensional and whose story depends more on what happens inside the mind of the characters than, say, where a boat might go (like Robinson Crusoe for example) – Theresa the Philosopher is scandalous. Compared to the marquis de Sade’s Justine, which was published in 1791, it may seem tame. According to the marquis de Sade, Theresa the Philosopher “achieved happy results from the combining of lust and impiety... [it] gave us an idea of what an immoral book could be.” 

The Carmelite Extern Nun, written by Anne-Gabriel Meusnier de Querlon, and published one year earlier, in 1747, is another whopper. It is the “Amorous True Story [of Saint Nitouche], the Carmelite Extern Nun, Written by Herself, and Addressed to her Mother Superior.” It is anticlericalism, antiestablishmentarianism, and eroticism –  the three main pillars or themes, sometimes even agendas, of the 18th century libertine novel – all in one short, but fast-paced, scandalous sack.    
 

Songs for Her & Odes in Her Honor (two books in one) by Paul Verlaine (1891, 1893); translated by Richard Robinson, 2021. (Originally Chansons pour elle, & Odes en son honneur.)  The first things that come to minds and lips, when thinking about Paul Verlaineʼs poetry, are music and nuance. It is through his heightened employment simultaneously and regularly of those two attributes, of those two mesmerizing attributes of his often absinthe-like poetry, that Paul Verlaine, the poet, really shines, – brightly, not incandescently, but fluorescently, like the greenish-blue polestar on a winterʼs night. But the poetry found in Songs for Her (1891) and Odes in Her Honor (1893) is somewhat contrary to the commonly held ideas of what Paul Verlaineʼs poetry is or “should be,” in terms of nuance;  it is just as musically virtuosic or experimental as his earlier poetry was, which we all know and love. Because these are poems of mostly physical love, but also emotional love, between a middle-aged man and a woman (two women actually, just not à trois) – there is arguably little need for, and little use of, nuance. They are paeans to physical love. 

Paul Verlaine didnʼt set out to be Petrarch in these two books of poetry. And neither Philomène, the tantalizing tart at least twenty years his junior, the “her” in Odes in Her Honor; nor Eugénie, his practical and good-hearted if not somewhat ugly and thick-necked bed partner, the “her” in Songs for Her, – neither of them, those two muses, are like Laura.   

Fanchetteʼs Pretty Little Foot by Restif de la Bretonne, 1769; translated by Richard Robinson 2020. Originally Le Pied de Fanchette in French, this was an  early novel by Restif de la Bretonne, published in 1769. The story is a cross between the fairytale Cinderella, from 1697, and Samuel Richardsonʼs moral story (actually libertine novel) Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, from 1740. Now, Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper was originally a folk tale dating back at least 2000 years ago to a similar tale from Greece or Egypt, but it was made famous in the modern era (at least for Western audiences) with the 17th-century publication of French writer Charles Perraultʼs version of the tale, and more recently still by the 20th-century release of Walt Disneyʼs animated movie. But one does not have to be a scholar of French fairytales, Hollywood movies, or 18th-century English libertine novels to appreciate this simple, but delightful tale about a young and virtuous bourgeois girl, the daughter of a wealthy fabric merchant, whose parents die while sheʼs still a teenager, leaving her to fateʼs fortune in then-naughty Paris. She is pretty as a belle [sic] and even more virtuous, but it is her prettier little foot in especial that gets her into all kinds of trouble. Who would have thought that a girlʼs foot, embellished by a rich slipper, could be so attractive and seductive? Leave it to the French to capitalize on that. Or leave it to Restif de la Bretonne in this charming story, which is really a comedy, to bring it front and center. Interestingly, this novel was the first to give a name to a sensual preference called shoe fetishism, or “retifism” in French (after the authorʼs name, Restif).

Ecclesiastical Laurels: or Abbot de T***’s Campaigns with the Triumph of the Nuns, &c., by Jacques Rochette de la Morlière, 1748; translated by Richard Robinson, 2020. The title of this story, Ecclesiastical Laurels (originally Les Lauriers ecclésiastiques), foreshortens in two words the basic plot: a commendatory abbot, the Abbot T***, wages war on the field of love. After several conquests, of varying degrees of success, with women at various levels of society and of various vocations, he progresses from a complete neophyte in the rules and etiquette of love-making and seduction, through a middle period of maturation and rage, to finally being fulgurated by the woman of his future happiness and “legitimate passion,” who, as chance might have it, is a nun. His successes, or conquests, earn him his laurels, imaginary leafy crowns that are more like garter belts.   

One subtitle of this story, the “Abbot de T***ʼs Campaigns,” further emphasizes the libertine tendencies of the main character and plot. But if anything, it is soft-libertinage, where the main character could be described as a mélange between ambitious young lover Julien Sorel (of Stendhalʼs Le rouge et le noir, also a bildungsroman) and master seducer Valmont in Choderlos de Laclosʼ Les liaisons dangereuses.