POETRY

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31500, 14 October 1967, Page 4

POETRY

Five Great Odes. By Paul Claudel. Translated by E. Lucie-Smith. Rapp and Carroll. 88 pp. The work of Paul Claudel is a rarity. Hto religious confidence and dogmatism give his poetry a coherence and a unity of purpose that is not found in the more reserved twentieth-century Catholic writers. His style, closer to Hebrew parallelism than any other major modern verse, combines with cautious Imagery to produce an effect like "the Song of Solomon"; this is supported by a pattern of “theme and variations,” phrases recurring throughout a poem to a slightly modified form. In range his mythology is impressive, but always oaplicit enough to deny tiie reader that false, academic illusion of accomplishment in recognising an allusion. Claudel does not attemp* to flatter his readers. Rather, he deplores the spiritual hopelessness and escapism of his nlneteentha—htyr .. predecessors and attempts to make Ms fellowmen .aware of the control of *e > *Rpirtt r ' over everything And ho succeeds in this: his religious certainty imbues the non-Catholic reader with envy of Such deep Involvement to the "full Credo of things visible and invisible.” Related to this Is Claudel's complete disregard for literary fashion; as a result of his rejection of the school of Baudelaire, he adopts Pindar as Ms structural model, and ooooequontly Ms poems seem

retrogressive In style as well as thought. In the Fourth Ode, he even retains the system of strophe, antistrophe, and epode. The least successful poem In the book is the first, addressed to the Muses: Claudel's total prostration before the pagan deities Is Incongruous with the fervent Catholicism of the other odes. At times his adulation for the Muses descends to an almost franiied rhetoric which oould make ono sceptical about the emotional basis ef his Christianity. But In spite of this the poem is worth reading for the theory of composition It presents: a state of subjection to the Muse that even Vergil thought obsolete! Perhaps this anomaly is resolved in the “Fourth Ode? the Muse who is Grace,” in which the poet acMeves a much more intimate relationship with his Muse, who gradually develops into Grace, only to be violently rejected by the poet Claudel Is not a difficult poet to translate, and Edward Lucte-Smlth, himself an accomplished poet, succeeds in producing both a complete transcript of Claudel’s ideas, and a very competent assimilation of his style. This is one of the few translations of poetry that ono ean read confident that It is very dose to the original work. This is the first English version of the "Cinq grandes odes," first published in 1910, and it contains also the “Processional to Greet the New Century," which is usually ineluded in French editions.