That Light All at Once. Selected Poems
That Light, All at Once. Selected Poems, by Jean-Paul de Dadelsen. Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. 205pp. $30 (hardcover).
Though many poets aspire to literary posterity, their hope for biological longevity can be even less certain. We think of Keats, Plath, Apollinaire, Wheatley, Rimbaud, etc., and wonder what poetic gems they might have written if granted two or three more decades of life. To this list we might add the name of the Alsatian poet Jean-Paul de Dadelsen (1913-1957), who died of a brain tumor at the age of forty-four. His life in poetry, however, was far briefer. Dadelsen wrote poetry as a student with an academic interest in German Romanticism, translating German writers into French. Fate had other plans for him, however, and World War II found him fighting in a tank regiment, his valor in battle earning him the Croix de Guerre. A fruitful career in journalism followed, and it wasn't until his late thirties that Dadelsen returned to poetry, his first published poem appearing in Albert Camus's newspaper, Combat, in 1955, only two years before his death. The poet wouldn't live to see the publication of his verse in book form. That wouldn't happen until 1962, when Gallimard published a slim selection under the title Jonas.
Marilyn Hacker's volume of English-language translations is the first to appear since Edward Lucie-Smith's British edition of Jonas (titled Jonah, published by Rapp and Carroll) in 1967 and should create impetus toward stimulating critical interest in Dadelsen's work outside of France. (As of this writing, a search of the MLA International Bibliography retrieves just three articles, only one of which —"Camus and Dadelsen's Jonas," from the Spring 1982 issue of Modern Language Studies — is in English.) Hacker's selection is more generous, and her translations have a smoother, more contemporary cadence than Lucie-Smith's, liberally employing contractions and avoiding knotty constructions (e.g., the latter's "trying to offer some name which seemed suitable" compared to the former's "trying to suggest some suitable name").
The TLS reviewer of the original French publication of Jonas advocated for the poet's wider reception, declaring Dadelsen to be "one of that select band of private poets who are not numerous in French but include perhaps the greatest, Villon, du Bellay, Baudelaire," a pronouncement soliciting only one reader's sniffing reposte that Dadelsen "scarcely counts" among French poets. Literary immortality must always reckon with the caprices of critical taste.
While that reviewer's characterization of Dadelsen as a "private poet" certainly rings true — even his closest friends had no idea he wrote poems until they began to appear in literary journals — the poet's journeys into the interior were informed by engaged experiences in the public sphere (he knew both Charles de Gaulle and future French President Georges Pompidou), first as a soldier caught up in the most devastating historical event of his century and later as a reporter who witnessed firsthand the corrosive aftereffects and spiritual disillusionment the war had sown throughout Europe in the following decade. It's no wonder that the story of Jonah and the Whale would serve as his central metaphor for individual helplessness in the face of overwhelming, all-encompassing forces, whether political, societal, natural, or theological. Raised as a Lutheran, he must have had some vestigial degree of faith in humanity's ability to effectuate God's desire to preserve Creation, and yet the atrocities of war, no doubt coupled with the existentialist influence of his friend Albert Camus, seriously undermined that faith, prompting him to question the essential nature of the soul and the worth of existence itself.
Trapped in "the always widening wave of melancholy," Dadelsen and the poetic personae to whom he gives voice find themselves almost uncontrollably led to doubt the benevolence of a supreme being. In the dramatic monologue, "Bach in Autumn," the aging, now blind composer posits an ornate but ultimately impersonal, desolate theology:
God goes through us
As the sea through a jellyfish, in one movement that swells it
And shrinks it at once. The galaxies' whirling is the phosphorescence of His wave.
The hordes of souls are plankton floating on His surface.
He is the hope of our blood toward death's estuary. He is
The tide of our spirit. He is our orbit and our madness.
Vaster than our infinity, tinier than an atom, this universal I
Is within us deeper than ourselves.
"The hope of our blood" flows only toward death, cessation, not to a rewarding afterlife playing volleyball among the angels. "What does it matter," the speaker asks, "when, how, why we were rock or reptile, / King or cabbage, Jacob or Jonah?" — a rhetorical question that nevertheless receives an answer in the poem that follows ("The Great Ledger"): "Nothing has rhyme or reason, nothing is for our use, / After us comes the sunshine," suggesting that the human presence on earth is little more than a shadow cast over the planet, a temporary interruption of the natural cycle. One wonders what he would think if alive today, reading this summer's United Nations "Code Red" report on just how drastically humanity has in fact disrupted that cycle for the worse.
The interplay of light and dark surfaces appears often in Dadelsen's poems, with light signaling faith or hope in spirituality, enhanced vision, even the presence of God (most explicitly in a prayerful poem titled "Lord, Give Me This Only," which was included in Lucie-Smith's selection but is omitted here). As befits a Modernist aesthetic — and Dadelsen, with his unmistakable echoes of Eliot and, more faintly, of Stevens, arguably can be counted among those high modernists — the state of darkness, as represented by night and the late months of the year, constitutes the more familiar and prevalent condition of human existence ("...how short life is and how little the sun!"), despite the hopelessness it carries:
Nothing is settled, nothing promised, nightfall brings nothing.
O jam pot of quietism! honey that poisons the soul, and yet
nightfall has the face of a homeland
nightfall opens an ancient country to us.
These lines, again spoken through the persona of the blind Bach, imply that one of the enhanced senses afforded through blindness may be a true sense of existence, immune not only to the influence of false appearances ("the triumph of the visible begins"), but to the influences of any appearances at all.
None of this extinguishes the poet's desire for enlightenment or prevents him from appealing to the divine. The sequence of poems titled "Women of the Plain: Variations on a Theme" invokes Saint Odile of Alsace, the patron saint of eyesight who was banished to the countryside by her father, a nobleman, because she was born blind and a woman. She was raised there by peasants, and after being baptized her sight was miraculously restored. But the French countryside is not what it once was, the creep of a bland petit bourgeois having eroded its once vibrant, pastoral character:
Odile, pray for us, women of the plain,
and especially for those who were once
daughters of a certain lineage, bringing as dowry
vineyards, hunting grounds, good rows
of hops, of beets, of tobacco,
good businesses — good cash registers
of good butcher shops, bakeries, jeweler's shops,
and now we are pharmacists' wives,
tax collectors' wives, wives of the district judge
and of the doctor who does his daily 100 kilometers
in two rounds of visits, pharmacists' wives
notaries' wives, wives of the mill owner
and the miller and the wine exporter.
Dadelsen's use of anaphora conveys the boring sense of routine that descendants of the "daughters of a certain lineage" (like Odile herself) who are now merely "wives" must endure as appendages of the bureaucratic system, an unrewarding appendage of capitalism itself, now dominating Alsatian/French society. The poet offers a prayer on their behalf:
Odile, you who were blind and not beloved,
pray for us also, women, still young,
in the villages of the plain. The days are long,
the winter is long, the year is long, and so many long
and empty years make such a short life!
Given Dadelsen's oft-displayed belief in the epistemic distance between God and humanity and his acknowledgment of existential realities, he's all too aware that Odile won't or can't intercede. As he writes in another poem, "We are born to bear time, not to elude it, / Like a day laborer who only leaves the vineyard at nightfall."
Time, mortality, social constructs, war, life itself are all enveloping if not overwhelming conditions of human existence, which brings us back to Dadelsen's touchstone tale of Jonah's entrapment in the whale, referenced here in the ironically titled "Psalm":
The whale, says Jonah, is war and its blackouts.
The whale is the city and its deep wells and its barracks.
The whale is the country stuck in its mud and its one grocery
and the pulled punches and its unwashed crotches and the money.
The whale is society, and its taboos, its vanity, its ignorance.
The whale is (in so many cases, my brothers, my sisters) marriage.
The whale is self-love. And still other things that I'll tell you
Later, when you are a bit less obtuse (after page x).
The whale is incarnate life.
The whale is creation, superfluous after all is said and done, but
indispensable
for that
gratuitous and after all almost incomprehensible experiment.
The whale is always farther, faster, vaster; believe me, you barely escape, you have
a hard
time escaping from the whale.
The whale is necessary.
To be human is to be circumscribed, contained by just about everything except, Dadelsen seems to conclude, the grace of God, who is "Outside all things / foreign to every being." In the aftermath of world war, existentialism wins. The poem "Easter 1957" contains lines that tersely encapsulate a prescription for living within whichever whale has swallowed us, while at the same granting us an oblique, tenuous measure of immortality: "It only matters / that you add to the unending construction of reality / (never completed) your very small daily share...."
For all their bleakness of vision, Marilyn Hacker's finely tuned translations grant Dadelsen his full range of emotional tonalities. The poet's cynicism is complicated by a need to believe in the ultimate worth of humanity, an earthy sense of humor, a painterly eye, and an appreciation for the suffering of those whose sacrifices for a greater good have yet to be redeemed. Though he did not live to more thoroughly revise and in some instances finish much of the work included here, the case for its worth is amply demonstrated, and much credit is due to Hacker for its rediscovery and reintroduction to an English-speaking audience.
—Reviewer Fred Muratori's three full-length poetry collections are Despite Repeated Warnings, The Spectra, and A Civilization. His poems and short prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Redivider, Cloudbank, The American Journal of Poetry, and PROEM.
