Paul Valéry
The Canticle of the Columns
The gentle columns wear
their hats in the bright air
with lively birds for trim
that walk about the brim.
The gentle columns sing
a spindle-legged song
each silent voice suppressed
to mingle with the rest.
– What do you raise up high
so similar in face?
– To a perfect desire
we bring our studious grace.
With the weight of the skies
on our head we advance.
Oh voices truly wise!
We sing to please the eyes.
See how candid the tune!
What melody we draw
from the daylight at noon
created without flaw.
So chilly and golden
from our chambers we rose
awakened by the chisel,
lilies of pure repose.
From our crystalline beds
how rudely we were called!
And steely were the claws
that fit us to this mould
each one of us to groom
smooth as a fingernail,
to face up to the moon,
the sun, the Milky Way.
Handmaidens without knees,
smiling without a face,
a girl in front of these
feels her legs growing chaste.
Pious and similar,
our noses and our ears
tucked safely out of sight,
we are deaf to the weight
of temple on our brow.
Blinded eternally
we advance without gods
towards divinity.
Our ancient youthfulness
olive-skinned in the shade,
is proud of this perfection
born out of repetition.
A honey-coloured God
lies down to cover us,
daughters of golden section,
strong in our just proportion.
Content, in daytime he
sleeps on the table we
spread to him above
the altar to his love.
Incorruptible sisters
half chilly and half burned
we have taken for partners
leaves dancing in the wind
and centuries by tens,
civilisations past
a time so deep, it is
a measureless abyss.
With our similar loves
weighing more than the world,
we plummet through the days
like stones through the waves.
We advance into time
and our bodies divine
leave an essential trace
immortalised in rhyme.
Paul Valéry (1871-1945) was a friend and in his youth a disciple of Mallarmé, whose exalted view of poetry and the poet he shared. The ‘Cantique des colonnes’, first published in 1919 and collected in Charmes (1922), uses architecture as a symbol of poetic artifice, while the poem’s shape on the page pictures the classical columns.
Claire Nicolas White, born in the Netherlands, is a poet, playwright, translator and art critic. Her most recent translations from the Dutch are Tim Krabbe’s The Vanishing (Random House, 1993) and Adrian van Dis’s My Father’s War (The New Press, 1996). Her poems have appeared in many
magazines, and she has taught creative writing at SUNY and elsewhere. She has lived in St James, Long Island, since 1947.
Translated by Claire Nicolas White
Page(s) 133-135
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