Julien Gracq is a renowned French novelist whose only venture into poetry, Liberté grande (1945), is often overshadowed by novels like Le Rivage des Syrtes [The Opposing Shore]. But in Gracq’s case, there is a conversation between poems and novels. The prose poems of Liberté grande are no strangers to narrative: many of them unfold miniature worlds through sequences of difficult images, aesthetic impressions, and long musical sentences.

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In her translation titled Abounding Freedom (World Poetry Books, 2024), Alice Yang includes the original poems of Liberté grande followed by a prose fragment, “The Road”, which she introduces as “a bridge between Gracq’s prose poems and his novels” (xvi). A bridge now redoubled in the bilingual edition by a bridge or crack between the original French poems on the left, and the English translation on the right.

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In this review, I focus on syntax—which is perhaps the most striking feature of Gracq's poems, full of long sentences, ripe with metaphors and perspective shifts. Gracq himself called his sentences “phrase-déferlante” [flood-phrase, or flood-sentence]—the opposite of declarative, conclusive statements. Though most poems fit on one single page, the density of syntax in Liberté grande literally floods each of them with suggestions and descriptions of worlds, situations and narratives. In her translator’s note, Alice Yang concludes that “expansive imaginative realms, surprising images, and a spellbinding sense of suspension arise from Gracq’s artfully worked sentences.” (p. xvii) As I was reading her translation, I focused on this tension between the baroque density of Gracq’s syntax and the prose poem as world-building form.

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“The Good Inn,” one of the final poems in Abounding Freedom, provides a good example of a combination between world-building, narrative, and what Yang calls “imaginative suggestion:”

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Men are cut in half by the guillotine of their tailcoats—with a kiss, women absorb the crystal’s sharp vibration, then burst and sow charming blood camellias beneath the snow. With the sound of drays, vehicles unload one by one before the entrance—the lord-mayor’s landau: tea roses and heliotropes—the magistrature’s mail-coach: whip and mignonette wheels—the vice squad’s all-terrain carriage: hydrangeas and daffodils. And now what? Couples knotted, introductions over, revolvers emerge from pockets and the festivities begin with a show of flying glass shards, like targets in a game of clay-pigeon shooting. In dawn’s haze, the men in tailcoats grow ill at ease, slip away in pairs like morticians on the leafy paths—a Berezina of fine glass fragments spreads across the deserted floors; the green plants: Christmas trees of crunchy snow, drawn glass—several white souls rise to the sky’s heights in the form of delicate little angels—light as an inconsistency in a metaphysical problem. An ease so disarming as to allay justice’s suspicions may best be left unconsidered. (p. 121) 

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The six sentences of this poem depict a peculiar overnight bourgeois gathering. It seems to be made of two parts, or two moments, the second of which begins once everyone has arrived and has been introduced, after the question “and now what?”. The two following sentences take up over half of the poem’s length; as if, “introductions over,” Gracq’s very syntax was able to unfold freely, travelling quickly from evening to night and until dawn. Outside of this “now what,” which serves a clear temporal and discursive function, each sentence is overcrowded—as if it could barely hold the contents of this small festive world. This is clear in the second and fifth sentences: in the second, a list of participants; in the fifth, a list of gestures and items in the wake of the party. As if sentences had contents to “unload,” like carriages into this open, fresh world. As the men “slip out” of the party, a succession of nonverbal sequences materializes the syntactical leftovers of the fifth sentence, “[spread] across the deserted floors.” The poem’s “festivities” will have happened between these two sentences, which is very little room compared to their introduction and aftermath. One sentence and two lines for what could have been the main content of a party—this poem accurately showcases the role and presence of narrative in Gracq’s Abounding Freedom. Though it systematically proposes situations and worlds, Gracq only outlines them, leaving the bulk of each narrative out of the frame, focusing instead on outlying details, liminal images, and atmospheric suggestions. Narrative is “suggested” through past participles (“couples knotted”) and nonverbal constructions (“introductions over”) like quick touches of paint on canvas. What remains instead in the reader’s eyes and ears are discrete elements and oddities—like the image of the “blood camellias”, or the concept of “light as an inconsistency in a metaphysical problem.” As a last note on this poem, a surprising volta declares much of this party “best be left unconsidered.” This anchors Gracq’s prose poem in a modern tradition particularly fond of such final turns. Let us remember, for instance, the last sentence of Rimbaud’s “Bridges” in Ashbery’s translation: “a white ray, falling from the top of the sky, wipes out this bit of theatricality.” “The Good Inn” can also be read as a “bit” with its oblique narrative and quick twists, ending with a dismissal. This prose poem, like many of its counterparts in the modernist tradition, is woven with an “ease” that gets cut down abruptly at the end. It leaves us with hints and outlines of a world of images in nonchalant order—the ending of which might be the most “theatrical”—as its curtain gets rolled down in front of us.

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Close readings like this one indicate Gracq’s intense work on structure and syntax—and consequently, how important these features are when you translate such a difficult book. Yang’s most ambitious gesture was to work so closely with Gracq’s syntax, and the risk that comes with producing these dense, spiraling sentences. Throughout the book, she takes “syntactic liberties” (xvi) with the French to construct an Anglophone sentence that both responds musically to Gracq's and gives her space to reanimate the small worlds and narratives of his poems. Yang’s insistence on the “sonority and linguistic tension” of Gracq’s poems (xvii) leads her to make translation choices that often refuse to mimic the French syntax, in favor of constructing a rhythm better fit for the English. This can lead to her prioritizing these tensions over other aspects, as in “The Numbed Garden:”

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Quelle tranquillité́ maintenant que midi sonné fait glisser la journée insensiblement sur sa pente la plus tragique. Les poiriers compliqués, branchus et durs comme des coraux, [...]

 

Now that noon has struck, making the day slip seamlessly into its most tragic decline, how tranquil it is. The pear trees, intricate with their many branches, stiff as coral, [...]

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This is the beginning of the poem. In the French, the nonverbal sentence begins with tranquility leading into the day’s “slip”—time as constructed by affect; in Yang’s translation, we get time first. The meaning hasn’t changed—but syntax has been reorganized through chronological rather than affective causation. In the second sentence, Yang’s syntactic liberties also reorder perception. In the French, “poiriers compliqués” being followed by a comma implies that pear trees are intricate in essence, and the following clause is but a further description; in Yang’s translation, placing the comma before “intricate” links the intricacy of the tree to the particulars of their “many branches, stiff as coral”. In these two sentences, Yang places time (noon) and objects (pear trees) first, as to order our perception of the scene—while delaying the appearance of oddities that came first in French (tranquility as a chronological affect; the essential intricacy of the pear tree).

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These moves result in a relative reordering of perception which, at times, softens what Yang calls Gracq’s “spellbinding sense of suspension” (xvii). Perhaps it is the price to pay for a translation which so acutely captures two essential elements of Gracq’s prose poetry: the musical quality of the long sentence, and through it the many worlds being created (yet always cut short). These two aspects of Gracq’s work draw on his surrealist influences, yet transcend them in many ways, shaping a poetics where dreamscapes and narrative go hand in hand—leaving room for the reader to transport themselves into these incomplete, suspended worlds.​