#289: THE NUMBERS THAT CAN NEVER BE COUNTED.   Still another fine example of a book which snuck up on me from behind and jumped into my hands: A Hundred Movements for a Fan, poems by Paul Claudel.  In the nineteenth century, a new enthusiasm in France for Japanese culture led to the discovery and collection of that country’s beautifully painted paper fans: every lady had to have one.  The poet Stéphane Mallarmé (who in his spare time edited a magazine extolling the new luxury goods) got into the habit of making up quatrains to decorate fans for his wife and wives of his artistic cohorts: a number of these survive, and can be seen at the Mallarmé Museum in Vulaines-sur-Seine.  That, as far as I’d known, was a far as this sub-sub-genre had ever gone, so running across this collection by Claudel was a complete surprise to me.  Claudel, like a number of European poets (as well as the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the Mexican Octavio Paz), ended up in Asia via the diplomatic service: he spent over four years in Japan, survived the Tokyo earthquake in’23, and created the still-existing Maison Franco-Japonaise in Tokyo.  Japan became part of his mindset and his work, as did India with Octavio Paz. In his preface to this collection, Claudel, like so many poets, cannot resist trying to tell us what he has done, talking about “a few words, freed from the harness of syntax and joined once again by the whiteness of their simultaneity alone, a phrase made up of relations!”—which frankly I find less than helpful.  He also, in the poems, breaks up phrases and individual words with odd lineation, which he is quite certain means something very deep, which I take the liberty of doubting.  But the poems themselves are delightful and charming, and sometimes even, yes, mysterious.  Suggested to him by the haiku form, they are sort of like the haiku’s first cousin:

            Tu          m’appelles  la  Rose                                   You            call me the Rose

                             dit la Rose                                                           says the Rose

              mais  si  tu  savais                                                          but if you knew

              mon  vrai  nom                                                               my real name

              je m’        effeuillerais                                                    I would      shrivel     

                                       aussitot                                                                           at once

           Bruit            de l’eau                                                    Noise          of water

                            sur de l’eau                                                                    on water

                                 ombre                                                                        shadow

                            d’une feuille                                                                   of a leaf

                                    sur                                                                              on

                         une   autre   feuille                                                          another leaf

I don’t always expect to go to French poetry for works of fancy, especially in the shadow of Claudel’s somber religious dramas, but there you are: another rabbit chance and talent have pulled out of the hat.

            Il faut     qu’il y ait                                                          In a             there must be

                         dans le poëme                                                    poem             a number

                            un nombre                                                                                 that

                                 tel                                                                                   stops it ever

                        qu’il empêche                                                                        being counted

                           de compter

A Hundred Movements for a Fan, by Paul Claudel.  Translated by Andrew Harvey and Iain Watson.  Quartet Books, 1992.  The French edition, Cent phrases pour éventails, from Poésie Gallimard, contains a good deal of Claudel’s quirky and charming calligraphy.

Several of Mallarmé’s éventail verses are in Henry Weinfield’s splendid translation of the Collected Poems, published by California.  The website for the Mallarmé Museum (www.musee-mallarme.fr) shows not only the verses but several of the fans as well.