Marguerite Yourcenar
Jason Kuznicki on Apr 19th 2004 09:45 am |
If I could not be a historian, my second choice would probably be to translate French literature. My favorite 20th-century French author is Marguerite Yourcenar, who 1980 became the first woman elected to the Académie Française. Although many of her works are available in translation, Yourcenar is essentially unknown in the United States. It seems almost unfair, given that she became an American citizen and spent much of her life here.
One of her greatest works is the 1941 Mémoires d’Hadrien. It is a fictional first-person memoir of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who ruled at the height of the empire’s power and sought to do so as wisely as he could. In this work, she shows Hadrian as a deep, sensitive and profoundly thoughtful individual, master of the known world and yet all too aware of his limitations in the grand sweep of history. We share with him his victories and defeats, watching as the thoughtful emperor envisions a future that may well look with indifference on everything he has treasured.
As most historians know, Hadrian’s love interests strongly favored men over women. Yourcenar’s treatment of Hadrian and his lover Antinous give a full, complex, and sometimes problematic picture of same-sex love in the ancient world. Her vision is almost completely devoid of either negative or positive stereotypes, recreating instead a sexual landscape that is neither the twentieth century’s nor some liberationist inversion of it. Gay men and lesbians today who read Mémoires d’Hadrien can imagine this world, and even envy it, but they can never quite enter into it.
Although she lived most of her life in a time that did not speak openly of these things, Yourcenar’s own romantic tendencies also favored those of her own sex. Yourcenar has since become a revered figure in the French gay and lesbian community, much as Gertrude Stein or Virginia Woolf have achieved in the anglophone world. Indeed, Yourcenar even translated many of Woolf’s works into French.
I was still single when I first discovered Marguerite Yourcenar. I can remember holding my copy of Mémoires d’Hadrien upright, so that people passing by could see what I was reading. It was the most selective invitation imaginable: Only a very intelligent, sensitive, sexy, gay francophone man would stop by and say hello to someone reading it, and that was the only kind of man I wanted. I can recall being sure that this man would show up, start a conversation, and sweep me entirely off my feet. Then he’d take me to Paris with him, where he owned a mansion in the 16ème arrondissement.
Reality turned out differently. I did end up with a very intelligent, sensitive, sexy, gay francophone man, although I did not meet him by way of Marguerite Yourcenar. To tell the truth, the mansion in Paris didn’t work out either, but I’m still glad I didn’t settle for anything less on the other fronts.
I’ve also done a few translations from Mémoires d’Hadrien that I’d like to share. All are from the 1974 Folio edition.
I imagined having the freedom that simultaneity might provide, where two actions, or two states of being, would be possible at the same time; I learned by example, modeling myself after Caesar, to dictate two texts at once, to speak while continuing to read. I invented a way of life where the most difficult task could be accomplished perfectly without engaging myself completely; in truth, I sometimes dared to propose to myself the elimination of even the notion of physical fatigue. At other times, I exerted myself toward practicing alternation as another kind of freedom: At each instant, emotions, ideas, and works had to be capable of being interrupted, then taken up again; and the certitude of being able to send them away or call them back like slaves removed from them any chance of tyranny, and from me all feeling of servitude. (p 53)
Each of us has more virtues than he believes, but success alone sheds light on them, perhaps because people then expect us to stop their exercise. Human beings avow their greatest weaknesses when they are astonished that a master of the world be not stupidly indolent, presumptuous, or cruel.
I had refused all of the titles. In the first month of my reign, the Senate–without my knowledge–had decorated me with that long series of honorific appellations that gets draped like a fringed shawl around the neck of certain emperors. The Dacian, the Parthic, the Germanic… Trajan had loved these beautiful noises of martial music, like the cymbals and drums of the Parthian regiments; they aroused in him echoes and responses; they did nothing for me but to irritate or to deafen. I had all of it taken away; I also declined, provisionally, the title of Father of the Country, which Augustus had only accepted late in life, and of which I did not yet consider myself worthy… I wanted my prestige to be personal, hung on my name alone, immediately measurable in terms of mental agility, force, or actions accomplished. The titles, if they came, would come later, other titles, testimonies of more secret victories which I would not yet dare to claim. For the moment, it was enough to become, or to be, the best possible Hadrian. (p 118)
To found libraries was… to construct public granaries, to amass reserves against a winter of the spirit whose signs, despite myself, I was beginning to see. (p 141)
I was a god quite simply because I was a man. The divine titles that Greece later accorded me did not but proclaim that of which I had been convinced long ago. I think that it would have been possible for me to feel myself a god even in the prisons of Domitian or sunk in a mineshaft. If I have the audacity to claim it, it is because this sentiment hardly seems extraordinary and not at all unique to me. Others have had it, or they will have it in the future. (p 160)
And I was astonished that these joys, so precarious, so rarely perfected in the course of a human life, under any aspect that we might have searched for or received them, are considered with so much disdain by the so-called sages that they would fear habituation and excess instead of fearing absence and loss, that they end up tyrannizing their senses, which were once better employed at regulating or embellishing their souls. In that time, I set about strengthening my happiness, tasting it, judging it also, with that constant attention that I had always given to the least details of my acts; and what is voluptuousness itself, if not a moment of passionate attention to the body? All happiness is a masterpiece: The least error, a counterfeit; the least hesitation, a breach; the least bit of heaviness, a flaw; the least foolishness, an idiocy. (pp 179-80)
I told myself that it was quite vain to hope for Athens and Rome the eternity that is accorded neither to men nor to things, and that the wisest among us deny even to the gods. These complicated and savvy forms of life, these civilizations quite at ease in their refinements of art and happiness, this liberty of the spirit that inquires and judges, depended on rare and innumerable chances, on conditions nearly impossible to recreate, that must not be counted on to last. We would destroy Simon [bar-Kochba]; Arrian would protect Armenia from the Alainic invasions. But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate the human condition would be but absent-mindedly continued by our successors; the grain of error and ruin contained even in the good would continue to grow monstrously nonetheless through the course of the ages. The world, weary of us, would seek out other masters; that which had seemed sage to us would seem insipid; and abominable that which we had found beautiful. Like the initiate to the Mithraic cult, the human race perhaps has need of a bath in blood and of a periodic passage through the funeral trench.
I saw the return of the ferocious laws, the implacable gods, the uncontested despotism of barbaric princes, the world chopped into enemy states, eternally prey to insecurity. Other sentinels, threatened by other arrows, would come and go on the roads round future cities; the stupid, cruel, obscene game would continue, and the species, as it aged, would no doubt add to it new refinements in horror. Our epoch, whose insufficiencies and defects I knew better than anyone, would perhaps one day be considered, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of humanity. (pp 261-262)
A bitterness invaded me, deep as the ocean: He had never loved me; our relations had quickly become those of a wasteful son and an over-generous father; this life had leaked away without great works, without serious thoughts, without ardent passions; he had squandered his years as a prodigal throws pieces of gold. (p 286)
Little soul, tender, floating soul, companion of my body, who was your host, now you will descend into those pale, hard, bare places, where you must renounce your games of earlier days. One instant more, let us regard together the familiar shores, the objects that, no doubt, we shall never see again… Let us meet death with open eyes… (p 316)
This book is not dedicated to anyone. It should have to have been dedicated to G. F… [Grace Frick], and it would have been, if there was not a sort of indecency to putting a personal dedication at the head of a work from which I have all but tried to efface myself. But the longest dedication is still too incomplete and too banal a way of honoring such an uncommon friendship. When I try to define this blessing that I have received over the years, I tell myself that such a privilege, as rare as it is, cannot, however, be unique; that it must be there many times, throughout the adventure of a book seen through to completion, or in the life of a happy writer: Someone who does not let pass an inexact or feeble phrase that I had wanted to keep through fatigue; someone who will reread an uncertain page with me twenty times if necessary; someone who takes for me great tomes from off the library shelves, where I could find a useful fact, and who insists on consulting them again, when lassitude had already made me close them; someone who sustains me, approves of me, and sometimes fights with me; someone who shares with me, in equal fervor, the joys of art and those of life, their works, which are never boring and never easy; someone who is neither my shadow nor my reflection, nor even my complement, but rather an individual; someone who leaves me divinely free, and who nevertheless obliges me to be fully she who I am. Hospes Comesque. (p 343)
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