Mark Scroggins Reviews The Idea of Perfection: The Prose and Poetry of Paul Valéry

At Hyperallergic, Mark Scroggins reviews Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody's new translations of Paul Valéry’s poems, The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). "His translations are fresher than any previous English versions, certainly more idiomatically English than those of David Paul, the Princeton/Bollingen translator," Scroggins writes. From there: 

…Rudavsky-Brody has taken on a Herculean task. Not only does Valéry write in rhymed, metrically regular lines, but his verse constitutes (in the translator’s words) “a dense texture of assonance, internal rhyme, double meanings and shifting images, ‘resemblances’ that ‘flash from word to word’ many lines distant.”

Rudavsky-Brody can only suggest this texture, inherent to the sounds of the French words, in his English translations. Thankfully, he doesn’t attempt to precisely reproduce Valéry’s poetic forms. While his versions are in regular English meters — a decision, he explains, that has “as much to do with experiencing a similar set of formal constraints, of exercise, as characterized Valéry’s work, as with re-creating a semblance of their complex rhythms” — he mostly abstains from attempting Valéry’s rhymes (an Everest littered with the frozen corpses of previous translators).

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