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Paul Valéry's "Crusoe"
Apr. 11th, 2011 11:02 amI mentioned this lyric essay, which I read for class last semester, in a comment on one of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
olivia_circe's poetry posts. Then I went poking around the Internet and was surprised at how little information on this piece I was able to find. I believe it is called "Robinson" in the original French (don't ask me why that would be changed to "Crusoe" in the translation) and was included in Histoires brisées, a volume that seems to have been published in 1950 although Valéry died in 1945 and that may or may not be included in the second volume of his Collected Works in English. I call it a lyric essay but I don't know what Valéry called it, as that term doesn't seem to have gained any currency until the late 1990's. It is too long to be a prose poem, and I don't feel right calling it a short story. Any of the other above information might also be incorrect.
The piece is, in short, sufficiently obscure, and it is also sufficiently beautiful, and also my computer's ability to extract the text from the rather low-quality PDF I got from my teacher is sufficiently impressive, that I am posting the whole thing here.
( He writes to imaginary persons, embraces trees, talks to himself. Gusts of laughter. Little by little ceasing to be himself )
olivia_circe's poetry posts. Then I went poking around the Internet and was surprised at how little information on this piece I was able to find. I believe it is called "Robinson" in the original French (don't ask me why that would be changed to "Crusoe" in the translation) and was included in Histoires brisées, a volume that seems to have been published in 1950 although Valéry died in 1945 and that may or may not be included in the second volume of his Collected Works in English. I call it a lyric essay but I don't know what Valéry called it, as that term doesn't seem to have gained any currency until the late 1990's. It is too long to be a prose poem, and I don't feel right calling it a short story. Any of the other above information might also be incorrect.The piece is, in short, sufficiently obscure, and it is also sufficiently beautiful, and also my computer's ability to extract the text from the rather low-quality PDF I got from my teacher is sufficiently impressive, that I am posting the whole thing here.
( He writes to imaginary persons, embraces trees, talks to himself. Gusts of laughter. Little by little ceasing to be himself )
