Monsieur Teste

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When, after the Second World War, the American literary world began to become aware of the intensely musical, intensely intellectual, poetic work of Paul Valéry, their attention fixated on the early translations of Monsieur Teste. It was as if American poets, novelists, and philosophers had been waiting for something like this for a long time, and they leapt with joy when it came: a poet who can write intelligibly, tersely, brilliantly about the mind, its work, its needs.

Teste, of course, is old French for ‘head,’ and this celebration of the cerebral power of poetry, at a time when the emotional dimension of poetry seemed so dominant in our society, this manifestation of poetry as thinking, and thinking as poetry, came as a shock to many poets and writers of the day, and that shock continues. Generation after generation, young writers discover the acuity, the humor, the vivid scrutiny of language and human thought that Monsieur Teste represents.

This new, definitive translation of the Monsieur Teste materials (both the original Evening with Monsieur Teste and Valéry’s later additions) brings to readers a voice that has lost none of its clarity, comedy, or intensity.Paul Valéry (1871–1945) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. Nominated twelve times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he did not begin writing full-time until he was nearly 50 years old, having worked secretarial and administrative jobs for the majority of his life. A hugely popular public speaker and intellectual figure during his day, Valéry is now best known for his intellectual diary, the Cahiers, and his poetry, which influenced contemporaries and later luminaries such as T. S. Eliot, John Ashbery, and James Merrill.

Charlotte Mandell is a French literary translator of more than 40 books, including Jean Genet’s The Criminal Child (NYRB Classics; co-translated with Jeffrey Zuckerman) and André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s The Magnetic Fields (NYRB Poets). In April 2021 she received the honor of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the poet Robert Kelly.

Ryan Ruby is the author of The Zero and the One: A Novel and a book-length poem, Context Collapse. His essays and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Nation, Poetry, and New Left Review, among other publications. He lives in Berlin.US

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