Between Poetic Cultures: Ancient Sources of the Asian "Orient" in Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Louise Ackermann
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Between Poetic Cultures: Ancient Sources of the Asian
“Orient” in Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Louise
Ackermann
Adrianna M. Paliyenko
L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 56, Number 3, Fall 2016, pp. 14-27 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2016.0026
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/631663
Access provided at 25 Mar 2020 07:19 GMT with no institutional affiliationBetween Poetic Cultures:
Ancient Sources of the Asian “Orient” in
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and
Louise Ackermann
Adrianna M. Paliyenko
Les études orientales n’ont jamais été poussées si avant. Au siècle de Louis XIV on était hellé-
niste, maintenant on est orientaliste. [...] Jamais tant d’intelligences n’ont fouillé à la fois ce grand
abîme de l’Asie. [...] Il résulte de tout cela que l’Orient, soit comme image, soit comme pensée,
est devenu, pour les intelligences autant que pour les imaginations, une sorte de préoccupation
générale à laquelle l’auteur de ce livre a obéi peut-être à son insu.
—Victor Hugo1
T
HESE REMARKS FROM THE LATTER PART of Victor Hugo’s
preface to the first edition of his poetic collection, Les Orientales
(1829), invoke the widespread fascination with the Orient during the
romantic era. Hugo foregrounds among thinkers and creative artists of the
time a dual use of the Orient, as representation (“soit comme image, soit
comme pensée”) rather than geographic location. More broadly, he suggests
the “liaisons between scholarship and creativity” that quickly multiplied in
early nineteenth-century France, as Raymond Schwab has meticulously doc-
umented.2 Hugo attaches his own engagement with “ce grand abîme de
l’Asie” to the Orientalist vogue with the phrasing “à son insu” and stresses,
moreover, that he could only imagine the distant lands evoked in his volume.
Indeed, for Hugo who was not among those writers who traveled to the
Middle East, books rather than travel were the primary source of knowledge
about the far reaches of the globe. Hugo pinpoints “the developments in ori-
ental studies between the China of Rémusat and the Egypt of Champollion,”
and proclaims “an Oriental Renaissance with such assurance” that Schwab
sees in his writings the direct influence of Baron d’Eckstein, an Orientalist
focused on the texts of ancient India (12).3
It is instructive to compare the Orient of Hugo’s preface with that of his
poems, as shown in the first part of this article, following Schwab who finds
the poet’s “paratext” more precise than his verse on the same topic.4 Schwab
also names Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Hugo’s contemporary, from the
early period of the exchanges linking the surge of Oriental studies and roman-
ticism: “Saadi influenced Desbordes-Valmore” (6). This brief statement,
using the French spelling of the thirteenth-century writer Sa‘di, alludes to one
© L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 56, No. 3 (2016), pp. 14–27ADRIANNA M. PALIYENKO
of her most anthologized poems, “Les roses de Saadi.” A self-described
dervish or Sufi Muslim ascetic, Sa‘di emerged as the leading Persian poet as
the French rediscovered the ancient texts of the Orient early in the nineteenth
century. Although Schwab does not identify the text nor offer any further
comments about Desbordes-Valmore’s reading of Sa‘di, scholars such as A.
Calder and M. Y. Behzâdi have begun to acknowledge the philosophical
depths of this poem inspired by Sufi mysticism.
Desbordes-Valmore herself provides few cues, apart from alluding to
Sa‘di in a letter in the late 1840s. As discussed in the second part of this arti-
cle, one cannot determine when Desbordes-Valmore first read Sa‘di or what
French translation of his writings she consulted. Scholars have not established
when she composed “Les roses de Saadi,” which first appeared in 1860.
Placed in a historical continuum, however, Desbordes-Valmore’s interpreta-
tion of ancient Persian thought illustrates the cross-cultural dialogues among
writers that overlapped with the study of the language established by the
philologist Silvestre de Sacy early in the nineteenth century. The reverse can
be argued in the case of Louise Ackermann, treated in the latter part of this
article. In translating episodes of the ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharata,
from Sanskrit into French verse, Ackermann relates the poetic use of India not
to imperialism, but to intercultural exchange fostered by the study of Oriental
languages.5
Schwab sketches Ackermann’s link to the Oriental Renaissance much
more amply than Desbordes-Valmore’s, yet he buries her actual “reading of
the Hindu poets,” which she recalled “as a major event in her life” (183).
Instead, Schwab focuses on the nihilism Ackermann cultivated in Berlin cir-
cles, which she frequented in the late 1830s and early 1840s, “a reminder,” for
him, “of how much the tributaries of German metaphysics mingled with the
current of Hindu pantheism” (183). Schwab invokes the twin influence of the
French Romantics, “headed by Hugo,” and that of the Orientalists Stanislas
Julien and Frédéric Gustave Eichoff, the latter a friend of her husband, Paul
Ackermann, an Alsatian philologist (183). A later reference to Ackermann in
Schwab’s volume places her with the Parnassian Leconte de Lisle and Sym-
bolist Jean Lahor (pen name of Henri Cazalis): “Pantheists and pessimists
haunted by India, these three poets stood surely for the theme of universal
illusion that was to inspire [Laforgue’s] Le sanglot de la terre” (423). The
Indic Orient in Ackermann’s Contes, however, differs from the intellectual
concern that critics have read into her later Poésies philosophiques (1871),
broadly aligning her thought with Arthur Schopenhauer who extolled the
Vedantic doctrine as the source of truth for seeking refuge from the “Pain of
VOL. 56, NO. 3 15L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
the World” (Schwab 427). She rejected his influence, in particular, in dating
the intellectual pessimism at her philosophical œuvre’s core.6 Ackermann,
like Desbordes-Valmore, gives specific meaning to the “Orient” as a source of
global poetic exchange.
Hugo, Desbordes-Valmore, and Sa‘di
In a note to Desbordes-Valmore’s undated poem, “Les roses de Saadi,” Marc
Bertrand observes that “un certain orientalisme n’est pas absent des poèmes
de Marceline,” giving as examples “Conte imité de l’arabe” and “Le derviche
et le ruisseau.”7 Whereas the former appeared in the elegy section of the 1819
edition of Desbordes-Valmore’s inaugural collection, Élégies, Marie et
romances, the latter first circulated as an individual piece in L’Almanach des
Desmoiselles (1820).8 Writing in 1973, Bertrand did not mean the patronizing
Western attitude Edward Said’s Orientalism would condemn five years later,
but rather the Oriental themes treated by Desbordes-Valmore in the vein of
Antoine Galland’s Les mille et une nuits and Hugo’s Les Orientales. Desbordes-
Valmore offers, in particular, closer readings of Sa‘di’s Gulistan (1258) or
“The Rose Garden.” Her morally instructive poem, “Le derviche et le ruis-
seau,” captures the philosophical gist of the Gulistan. Desbordes-Valmore
thinks even more deeply through this ancient text in “Les roses de Saadi,”
mediating the nature of mystical experience across poetic cultures.
In 1634, just as diplomatic relations between France and Persia began to
develop, André Du Ryer brought forth the first, albeit partial, French transla-
tion of Sa‘di’s moral treatise under the title Gulistan, ou l’empire des roses. A
French translation of anecdotes from the Gulistan appeared in 1704, and com-
plete translations of the work followed in the nineteenth century.9 By then,
interest in Persia and its culture had grown from Napoleon’s designs on the
region, which ultimately failed as a way to gain passage to India and thus
thwart Britain’s stronghold.10 In the absence of an explicit statement from
Desbordes-Valmore, it is impossible to determine when she first read Sa‘di, or
what French translation of his influential tome she may have consulted. The
Persian sage’s writings resonate in Desbordes-Valmore’s poetic thought with
no particular historical significance, suggesting instead a shared aesthetic
realm of global ideas.
The Gulistan portrays the dervish as a holy mendicant who espouses self-
denial as the path to spiritual illumination, with this asceticism being the focus
of chapter two, “Les mœurs des derviches.”11 Desbordes-Valmore’s poem “Le
derviche et le ruisseau” emphasizes a similar teaching.12 Unnerved by the
babbling stream he hears outside his cell, which reminds him of his thirst, the
16 FALL 2016ADRIANNA M. PALIYENKO
dervish cries out in line 22: “Silence enfin! Il est temps que je dorme!”
(1:177). Stirred by his cry, “L’onde à son tour s’offense, et vive, peu dor-
meuse, / Elle se change en cascade écumeuse, / Qui semble menacer de deve-
nir torrent” (ll. 24–26). Now fearful, the dervish flees to seek another place to
rest, where he falls asleep with a voice whispering in his ear, “Dormez en
paix, mon père, et laissez couler l’eau” (l. 41). One overstates the case, how-
ever, by arguing that “Le derviche et le ruisseau” is a gloss of a particular pas-
sage from the Gulistan. The word “ruisseau” appears only once in the Gulis-
tan: “Jardin dont le ruisseau a une eau limpide” (35). This verse from Sa‘di’s
preface precedes the garden scene related more explicitly to “Les roses de
Saadi,” a point developed below. From the perspective of the subtitle, “apo-
logue,” noted in the manuscript, “Le derviche et le ruisseau” suggests the
lesson of acceptance gleaned from this maxim in verse taken from Sa‘di’s
second chapter aimed at illumining the “mœurs” of derviches: “Une mer con-
sidérable ne sera pas troublée par une pierre. / Le religieux qui se fâche est
encore une eau étroite” (191). However Desbordes-Valmore first encountered
Sa‘di’s Gulistan, we shall see that she expanded her reading of the sage’s
“apologue” in the rose garden well beyond epigraphs she would have known
from Les Orientales (1829), which illustrate Hugo’s use of the East to achieve
his own aesthetic goals.
In attempting to locate the Orient in Hugo’s Les Orientales, Dorothy Betz
has argued that “the Orient for Hugo was less a geographical entity than a
state of mind.”13 She describes Hugo’s Orient as visionary rather than docu-
mentary, “a place of freedom” he equated with the liberty from classical
prosody that he sought for Romantic poetry (55). From a similar perspective,
Michael Riffaterre has discussed the volume’s reception “as a perfect example
of how poetic imagery can be enriched and inspiration renewed by exoti-
cism.”14 He analyzes Hugo’s use of contrasts and play of light, in particular,
to develop the sense of the exotic or foreignness the poet creates by “free[ing]
himself [...] from classical structures” (182). For Riffaterre, “Just as the Ori-
entales receive their light from the poet’s inner vision, so are their colors, their
exoticism born of his efforts to free literary language” (183). While Richard
Grant agrees that “Les Orientales did have an effect on poets defending the
doctrine of art for art’s sake,” he observes that Hugo’s collection was not
removed from “contemporary political concerns,” citing the Greek War of
Independence in 1821.15 In relation to the latter, Grant focuses on a thematic
progression of apocalyptic thinking in Hugo’s volume, which belies “descrip-
tions of voluptuous ‘oriental’ delights” that readers might have expected from
the volume’s title (896). Such descriptions are not entirely absent from Hugo’s
VOL. 56, NO. 3 17L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
volume, as seen in “Les tronçons du serpent” which “tells of the poet’s
anguish at having lost the woman he loves” (Grant 898). In this poem, Hugo
alludes to Sa‘di in treating a more personal sense of loss without, however,
conveying the broader intellectual concern we shall see in Desbordes-Val-
more’s reading of the Persian sage.
Hugo’s poem of November 1828, “Les tronçons du serpent,” takes its epi-
graph from Sa‘di: “D’ailleurs les sages ont dit: Il ne faut point attacher son
cœur aux choses passagères” (650). This epigraph, which promotes transcen-
dence of worldly concerns, contrasts the poet’s desire for the seductive figure
“Albaydé,” as Eastern and Western tropes blend in the expression of this
desire, which takes the form of a “blason”: the poet celebrates the Oriental
muse’s beauty as he laments her death and his attendant loss of inspiration. Let
us recall from Hugo’s preface the many colors of the Orient that pervade his
inner landscape: “hébraïques, turques, grecques, persanes, arabes, espagnoles”
(580). He works in a framework of his own invention, yet one enriched by the
Oriental past. The epigraph quoted by Hugo paraphrases a passage from the
preface to Gulistan, where Sa‘di recounts his encounter with a friend in a
garden.16 As they prepare to return to town the next morning, having stayed the
night in the garden, the companion starts gathering rose petals to take back as
souvenirs. Sa‘di comments that ephemeral things make unsuitable objects of
affection: “[J]e dis: À la rose du jardin, comme tu sais, il n’est pas de durée: il
n’est pas de confiance (à avoir) dans la saison du jardin de roses” (35). This
statement appears in slightly modified form as the epigraph to Hugo’s poem,
“Novembre,” which closes Les Orientales: “Je lui dis: la rose du jardin, comme
tu sais dure peu; et la saison des roses est bien vite écoulée” (686).
Hugo appropriates Sa‘di’s idea to depict his own fleeting inspiration, as
expressed in the lines that end the first stanza of “Novembre” and carried
through to the poem’s second stanza:
O ma muse! en mon âme alors tu te recueilles,
Comme un enfant transi qui s’approche du feu.
Devant le sombre hiver de Paris qui bourdonne,
Ton soleil d’orient s’éclipse, et t’abandonne,
Ton beau rêve d’Asie avorte, et tu ne vois
Sous tes yeux que la rue au bruit accoutumée,
Brouillard à ta fenêtre, et longs flots de fumée
Qui baignent en fuyant l’angle noirci des toits. (686)
Here, as reality collides with the ideal, Hugo seems to “go out of his way to
remind the reader that his Orient was only a dream,” as Grant suggests more
18 FALL 2016ADRIANNA M. PALIYENKO generally about Les Orientales (904). One could argue that this reminder (“Ton beau rêve d’Asie avorte”) defends the exoticism in “Novembre” as a form of poetic license and, more broadly, Hugo’s liberal usage of the East as part of his Romantic project. In this and other ways, his Orientalism differs from Desbordes-Valmore’s, whose references to Sa‘di illuminate through the symbolic rendering of divine love and knowledge a profound grasp of Sufism or the inner mystical dimension of Islam. Desbordes-Valmore’s reading of Sa‘di An earlier passage from Sa‘di’s preface to the Gulistan is key to understand- ing its trace in Desbordes-Valmore’s letter to the critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, one of her main supporters, as well as her expanded, poetic ren- dering of the same scene. The passage thus warrants being reproduced here in French translation in its entirety: Un certain sage avait enfoncé sa tête dans le collet de la contemplation, et était submergé dans la mer d’intuition. Alors qu’il revint de cette extase, un de ses camarades lui dit, par manière de plai- santerie: De ce jardin où tu étais, quel don de générosité nous as-tu apporté? Il répondit: J’avais dans l’esprit que, lorsque j’arriverais au rosier, j’emplirais (de roses) un pan de ma robe (pour en faire) un cadeau à mes camarades. Lorsque je fus arrivé, l’odeur des roses m’enivra tellement, que le pan de ma robe m’échappa de ma main. (Gulistan 30) Writing to Sainte-Beuve on February 22, 1848, Desbordes-Valmore expressed gratitude for his advice together with an abiding sense of friendship. Her letter opens thus: “Voici ce que je pourrais vous dire, véritable Saadi de nos climats: ‘j’avais dessein de vous rapporter des roses; mais j’ai été tellement enivrée de leur odeur délicieuse qu’elles ont toutes échappé de mon sein.’”17 The next sentence starts a new paragraph: “Si vous saviez quelle détresse cachée vous venez d’adoucir, vous tressailleriez (sic) dans votre âme d’une joie divine” (227). The latter statement displaces the sensuality of the fragrant rose, with all its Ronsardian connotations, toward the “divine.” Desbordes-Valmore effectively conveys the belief in a transcendent realm to the chief mystical experience that Sa’di associates with divine illumination. For Jeanine Moulin, the lines Desbordes-Valmore penned to Sainte-Beuve “ébauchent le sujet des Roses de Saadi, poème qui ne fut pas inspiré, comme on l’a cru, par l’amour.”18 In interpreting a passage from the preface of the Gulistan, Desbor- des-Valmore’s poem emphasizes the symbolism of the rose as a sign of deep friendship, as Moulin further notes. For Calder, too, the missive alluding to the Persian sage “throws considerable doubt on the assumption that ‘Les Roses de Saadi” is a love poem” (71).19 VOL. 56, NO. 3 19
L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
Calder may have had in mind André Beaunier’s lavish reading of Desbor-
des-Valmore’s love life into the poem in 1910: “Ainsi, Les roses de Saadi: tout
simplement, je ne crois pas qu’il y ait de plus beaux vers d’amour. La ferveur
s’est envelopée d’un symbole. La ceinture aux nœuds trop serrés, toute pleine
de roses, n’est-ce pas le cœur que l’abondance de son émoi fait éclater?”20
Even in projecting “Sa’di’s parable into a Romantic context,” where Pierre de
Ronsard’s amatory verse and rose trope circulated anew, however, Desbordes-
Valmore’s poem surpasses the realm of earthly love (Calder 73). Behzâdi also
highlights the spiritual dimension of her poem which links Sa’di and Desbor-
des-Valmore as well as their respective readers in a dynamic cultural
exchange across time and space: “Comme Saadi, Marceline Desbordes-Val-
more estime que l’amour se cristallise dans la pensée humaine et est ultime-
ment destiné à être le ressort de la perfection morale.”21
In “Les roses de Saadi,” a deeper symbolism links roses to all of the expe-
riences that constitute human life and yet escape our control, capturing how
Desbordes-Valmore expresses Sa’di’s kernel idea:
J’ai voulu ce matin te rapporter des roses;
Mais j’en avais tant pris dans mes ceintures closes
Que les nœuds trop serrés n’ont pu les contenir.
Les nœuds ont éclaté. Les roses envolées
Dans le vent, à la mer s’en sont toutes allées.
Elles ont suivi l’eau pour ne plus revenir.
La vague en a paru rouge et comme enflammée.
Ce soir, ma robe encore en est tout embaumée...
Respires-en sur moi l’odorant souvenir. (509)
Like Sa‘di’s, Desbordes-Valmore’s roses become vehicles for beholding a
moment of perfect union of hearts or souls, which, even as it is felt, begins to
recede into memory. Her poem engages with Sa‘di’s text at a discursive level
that elucidates his meaning, thus echoing the translator Semelet’s objective
“de faciliter l’intelligence du texte aux amateurs de la langue persane” (7). By
inscribing Sa‘di’s core idea about knowledge of the divine that one experi-
ences in the form of insight that cannot be fully expressed through language,
Desbordes-Valmore reveals in the poetic mind’s eye the global reach of the
Persian sage’s work, which Semelet invoked for French readers in 1834: “ses
maximes et ses sentences sont inspirées par la sagesse même; elles n’ont pas
vieilli; on aime à s’en pénétrer” (11).
India and its sages, too, inspired the flow of poetic thought between
France and what Hugo called “ce grand abîme de l’Asie,” as seen in the writ-
20 FALL 2016ADRIANNA M. PALIYENKO
ings of Leconte de Lisle, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Jules
Laforgue, among others.22 Critics who include Louise Ackermann in this
group have largely overlooked the specific inspiration that she found in the
Mahabharata. Ackermann was not alone in reading the Indian epic, which
since early in the century had also stimulated French interest in the ancient
Asian imaginary. Few readers, however, had direct access to the Sanskrit text,
with Orientalism “posing in a new way the insoluble problem of translation”
(Schwab 91). “In this field,” Schwab continues, “no language was at a greater
disadvantage than French, for no other language is fashioned so exclusively
for the analytical mind and a certain literary canon” (91). Ackermann’s mas-
tery of the sacred Indian language thus had a unique impact on her literary
career, reawakening her desire to write poetry just as she began to seek the
limits of human understanding in relation to modern science.
Ackermann’s reading of “un grand poème indien”
In 1914, in a tribute to Ackermann the year following the centenary of her birth,
André Thérive recalled the precocious writer and reader as a study in contrasts,
juxtaposing her desire for knowledge with her nascent intellectual pessimism:
Elle écrivait en secret de sombres vers à dix-sept ans; à quatorze, elle rimait une tragédie sur les
jansénistes; et après une enfance concentrée et sauvage, elle voulut tout savoir pour pouvoir tout
estimer vain. Elle sut de fait toutes les langues, sans excepter le sanscrit; et elle étudia le chinois
avec Stanislas Julien, car l’Extrême-Orient a la clé de toute sagesse.23
Ackermann, whose verse from the late 1820s and 30s blends subjective lyri-
cism and philosophical objectivity, stopped writing poetry upon her marriage
to Paul Ackermann and assisted him in his work.24 His death in 1846, only
three years into their marriage, precipitated her retreat to Nice, where she
devoted her time to tending her garden and reading. “Les livres, les journaux,
les revues de tous les pays prirent le chemin de ma colline,” she later recalled
in her autobiography, “Ma vie.”25 Ackermann’s return to poetry in the early
1850s, which she tied to her reading material, preserves how she absorbed the
syllabic verse of the classical Sanskrit and universal myths found in the
Mahabharata (composed between 300 BC and 300 AD), which did not appear
in its entirety in French translation until 1863.26
In a journal entry of November 3, 1852, Ackermann evoked a new chapter
in her writerly life: “Depuis un mois une vie nouvelle a commencé pour
moi.”27 Later, in “Ma vie,” composed in 1874, but not published until 1882 as
a guide for reading her poetic development, Ackermann disclosed the literary
source that had spurred her return to verse:
VOL. 56, NO. 3 21L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
[V]oici qu’un beau matin, au moment où j’y pensais le moins, j’entendis tout à coup des rimes
bourdonner à mes oreilles. [...] J’étais précisément en train de lire un grand poème indien, où
j’avais rencontré certains épisodes qui, parce qu’ils traitaient d’amour conjugal, m’avaient
enchantée. Dans la surprise du premier moment et, pour ainsi dire, inconsciemment, au mépris de
la couleur locale et des égards dus à d’aussi respectables sujets, je me trouvai les avoir brodés à
la gauloise en quelques matinées. (431)
The Mahabharata fired her poetic imagination and, in a matter of days, she
produced the verse narratives “Savitri,” “Sakountala,” and “Le coffre et le
brahmane,” first published with others under the title Contes (1855), then
reissued with poems in Contes et poésies (1862).28 Upon reflection, Acker-
mann recognized as a flaw the lack of local color and due respect for the sub-
ject matter considered sacred in its essence, a flaw produced by having
removed the stories from their original context to translate them for French
readers.29 This questioning of what is lost of the original in translation, and
even more so in an adaptation, suggests how her narrative poems complicate
an aesthetic appropriation of India with the contours of “un contre-discours
orientaliste.”30
In “Savitri, tiré du sanscrit,” Ackermann assumes the role of a first-person
narrator. She establishes her authority as an elite reader by bridging via the
narrative poem’s title and subtitle the distance (in time and space) between the
exotic subject and her linguistic access to it. While Desbordes-Valmore
adapted foreign texts largely from French translations of them, Ackermann
mediates at a meta-discursive level her abridged, yet own and thus original,
translation. She opens her verse narrative by disclosing books as her primary
source of information about India, emphasizing the discursive connection she
forged with a foreign (literary) culture:
L’Inde me plaît, non pas que j’aie encore
De mes yeux vu ce ravage enchanteur:
Mais on sait lire et même, sauf erreur,
On a du lieu déchiffré maint auteur.
En ce pays des perles, de l’aurore,
Des frais lotus et du parler divin,
La poésie a l’horreur du mesquin.31
The “parler divin” that Ackermann associates with India echoes the universal
wisdom Desbordes-Valmore discerns in Sa‘di, which elevates poetry as a way
of knowing. In comparing the length of her narrative poem with its epic
source, however, Ackermann distinguishes the practice of writing and reading
poetry in nineteenth-century France from that in India:
22 FALL 2016ADRIANNA M. PALIYENKO
De mon cerveau si je tire à grand’peine,
Tant bien que mal, quelques cents vers ici,
C’est déjà trop; la muse hors d’haleine
Demande grâce et le public aussi.
Dans l’Inde seule ils se font par cent mille
Ces mêmes vers, bien plus, on les y lit. (8)
Here, the poet as translator expresses self-criticism, her “Savitri” being a
much shorter version of the Sanskrit text. This may partly explain why, apart
from the characters’ names, Savitri and Satjavan (the French spelling of
Satyavan), Ackermann’s poetic narrative offers scant allusions to the original
cultural context: Brahma, the Hindu divinity known as the creator; Yama, the
lord of death; and the Ganges, a river of northern India. In recounting this
story of conjugal love that conquers death, she nonetheless captures the tale’s
function as a myth that, like Sa‘di’s parable from the rose garden, illustrates
for humans the path from their earthly state to a divine consciousness and
immortality. Her closing authorial intrusion underscores this point:
Auriez-vous vu là dedans (sic) rien qui nuise?
Je crois qu’au fond l’Amour, quoi qu’on dise
N’a jamais fait fi d’un bon logement.
Mais taisons-nous, car, remarque profonde,
Les gens heureux, qui donc en parle au monde?
J’ai mes raisons d’ailleurs pour finir là:
Cent ans d’amour! Comment conter cela? (36)
One could interpret these final thoughts as an echo of Ackermann’s love for
her deceased husband.32 But her life would not be the source of the pessimism
she expressed in seeking answers to the larger questions of life. This passion
for truth relates to the wisdom she gleaned from another episode in the
Mahabharata.
“Sakountala, tiré du sanscrit” begins with a prefatory statement that pre-
pares the reader for its length. Composed of approximately 1,600 “décasyl-
labes,” a poetic meter of ten syllables, the text covers forty pages. The poetic
narrator again expresses concern about retelling the Hindic story in French,
but highlights reception more than the problem of losing the fuller cultural
context in translation:
De l’Inde! À son ami lecteur
Un grand courage il faut que l’on suppose.
Passe une fois, mais nous doubler la dose!
[...]
VOL. 56, NO. 3 23L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
Vous agréer n’est pas petite affaire.
Moi qui joyeux et suant sang et eau
De ce pays portais un fruit nouveau,
Nouveau pour vous, je n’en fais point mystère,
Ce même fruit, voici quelques cents ans
Que l’Inde entière y mord à belles dents.
[...]
— Ayant changé de ciel et de corbeille,
Il a perdu de sa couleur vermeille;
Bien que l’aveu coûte, je vous le dois. (37–38)
In “Sakountala,” markers of the original context are limited to the characters’
names and the place: India. In telling the story of Sakountala who, abandoned
as a child and later by her husband the king Dushyanta, remains steadfast in
her love and is later reunited with him, Ackermann embeds maxims with uni-
versal appeal, such as “(Le cœur humain est fait d’étrange sorte) / Ce qui nous
fuit nous le voulons toujours” (42–43) and “Car du passé l’on n’est pas sitôt
quitte” (53). She also alludes to Ronsard’s extended metaphor of the rose as
woman, her youth and beauty, like love, all fleeting: “Dès qu’elles sont à leur
tige ravies, / Sans nul retour auraient leur prix perdu” (49). Her text ultimately
bridges the past and the present as well as poetic cultures, at once “helléniste”
and “oriental.” Cultural memory generates the axis along which “l’odorant
souvenir” preserved by Desbordes-Valmore’s “Les roses de Saadi” links with
Ackermann’s “Sakountala”: “La mémoire est le coffret parfumé” (63).
The lines closing the epilogue to “Sakountala” express Ackermann’s
underlying criticism of romantic effusion along with her sense that the loftier
culture underlying her hybrid and intercultural text would be lost on French
readers of the time:
Hélas! chez nous la Muse a tant pleuré
Qu’on en est las; on voudrait un peu rire.
[...]
D’un doux regard que votre gai langage
Soit appuyé, cela vous sied au mieux
Chez les Français, experts en badinage,
Mais aux bon vers préférant les beaux yeux. (99)
To Ackermann’s point, her Contes drew virtually no notice in 1855 and would
be overshadowed by the favorable reception of the poetry section of the
volume in which they were republished in 1863. Later, as the critical reader
of her own trajectory, Ackermann would emphasize her engagement with phi-
losophy and science. Her reading of the Mahabharata, which highlights its
24 FALL 2016ADRIANNA M. PALIYENKO
phonetic and ideographic value, thus faded from the literary record of cross-
cultural exchange in her day as well as our own.33
In a statement to Daniel Stern (a.k.a. Marie d’Agoult), written three
months before her mentor and friend’s review of Contes et poésies for Le
Temps appeared in two installments (on June 7 and 8, 1863), Ackermann
depicted her Contes as “des jeux d’imagination” and added, “Je n’y ai recher-
ché que la grâce et la finesse, qualités particulières aux Français du bon temps
littéraire.”34 Stern in turn criticizes the “ton gaulois” of these stories, “particu-
lièrement dans les sujets tirés des littératures orientales, slaves ou germa-
niques, tels que Savitri, Sakontala, L’entrevue nocturne [...] etc., où la discor-
dance entre le génie de la fiction inventée et le génie de la langue choisie pour
reproduire cette fiction, inquiète les goûts délicats” (June 7, 1863). Stern
invokes more productively an intercultural framework for understanding
Ackermann’s philosophical pessimism: “C’est un souffle de l’Inde qui, en
passant par l’Allemagne, l’apporte à notre poëte” (June 7, 1863). In reference
to Ackermann’s poem “Les malheureux” (composed in 1862), which ends
with the line “Laisse-nous oublier que nous avons vécu,” Stern further obser-
ved, “L’auteur des Malheureux n’eût sans doute jamais écrit ces vers pathé-
tiques, s’il avait ignoré le Nirwana des Bouddhistes et la philosophie de Scho-
penhauer. Il ne fût pas ainsi descendu jusqu’aux dernières profondeurs d’un
douloureux panthéisme” (June 7, 1863).
“Les sages de l’Inde,” to quote Schopenhauer in translation, embraced
transcendental ideality and thus found purpose in all human suffering.35
Though Thérive placed Ackermann in a Eurocentric literary tradition, he com-
pared her disavowal of personal subjectivity to “l’orgueil des mystiques qui
cherchent à la fois pour leur être l’anéantissement et la pleine perfection”
(148). As we have seen, like Desbordes-Valmore, Ackermann worked in a
multicultural context enriched by the literature of ancient Persia and India.
Their respective readings of great works from Asian culture attest to the broad
and profound impact of the Oriental Renaissance on nineteenth-century
France, an era of diverse cross-cultural exchanges that develop understanding
of a global literary history.
Colby College
VOL. 56, NO. 3 25L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
Notes
1. Victor Hugo, Œuvres poétiques, Pierre Albouy, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 1:580.
2. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East,
1680–1880, Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking, trans., Edward W. Said, foreword
(New York: Columbia U P, 1984), 6. First published in French as La renaissance orientale
(Paris: Éditions Payot, 1950).
3. The French sinologist Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat held the first Chair of Sinology at the Col-
lège de France; Jean-François Champollion, a philologist and Orientalist, deciphered the
Egyptian hieroglyphics.
4. Genette’s term “paratext” encompasses the various texts surrounding a literary work that
negotiate between the writer and the public. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Inter-
pretation, Jane E. Lewin, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1997).
5. In the late seventeenth century, the French established trading bases in India, occupying
large areas in southern India by the mid-eighteenth century. Though France retained
Pondicherry, India became a British colony by the middle of the nineteenth century and fig-
ured little in French colonial expansion during the latter part of the century.
6. In May 1877, Ackermann added an appendix to her autobiography, “Ma vie” (dated January
20, 1874); she insisted that Schopenhauer was not the source of her intellectual pessimism,
as illustrated by her early poem “L’homme” (1830), depicting humankind’s bleak destiny.
7. Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Les œuvres poétiques de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,
Marc Bertrand, ed., 2 vols. (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1973), 2:736.
8. Bertrand calls “Conte: imité de l’arabe” an “apologue” or a morally instructive work based
on an allegory and compares it to Jean de La Fontaine’s fable, “Le coq et la perle” (1:305).
On La Fontaine’s fable, “Le songe d’un habitant du Mogol,” taken from the Gulistan, and
the influence of Sa‘di’s work on other French writers, see Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin,
“Image of Persia and Persian Literature among French authors,” Encyclopædia Iranica
10.2: 150–54; http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/france-ix.
9. Gulistan, ou l’empire des roses, Traité des mœurs des rois, composé par Musladini Saadi,
prince des poëtes persiens. Traduit du persan par M*** (Paris: La Compagnie des librai-
ries, 1704), http://z.umn.edu/155g; the bibliographical record at the BnF lists d’Alègre as
the translator.
10. On Napoleon’s alliance with Fath Ali Shah Qajar sealed by the Treaty of Finkenstein of
May 4, 1807, which drew Persia “into the sphere of international rivalries,” see Iradj Amini,
“Napoleon and Persia,” Iran, 37 (1999): 109–22.
11. Statements such as these encapsulate Sa‘di’s teachings: “Par le motif que la tranquillité
consiste dans la possession de la modération des désirs”; “Aie ton intérieur vide de nourri-
ture, afin que tu y voies la lumière de la connaissance de Dieu,” Gulistan, ou le parterre-
de-fleurs du cheikh Moslih-Eddin Sadi de Chiraz, traduit littéralement sur l’édition auto-
graphique du texte publiée en 1828 avec des notes historiques et grammaticales par M.
Semelet (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1834), 105, 178. Further references to the Gulistan in
translation are to the Semelet translation.
12. “Le derviche et le ruisseau” was republished in Psyché (1826), Mémorial de la Scarpe
(1826), Annales Romantiques (1827–28), Guirlande des Dames (1830), and in Desbordes-
Valmore’s collection, Poésies (1830).
13. Dorothy M. Betz, “Orientalism as Freedom in Hugo’s Les Orientales,” Romance Quarterly,
52:1 (Winter 2005): 54.
14. Michael Riffaterre, “Hugo’s Orientales Revisited,” Romanic Review, 93:1–2 (Jan.-Mar.
2002): 173.
15. Richard B. Grant, “Sequence and Theme in Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales,” PMLA, 94:5
(Oct. 1979): 894.
16. In Semelet’s 1834 translation, the original passage reads, “et les sages ont dit: Tout ce qui
n’a pas de durée ne convient pas à l’attachement du cœur” (35).
17. Quoted in Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, Sainte-Beuve inconnu (Paris: Plon, 1901), 227.
According to A. Calder, “The passage is copied almost word for word from a free transla-
tion of the Gulistan, published in the literary omnibus Panthéon Littéraire, 135 vols. (Paris,
26 FALL 2016ADRIANNA M. PALIYENKO
1835–45), LVIII, 553–621 (554),” “Notes on the Meaning and Form of Marceline Desbor-
des-Valmore’s ‘Les roses de Saadi,’” The Modern Language Review, 70:1 (Jan. 1975): 72,
n1.
18. Jeanine Moulin, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, édition revue et mise au point (Paris: Édi-
tions Seghers, 1983), 97.
19. Lucien Descaves alludes to Desborbes-Valmore’s reading of Sa‘di in more general terms:
“Elle avait trouvé, d’ailleurs, dans le poète persan Saadi, à qui elle doit une de ses plus
fraîches inspirations, un apologue traduisant son merveilleux instinct de charité,” La vie
douloureuse de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (Paris: Éditions d’art et de littérature, 1910),
217.
20. André Beaunier, Visages de femmes, 5th ed. (Paris: Plon-Nourrit et cie, 1913), 274.
21. “Saadi à travers les poèmes de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,” La Revue de Téhéran, 78
(May 2012), http://www.teheran.ir/spip.php?article1575#gsc.tab=0. For other exchanges
between French writers and Iran during the nineteenth century, see the list of Behzâdi’s arti-
cles compiled at http://www.teheran.ir/spip.php?auteur214#gsc.tab=0.
22. See Schwab’s chapter on these poets, 411–24.
23. André Thérive, “À propos de Mme Ackermann,” La Revue Critique des Idées et des
Œuvres, 24 (Jan.–Mar. 1914): 143–44.
24. There is no evidence that their collaboration encouraged her reading of the Mahabharata.
25. Louise Ackermann, “Ma vie,” La Nouvelle Revue, 7–8 (1882): 431.
26. The Sanskritist Hippolyte Fauche produced the first French translation (up to the eighth
book) in volumes that appeared between 1863 and 1870. L. Ballin translated books 10, 11,
and 12 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1899).
27. “Journal de Mme Ackermann,” Marc Citoleux, ed., Mercure de France (May 1, 1927): 532.
28. The shortest of the three stories, “Le coffre et le brahame,” has the quality of an “apologue,”
as suggested by this line: “Sauver l’âme des gens est un devoir sacré,” Louise Ackermann,
Contes et poésies (Paris: Hachette, 1863), 194. Another story, “L’entrevue nocturne,” was
drawn instead from Les mille et une nuits, translated and published by Antoine Galland in
twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717.
29. The following year, on May 25, 1853, Ackermann expressed ambivalence about publishing
this work: “Ma paresse et mon indolence s’arrangeraient fort bien de garder mes Contes en
portefeuille. Mon talent de fraîche date me fait l’effet de ces enfants survenus tard et sur les-
quels on ne comptait pas. Ils dérangent terriblement les projets et menacent de troubler le
repos des vieux jours” (“Journal,” 533).
30. This term comes from the preface by Guillaume Bridet, Sarga Moussa, and Christian Petr,
L’usage de l’Inde dans les littératures française et européenne: XVIII e–XX e siècles (Paris:
Éditions Kailash, 2006), 15.
31. Page references to Contes et poésies, 1863, 8.
32. See Ackermann’s account in “Ma vie,” 430.
33. Jean Biès delimits Ackermann’s “Sakuntala” as “un prétexte à confession impersonnelle,”
and, following Schwab, highlights the influence of Hindic pantheism on her pessimism, Lit-
térature française et pensée hindoue des origines à 1950 (Lille: Service de reprod. des
thèses de l’Université de Lille III, 1974), 121.
34. Quoted in Jacques Vier, Marie d’Agoult: Son mari, ses amis, documents inédits (Paris: Les
Éditions du Cèdre, 1950), 133.
35. This statement did not appear until the expanded, third edition of 1859. Page reference to
Arthur Schopenhauer, Le monde comme volonté et comme représentation, A. Burdeau,
trans., 6th ed. (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1912), 4. See also The World as Will and Idea, R. B. Hal-
dane and J. Kemp, trans., 3rd ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., 1891), 4.
VOL. 56, NO. 3 27You can also read
