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PARTISAN REVIEW
"Frontispiece" is one of the many titles relevant to poetry, books, and
art. Seemingly, it wil l introduce the reader to the mystery of creation, to
poetic labor and toil. But the poet claims to be unaware of his creation.
This text, like others in
The Dice Cup,
ends with a sort of denial. The
mention of the vastness of the sea produces unpredictable disproportions,
which gives the poem the semblance of a reversed confession. Jacob also
illustrates, at least implicitly, one of his own statements, "I am convinced
that artistic emotion ceases when analysis and thought intervene." The
translation, quite literal, brings out a personal but hardly lyrical and
unsophisticated tone. We may wonder whether the poem was written as
it is presented and reflect on the demands it makes on the reader.
"Moon Poem" deals with poetic creation in quite a different way,
showing the passage from the outer to the inner world:
There are three mushrooms on the night and they are the moon.
Once a month at midnight they change their positions as suddenly
as the cuckoo in a cuckoo clock pops out to sing. In the garden
there are rare flowers which are little men lying down, a hundred
of them, reflections in a mirror. In the darkness of my bedroom
there's a luminous shuttle wobbl ing menacingly
to
and fro, then
another ... phosphorent blimps, reflections in a mirror. Tn my head
there's a bee talking.
The poem seemingly bypasses the detachment outlined in "Fron–
tispiece." But in spite of this inward journey, poetic creation-the
buzzing of the bee-remains mysterious. From a single moon to a hun–
dred men one moves to the invisible bee. These shifts imply a gradual
disappearance of the visible world. Jacob makes us believe by the title
that a romantic poem is forthcoming, but such a course becomes incom–
patible with the unassuming and repetitive language he uses. Again, in
spite of his promises he does not give himself away.
In these brief texts in which he has forsaken several of the most rec–
ognizable features of poetry, Max Jacob weighs, with irony and unex–
pected effects, the validity of truth and of acknowledged systems. Yet at
the same time, by surprising words and expressions, he introduces mys–
tery and fable . The new translations of
The Dice Cup
convincingly con–
vey the salient characteristics of the prose poems. Their faithfulness to
the French text is rendered with elegance and style in English. They are
not encumbered by traditional poetic elements, but leave it up to the
reader to establish links between bana lity and subtly hermetic games.
Renee Riese Hubert
