Le Cimetiere Marin - French / English Author:Paul Valery, Graham Dunstan Martin (Translator) The structure of this great symbolist poem, published in 1920, is carried more by the overtones, associations, shape, sound, and echo of the words and imagery than by the consequential logic or syntax. 'La résonance l'emporte sur la causalité', said Valéry. But what controls the obscure and ambiguous is ... more »an intellect of extraordinary sensibility, learning, and subtlety, and a classic belief in order, that organizes the shimmering facets of metaphor into a resolved and satisfying artistic whole. Here, translation alone can do little more than indicate the total possibility of the original, picking its way through the threads of meaning; but, in the extensive commentary that follows, the reader is given an impressive and minutely-detailed reading, line by line, that totally illuminates this major work that is, half a century after its first appearance, still central to much of the subsequent poetic expression of 20th-century Europe. The volume contains, also, the text and translation of Valéry's own description of the conception and structure of the poem.« less