Paul Valéry

Paul Valery

This selection from representative works of the great French poet-philosopher is based on the Paris Morceaux Choisis volume, which was assembled by Valery himself."

Selected Writings

Essays present philosophical discussions in the form of Socratic dialogues.

Dialogues

Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 4

Presents the French poet's meditations in prose on seashells and the questions raised by their forms

Sea Shells

A obra foi escrita para satisfazer uma encomenda do livreiro René Hilsum para que Paul Valéry escrevesse 24 poemas em prosa cuja inicial fosse cada uma das letras do alfabeto, retirando desse “alfabeto” o K e o W por serem raras as palavras francesas com essas iniciais. Valéry aproveitou a ausência das duas letras para encaixar os seus textos nas 24 horas do dia, fazendo-as “corresponder a um estado e uma ocupação ou uma disposição da alma diferente”. A obra foi traduzida por Cristina Robalo Cordeiro.

Alfabeto

Ryan Ruby

In 1892, during an intense thunderstorm, the great Symbolist poet Paul Valéry underwent an existential crisis. For the next twenty years, he wrote no poetry, devoting himself instead to the study of philosophy, mathematics, and language—and to the creation of his literary alter ego, Monsieur Teste, who first appeared in the 1896 novella The Evening with Monsieur Teste, and about whom Valéry continued to write for the rest of his life.

Middle-aged Monsieur Teste lives on modest speculations on the stock market. He resides in a greenish room smelling of mint, takes a daily stroll with his wife, and would be entirely unremarkable, were it not for the fact that he is a being made up of pure consciousness, a Cartesian creature of pure rationality, intellect, and self-control. Teste is old French for “head,” and detached from senses and emotions, Monsieur Teste feels skepticism for all received wisdom while also refusing to hold any opinions of his own. What would such a man make of his own thought processes? And what would he make of human relationships and the world?

Standing in counterpoint to Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Monsieur Teste is without a doubt one of the most enigmatic and searching manifestations of the modern imagination. A genre-defying exploration of the nature of language and consciousness, Valéry’s full body of writings on Monsieur Teste is presented here in a stunning new translation by Charlotte Mandell.

Monsieur Teste

Judith Robinson-Valéry

Poèmes et petits poèmes abstraits

Cette anthologie couvre toute l'oeuvre poétique de Paul Valéry, depuis ses débuts (Albums des vers anciens, écrits datant de 1980) jusqu'au recueil Charmes de 1922. On y retrouve les poèmes les plus célèbres qu'ont fait la renommée de l'auteur, notamment La Jeune Parque (1917) et le Cimetière marin (1920).

Le cimetière marin et autres poèmes

The Collected Works of Paul Valery

O Senhor Teste

and other pieces

Charms

All of the major meditations on the theory and practice of poetry by one of the greatest poets of our time--and perhaps the one who has most scrupulously analyzed his art--are included in The Art of Poetry. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Art of Poetry

A fresh look into the monumental work of Paul Valéry, one of the major French literary figures of the twentieth century. Heir to Mallarmé and the symbolists, godfather to the modernists, Paul Valéry was a poet with thousands of readers and few followers, great resonance and little echo. Along with Rilke and Eliot, he stands as a bridge between the tradition of the nineteenth century and the novelty of the twentieth. His reputation as a poet rests on three slim volumes published in a span of only ten years. Yet these poems, it turns out, are inseparable from another, much vaster intellectual and artistic enterprise: the Notebooks. Behind the published works, behind the uneventful life of the almost forgotten and then exceedingly famous poet, there hides another story, a private life of the mind, that has its record in 28,000 pages of notes revealed in their entirety only after his death. Their existence had been hinted at, evoked in rumors and literary asides; but once made public it took years for their significance to be fully appreciated. It turned out that the prose fragments published in Valéry’s lifetime were not the after-the-fact musings of an accomplished poet, nor his occasional sketchbook, nor excerpts from his private journal. They were a disfigured glimpse of a vast and fragmentary “exercise of thought,” a restless intellectual quest as unguided and yet as persistent, as rigorous, and as uncontainable as the sea that is so often their subject. The Idea of Perfection shows both sides of Valéry: the craftsman of sublimely refined verse, and the fervent investigator of the limits of human intellect and expression. It intersperses his three essential poetic works—Album of Early Verse, The Young Fate, and Charms—with incisive selections from the Notebooks and finishes with the prose poem “The Angel.” Masterfully translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, with careful attention to form and a natural yet metrical contemporary poetic voice, The Idea of Perfection breathes new life into poems that are among the most beautiful in the French language and the most influential of the twentieth century.

The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry; A Bilingual Edition

The Idea of Perfection

Monsieur teste

Alistair Elliot's translation with notes is aimed at making this rewarding but difficult long poem accessible enough for bafflement to turn into admiration. He attempts to clarify its small puzzles and also trace the overall narrative line of Paul Valery's poem: it does have a story (what should a young woman do?) and does struggle towards a resolution. He also provides an introduction which deals with the interesting circumstances of the poem's four-year composition (1913-17), which resulted in Valery's instantly becoming a famous poet at the age of 45, after having written no poetry for 20 years.

La Jeune Parque

"De ces essais que l'on va peut-être lire, il n'en est point qui ne soit l'effet d'une circonstance, et que l'auteur eût écrit de son propre mouvement. Leurs objets ne sont pas de lui ; même leur étendue parfois lui fut donnée. Presque toujours surpris, au début de son travail, de se trouver engagé dans un ordre d'idées inaccoutumé, et placé brusquement dans quelque état inattendu de son esprit, il lui fallut, à chaque fois, retrouver nécessairement le naturel de sa pensée. Toute l'unité de cette Variété ne consiste que dans ce même mouvement." Paul Valéry.

Variété I et II

Joris Karl Huysmans

Charles Baudelaire

Stéphane Mallarmé

André Breton

Edgar Allan Poe

"An anthology of fugitive writings by Edgar Allan Poe, with appreciations by Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Paul Valery, J.K. Huysmans.

An Anthology of Fugitive Writings

The Unknown Poe

The Collected Works of Paul Valéry: Masters and friends, translated by M. Turnell

This is an informal collection of essays and speeches on the writers who in one way or another counted for Valéry in the shaping of his mind or in his affections and interests: Descartes, Voltaire, Stendhal, Goethe, Villon, Nietzsche, Pascal, Proust, Huysmans, Pierre Louÿs, Nerval, Rilke, Bergson, and others. The volume presents, in an appendix, the first publication in English of any extensive selection from Valéry's personal notebooks--the Cahiers. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Masters and Friends

Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 9

A collection of Valéry’s essays and speeches on a wide range of philosophers, novelists, and poets Masters and Friends is a collection of Paul Valéry’s essays and speeches on writers who shaped his mind, interests, and affections: Descartes, Voltaire, Stendhal, Goethe, Villon, Nietzsche, Pascal, Proust, Huysmans, Pierre Louÿs, Nerval, Rilke, Bergson, and others. The volume also includes an appendix of Valéry’s private comments on these writers in his Notebooks. The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, the first collected edition of the writer in English, features new translations, the original French on facing pages for poetic works, and editorial notes.

Paul Valéry

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