Victor Segalen

In this entrancing story of spiritual adventure, a Westerner in Peking seeks the mystery at the heart of the Forbidden City. He takes as a tutor in Chinese the young Belgian René Leys, who claims to be in the know about strange goings-on in the Imperial Palace: love affairs, family quarrels, conspiracies that threaten the very existence of the empire. But whether truth-teller or trickster, the elusive and ever-charming René presents his increasingly dazzled disciple with a visionary glimpse of "an essential palace built upon the most magnificent foundations."

René Leys

Christian Doumet

Dans chaque civilisation, les pierres parlent une langue singulière. Enfant d'un pays de menhirs, Segalen découvre au fil de ses séjours chinois, entre 1909 et 1914, les pierres écrites. Il en conçoit le projet de Stèles : non pas un recueil de traductions, mais plutôt une transposition, un détournement de la vertu pierreuse (pétrifiée, pétrifiante...) des mots au profit d'un monde de sensations et de visions qui lui est propre. La présente édition se propose de donner à entendre les résonances les plus lointaines de chacun de ces poèmes. Résonances chinoises, d'abord, à travers les références et les sources livresques qu'invoque le poète lui-même. Mais résonances imaginaires surtout, tant ce livre, l'un des plus étonnants de l'immédiat avant-guerre, engage déjà, dans sa complexité, les œuvres qui le suivront : Peintures, Equipée, René Leys, Le Fils du Ciel. Sont rassemblées ici, non seulement les stèles constitutives de l'édition de 1914, mais aussi celles qui, bien qu'achevées, furent finalement écartées de la publication. Une chronologie, une bibliographie, enfin un dossier de textes de Segalen à propos de Stèles contribuent à éclairer de la manière la plus précise ce monument de la langue dont on découvre chaque jour un peu mieux la modernité sans âge.

Stèles

Un monde se meurt. Immémoriaux, les Tahitiens ont trahi leurs dieux et leurs coutumes. Le drame se joue au moment de l'arrivée des Européens sur les rives enchantées de la Polynésie, à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Il prend ici figure d'allégorie : en vain, Paofaï, le dernier païen, partira à la recherche d'une écriture capable de sauvegarder les " mots qui ne doivent pas mourir " et moins de vingt ans suffiront aux Occidentaux pour anéantir une culture restée jusque-là intacte. Dans ce premier livre, une active nostalgie mène Victor Segalen, non à déplorer, mais à recréer la belle " société antique et forte ", ses fêtes, son culte du jouir, son alliance heureuse avec la nature. Quant à la langue sacrée des Maori, il la réinvente par une prose sans exemple, qui en devient le simulacre. Le livre, publié en 1907 sous un pseudonyme, acquiert tout son sens aujourd'hui où nous en mesurons le caractère prémonitoire.

Les immémoriaux

Harry Harootunian

DIVA series of notes on alterity written by Victor Segalen between 1904 and 1918, and here translated into English for the first time, anticipates the post-colonial critique of colonial theory./div

An Aesthetics of Diversity

Essay on Exoticism

René Leys: Dossiers : Annexes

Victor Segalen (1878-1919) was a doctor, a traveller (principally in Polynesia and China), and above all else, a great poet. An admirer especially of Gauguin and Rimbaud, the journey undertaken in this, his last and most important work, is that between the imagined and the real: 'neither a poem about a journey, nor the travel diary of a wanderer's dream'. Journey to the Land of the Real is the summation of the author's life as both traveller and poet, and a summation that is all the more surprising since he could know nothing of his imminent and mysterious death.

Journey to the Land of the Real

Works by the polymathic French author Victor Segalen, including a previously untranslated essay, a novel, and a libretto. Victor Segalen (1878–1919) had one of France's most curious literary careers, applying his imagination to musicology, ethnography, exploration, medicine, synesthetics, Chinese history, and the occult. This collection gathers together his previously untranslated essay “Synesthestics and the Symbolist School” and his novel In A Sound World, a work of fantasy concerning an inventor lost in his own immersive harmonic space. Segalen's medical training (he had a career as a ship's doctor) inspired an interest in the link between the prevailing Symbolism of the time and synesthesia, the condition whereby one sense affects the perception of another. This edition also includes an essay by the musician and cultural historian David Toop that explores the historical context of Segalen's ideas. Also included is Segalen's libretto for Orpheus Rex, a collaboration with the composer Claude Debussy, which he would use as an opportunity for further explorations of his synesthetic concepts. This book makes available all three texts for the first time in English.

In a Sound World

Victor Segalen : colloque

Regard, espaces, signes

Steles

First English critical edition of a bilingual masterpiece with facsimile and facing-page translation Winner of the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for an Outstanding Translation of a Literary Work (2008) Victor Segalen has come to be widely recognized in recent years as one of the luminaries of French modernism. Trained as a surgeon and Chinese interpreter, he wrote prolifically in a variety of genres. With this highly original collection of prose poems in French and Chinese, Segalen invented a new genre—the "stèle-poem"—in imitation of the tall stone tablets with formal inscriptions that he saw in China. His wry persona declaims these inscriptions like an emperor struggling to command his personal empire, drawing from a vast range of Chinese texts to explore themes of friendship, love, desire, gender roles, violence, exoticism, otherness, and selfhood. The result is a linguistically and culturally hybrid modernist poetics that is often ironic and at times haunting. Segalen's bilingual masterwork is presented here fully translated, in the most extensively annotated critical edition ever produced. It includes unpublished manuscript material, newly identified sources, commentaries on the Chinese, and a facsimile of the original edition as printed in Beijing in 1914. Volume 2 of this work is available online at www.wesleyan.edu/wespress/segalen2 and www.steles.org.

古今碑録

The “Other”—source of fear and fascination; emblem of difference demonized and romanticized. Theories of alterity and cultural diversity abound in the contemporary academic landscape. Victor Segalen’s early attempt to theorize the exotic is a crucial reference point for all discussions of alterity, diversity, and ethnicity. Written over the course of fourteen years between 1904 and 1918, at the height of the age of imperialism, Essay on Exoticism encompasses Segalen’s attempts to define “true Exoticism.” This concept, he hoped, would not only replace nineteenth-century notions of exoticism that he considered tawdry and romantic, but also redirect his contemporaries’ propensity to reduce the exotic to the “colonial.” His critique envisions a mechanism that appreciates cultural difference—which it posits as an aesthetic and ontological value—rather than assimilating it: “Exoticism’s power is nothing other than the ability to conceive otherwise,” he writes. Segalen’s pioneering work on otherness anticipates and informs much of the current postcolonial critique of colonial discourse. As such Essay on Exoticism is essential reading for both cultural theorists or those with an interest in the politics of difference and diversity.

Victor Segalen

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