Paul Claudel, newly translated: A sea so calm as if it didn't exist

From what distance does this voice come! From a distance that is still growing, one reads with amazement and fascination a book that was once one of the greats of French literature. In order to measure this distance, a reminder is needed today: When the twenty-seven-year-old prospective diplomat Paul Claudel took over his first job in China in the summer of 1895, the journey by ship took several weeks. Mail reached the consulate every ten to fourteen days, visits to home were of course excluded during the stay, which lasted until December 1899. Even during his second period of service from 1901 to 1904, nothing had changed: The world was big, and the distance, from today's perspective, was actually unimaginably distant.

“Connaissance de l'Est”, published in 1907, now in a new translation by Rainer G. Schmidt, otherwise appears to be from another literary world, and this is precisely where its surprising appeal lies today.

Because already in language and form, in the whole kind of narration and reflection, every single one of the many short chapters defies the usual genres of literature: This portrait of ancient China is not a report, not a novel, not a non-fiction book, and yet it is the exact, haunting picture not only a distant, but also a completely foreign country.

In a deep crisis

In Claudel's French Complete Edition it is included in the volume with poetic works; Rightly so, because Claudel's instrument of getting to know each other is not about the country, but rather one's own poetic language. Be it the Far Eastern “gardens”, be it “the earth seen from the sea” or a “contemplation of the city”, the carefully considered expression, the unusual metaphor, the dramaturgy and the sound of the sentences always create something that is so pictorial like an ink drawing, self-contained like a poem: “The ship moves its course between the islands; the sea is so calm as if it doesn't exist. It's eleven in the morning and you don't know whether it's raining or not. "

When Claudel comes to China, he is in a deep crisis, torn between his claim as a poet, his religious vocation, and the down-to-earth job in the foreign ministry. The provincial never feels at home in the modern metropolis of Paris, its literary milieu, the only confidante in the family is Sister Camille, who as a sculptor is also on a non-bourgeois path. The decision for China is also the decision for a radical new beginning in one's own life, as the immense distance of the Far East inevitably leads to the breaking off of almost every old bond that is now dependent on the rare correspondence. So at the beginning there is a picture of the end, of the beginning, one last time and already as a stranger at the family table: "This traveler, whom you have received, has ears full of the noise of trains and the din of the sea,like a dreaming he sways under the deep movement which he still feels under his feet and which will carry him away, no! this is no longer the same person. . . "

The East as a mirror of one's own culture

Claudel didn't stay the same.

The many years in the Far East have profoundly changed him, who always remains true to himself.

It is precisely in this double face that the fascination of his poetic approach lies: in view of a foreign country, a foreign language, culture, religion, to which the viewer never gives up his own strangeness and subjectivity.

Claudel doesn't make himself a Chinese, and he doesn't just stay the French he was.

When he describes the almost tropical rain - “the river itself, which borders my horizon like a sea, seems to have drowned” - then there is also the counter-memory of the drizzle at home;

He regards the temples and tombs with the respect of the devout Catholic.

Claudel's book is both: depicting reality and transforming it into poetry; the term “Connaissance” in the title encompasses both objective knowledge and the subjective process of getting to know each other. The old translation opted for “Knowledge of the East”, the new one with “What the East is” relies more on an objective-looking claim and lets you feel less that it is about a deeply personal process, about the experience of the East as a mirror of the own culture and self. There is no answer to the question of what the East is, the counter-question is what the East makes of me.

All of this is all the more astonishing and gripping as it has become so completely alien to today's world with its omnipresence and accessibility of every corner of the earth. However, if you allow yourself to be patient with this poetry of the unknown, it seems more and more that planes and fleeting images have only definitively closed the distant realms. Claudel is nowhere concerned with the exoticism of a somehow “original” country. The China in which he lived was by no means an untouched fairy tale space.

The diplomat Claudel in particular knew very well that the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, the interventions of England and France, the Japanese occupation, the collapse of imperial rule had made the gigantic empire a pawn of international economic and power interests, and the consequences of this decline are unmistakable when the poet moves around the cities with open eyes: without accusation, without the gesture of superiority, yet by no means neutral, but with his own view and judgment. And beyond all that, this great rediscovery reminds you once more of what it can actually be: poetic knowledge.

Paul Claudel: "What the East is". 

From the French, with notes, an afterword and a chronology by Rainer G. Schmidt. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2021. 222 pp., Hardcover, € 28.