Anabasis
by Saint-John Perse
Summary
Anabasis is a long visionary poem rather than a story with named events, following a figure called simply the Leader as he founds a settlement on an unnamed eastern coast and builds it, canto by canto, into a full civilization: princes, priests, grammarians and tailors all arrive in turn to give the new city its order. Perse writes almost nothing as direct statement; instead a bronze tree, a newborn colt, a dead donkey in the harbor and the shadow of a great bird accumulate into a sense of founding and empire that never resolves into a single readable plot.
Having built the city, the Leader grows restless with it and sets off again toward the horizon, less interested in ruling what he made than in the act of founding itself, and later cantos bring an encounter with a group of women that reads as renewal after his long solitary wandering. The poem closes with purification rites, the raising of a monument and a long list of trades and crafts, as if the whole cycle of settling and founding were about to begin again from nothing, the same restlessness that opened the poem still unresolved at its end.
Perse writes in long, unrhymed lines closer to scripture than to conventional French verse, dense with the names of tribes, trades and unfamiliar places that accumulate rather than explain, and the poem is genuinely difficult on a first reading, closer to overhearing one half of a conversation than to following a story. It suits a reader drawn to pure sound and image over narrative, and its reputation rests heavily on T. S. Eliot's own English translation, which carried the poem to readers who would never otherwise have found it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Saint-John Perse the 1960 Nobel Prize in Literature for the soaring flight and the evocative imagery of his poetry, which in a visionary fashion reflects the conditions of our time, honoring a poet who had published Anabasis in French in 1924 under a pseudonym chosen specifically to keep his poetry separate from his real career as a French diplomat, born Alexis Leger. T. S. Eliot, then still an admirer rather than a fellow laureate, translated the poem into English in 1930, and that translation did more than any French edition to build Perse's reputation outside France.
The Vichy government stripped Leger of both his citizenship and the Légion d'honneur in 1940, and he fled to the United States, where he spent the war as a literary adviser at the Library of Congress on the recommendation of the poet Archibald MacLeish. His citizenship was restored after the war, and he wrote under the Perse name for the rest of his career, keeping the diplomat and the poet permanently separate even after both were known to be the same man.