1Trouver une langue, Finding a language is a handsomely-produced selection of sixteen essays which were first shared at a conference. As the title implies, Adrian Grafe and Nicolas Wanlin’s volume is a bilingual and interdisciplinary work whose novelty lies in the bringing together of insights drawn from two very different literary traditions around the single question of poetic language. Such unity in diversity is to be applauded but it brings with it not only the delights but also the dangers attendant on interdisciplinary work, a point we shall return to later. This is a work which is clearly ambitious in its scope, since the “poetry and poetics” promised in the subtitle range from the classical to the contemporary. The approach is steadfastly empirical, the general propositions about poetic language being sometimes argued and sometimes implied in discussions of a single poet or groups of poets. Perhaps with a view to counteracting the centrifugal forces inherent in such a method, the co-editors have taken pains over the coherence of the presentation.

2The essays have been grouped under four headings: Le dire poétique en question / Poetic speech in debate; Traduction, adaptation, réécriture / Translation, adaptation, rewriting; Conversions et crises / Conversions and crises; and Praxis poétique : « Chercher/trouver »/On poetic praxis: seeking/finding. A general introduction accounts for these groupings and summarizes the contributions to each section. More convincingly, the essays are arranged in roughly chronological order, beginning around 1613, the date of Jacob Hoefnagel’s Orphée charmant les animaux reproduced on the cover, and ending with the ultra-contemporary Frank Smith. Smith’s Essai d’investigation poétique makes a particularly satisfying conclusion to the collection since, paradoxically, it teases out a number of theoretical questions in so intriguing a way as to make the reader want to go back and reread the volume in this concluding light.

3One point needs to be made from the outset: this volume of literary criticism is entirely jargon-free. Without exception, the contributors have found a prose language in which to write about poetry. In a time when even university teachers and students find poetry difficult and are increasingly reluctant to read it, critical writing which does not add another barrier but rather seeks to entice people back to the reading of poetry has become paramount. The main difficulty is that of quotation: given the performative nature of poetry, how much of a poem needs to be quoted to make an argumentative point? The contributors do not always sufficiently consider this issue, some quoting verse at too great a length for the point they wish to make, others too little and two critics not quoting the verse they are referring to at all. One contributor who does quote well is Andrew McKeown, whose demonstration of Edward Thomas’s modernist language works particularly well through comparative quotations.

4In her interesting study of Geoffrey Hill, Madeline Potter emphasizes Hill’s interest in the presence or absence of a title (105). Indeed, the title Finding a language promises some sort of common understanding among the contributors of what they mean by the term ‘language’, while ‘finding’ suggests that something is felt to be missing in the language available to a poet in a given situation. Nor should we forget that deceptively discreet indefinite article. A language is the language appropriate to a particular situation. It will answer the needs of a particular poet in a given place and time, but it is unlikely to be of universal value. Since the title implies these three concerns, this review focuses on the extent to which the contributors discuss them satisfactorily.

5The sixteen contributors refrain, no doubt wisely, from binding the term language to any positive definition. Rather they deal with poetic language in terms of what it is not. It is not the rational language of science, implies Nicolas Wanlin in an essay which draws attention to the pitfalls of metaphor when used to express the latest scientific discoveries. It is not a language easily understood by the tribe for whom the poet sets himself up as spokesman, adds Charlotte Estrade in an essay on the many paradoxes to be found in the poetics of Ezra Pound. It is not the language of redemption, suggests Madeline Potter, although Hill’s symbolic use of words and their ritual movement may offer a form of atonement. Poets can hold the mirror up to the destructive language of the political world, argue Shirin Jindani concerning Paul Muldoon’s Plan B (2009) and Frank Smith à propos of his own Guantanamo (2010) and Gaza d’ici-là (2013).

6Shifting the accent to the indefinite article in the title, a language, not poetic language in general but the language of a particular poet or group of poets, contributors such as Adrian Grafe and Frank Smith adopt a more historicized view of poetic diction. They cite Arthur Rimbaud’s letter of the 15^th May, 1871 to explain that at any given time, poets will seek out a new language appropriate to the needs of a new generation. According to Suzanne Duval, novelists may also feel such a need, as shown in the borrowing of poetic adornments by early seventeenth-century French prose-writers. Every generation feels such a need to reject the old and strive after the new but in the case of Théodore de Banville and Stéphane Mallarmé, Barbara Bohac’s close examination of the poetics of the Parnassiens and those of the Symbolistes concludes that the two schools may not be that different. A generation later the progress from the old to the new would be embodied within the lifetime of a single poet, Anna de Noailles, as she moves from what François Raviez calls the “perpetual burgeoning” of her early poems to the austere near-silence of her late work. In our own time, according to Eléonore Hamaide-Jager and Isabelle Olivier, David Dumortier has sought to incorporate into his poetry words that might be thought crude and vulgar by an older generation, but which undoubtedly appeal to a younger one.

7To these concerns with finding a language that will speak to one’s own time, Sara Greaves adds the dimension of space. Not only does the poet-journalist James Fenton find himself groping for words to express war and its aftermath but he is “adrift in the politics of the Pacific Rim,” all-but-overwhelmed by the magnitude of the catastrophes he witnesses and for which he must find words: the fall of Saigon and the killing fields of Cambodia. Meanwhile on the other side of the world, Ben Leubner finds that the central theme of Derek Walcott’s poems, and more particularly Omeros, is that of “the crippling pain of history inherent in language” (167) and the need to find words bringing release from that pain. Indeed, medical metaphors abound in this study of poetic language, the poet seeking for a language which will bear what T.S. Eliot called the “sharp compassion of the healer’s art.”

8Turning to the very act of finding, the third term of the title, several contributors discuss the fact that what the poet finds is often not so much a new language as an old or common one redeployed. Poetic language can be something found, words picked up and recast in novel ways. Where they are found varies of course with the individual poet, but it is surprisingly often in the classics. Claudine Nédelec explains how the burlesque poets of seventeenth-century France were able to circumvent and triumph over the austerity recommended by Malherbe by parodying the Ancients. Translation comes into its own here, and we are encouraged to take an interest not in what is lost but what is found in translation, whether it be what Alex Shakespeare observes in Robert Lowell translating Dante or what Adrian Grafe admires in Francis Cabrel’s translations of Bob Dylan. Philippe Chométy in making us aware of what the eighteenth-century translators of Lucretius were seeking—the glory of being the sole translator of the Roman poet—offers an additional and astonishing insight into a lost poetics of translation. For these Enlightenment translators, a good translation was not a relative achievement, not something to be added to a separate category of literature-in-translation but a void to be filled in French literature itself, one of the oft-forgotten functions of translation. The question has a bearing on current university practice: it is one thing to know that French departments and French competitive examinations routinely require students to study works in translation; it is quite another to be reminded that this is because such works are considered as component parts of French literature itself.

9It is just such insights which make bilingual collections potentially so exciting and so bring us back to the question of interdisciplinary work. In an academic world in which more and more French and English departments are being asked to offer combined degrees, these will become increasingly necessary. Trouver une langue/Finding a language makes a promising start down an exciting path, but it is only a start. Every essay here works on its own terms, but there is insufficient communication between them and so insufficient examination of what unites or separates the French and English language-and-literature traditions. Each critic writes about their subject in a way that is worth reading for its own sake but, despite sharing a common critical language, they seldom, if ever, talk to each other. The connections to be made are by no means excluded from this volume, but the burden of making them is left for the reader to bear. This is the interdisciplinary question that needs to be addressed—and it is a question eminently worth addressing—if the scholars brought together here wish the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts.