Maria-Mercè Marçal - “I am of those laid low by light. Under the implacable face of day, memories devour me like abject vermin. And at dusk when I hear the groaning of the unfortunate land, I have felt in excess the horror of having been born. Who, then, will bring me the hemlock in their hands?"

Maria-Mercè Marçal, The Passion according to

Renée Vivien, Trans. by Kathleen McNerney and

Helena Buffery, Francis Boutle Publishers, 2020.

In this often poetic and lyrical novel by the revered Catalan poet Maria-Mercè Marçal, we are taken on a journey through the multiple, mobile and contradictory life, letters and loves of the fin-de-siècle Anglo-French writer, Pauline Tarn-Renée Vivien, as researched and reimagined by two principal narrators – a 1980s Catalan documentary film-maker Sara T. and a 1920s French archaeology scholar and museologist Salomon Reinach – alongside the voices of the various friends, relations, lovers, companions and servants who made her acquaintance at different moments in her life.

In the process, we are presented with a compelling reconstruction of the Belle Époque and interwar years in Paris, alongside other key sites in this transformational literary geography – Nice, Bayreuth, Switzerland, Istanbul, and the island of Lesbos – that include often dazzling evocations of other cultural figures and influencers of the age, from Zola to Pierre Louÿs and Remy de Gourmont, Liane de Pougy to Mathilde de Morny and Colette, not forgetting the central figure of Natalie Clifford-Barney, the ‘Amazone’.

Contains the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read in Catalan. - Anna Murià

The Passion according to Renée Vivien is a novel, but, closely based on the life of the poet Renée Vivien (1877 to 1909) -- born Pauline Mary Tarn --, also very much a work that explores how/whether one can capture a real-life person in some creative variation on biography. Marçal's approach is decidedly not the standard life-by-the-numbers one; Vivien's life here is pieced together from reminiscences and other material (much of it actual-documentary), much of it from after the fact, beginning, for example, with the recollections of an uncle, Amédée, she was close to, from shortly after her death. It is two outside figures, working after her death, whose fascination with the poet shapes much of the novel: filmmaker Sara T., working on a screenplay about Renée Vivien in the mid-1980s and Salomon Reinach, whose Violet Notebooks from the 1920s, deposited at the Bibliothèque nationale (and sealed from outside -- though not the reader's -- eyes until the year 2000) also have Vivien as a subject. Vivien herself is presented largely at a remove -- made all the more clear by the fact that the documentation, itself precisely dated, in letters and diary entries, is almost entirely written and collected after her death -- even as the entire novel is completely suffused by the poet (and her passion(s)) -- culminating then in the short final section, 'Final Monody' which, as the author reveals in her postscript-Note: "is composed wholly from sparse verses of the protagonist" -- i.e. the poet's own words. 

'Renée Vivien' is, of course, already herself a fiction, the adopted name -- and, arguably, persona -- of Pauline Mary Tarn; though adopted specifically as a pen name, i.e. an identity to ascribe her creative output to, it clearly became more than that, as, as is emphasized throughout the novel, her art and life tended to one. 'Renée Vivien' was a role Pauline assumed and embraced -- though it is noteworthy that many of those who write and speak about her do also refer to her as 'Pauline', a part of her that she could not (and apparently did not want to) entirely disassociate herself from. 

Renée Vivien is best-known as: "the first woman after Sappho to openly sing of feminine love", and her passionate affairs are seen as defining in and of her life. While her first collection was published under the name 'R. Vivien' -- leading/allowing its author to be mistaken for a man -- she lived openly as a homosexual, and celebrated it in her poetry. Among the great but thwarted passions of her life was a Natalie B. (Barney) -- and, in one of the few sections where her own words from the moment are presented at greater length, quoting from a 1901 letter, the lasting hurt of this failed relationship is suggested: 

You speak of people who love me -- no one loves me in the great, sacred sense of the word. I have loved Natalie, I squandered everything on her exclusively, but she didn't love me. Who, then, could love me ? 

The ideal of love eludes Renée Vivien, even as she throws herself with such great passion into her affairs. 

Renée Vivien herself wrote an autobiographical novel, A Woman Appeared to Me (1904) -- about which Salomon R. writes in his notebooks: 

This roman-à-clef -- as all novels are at heart, no matter how difficult the code might be to decipher -- does not strike me as a good story, although it is a supreme source for Pauline's biography. It is a pity that the divine being, motivated no doubt by a false sense of modesty, refused to write memoirs, a genre which is, to me, much more interesting. 

Even as he acknowledges the work of fiction as tremendously revealing, Salomon R. differentiates between novel and memoir, and doesn't find A Woman Appeared to Me to be a real substitute. This is a central theme and question to The Passion according to Renée Vivien as well, as several figures try to capture Renée Vivien in some written form -- notably Sara T. and Salomon R. Hovering beyond all these is also a narrator -- the guiding authorial hand -- who remains in the background but repeatedly reminds readers of her presence (that there is a: "teller of this tale"), such as in some of the chapter-preview headings, e.g.: 

Where the -- seemingly absent -- narrator catches Sara T. in the process of composing an extensive epistolary account of her doubts, motivations, considerations and reconsiderations regarding Renée Vivien. And where that which is silenced is more important than that which is said. 

Sara T. notes that: 

Renée is one of those mythical figures who has functioned as a screen on to which everyone projects their own imaginary. 

Indeed, with the basic facts the subject's life well-known, The Passion according to Renée Vivien is very much a book of projections -- not least, of course, Maria-Mercè Marçal's own, the author herself a lesbian and poet. The novel's collage of reminiscences and reflections is as revealing about those who look (generally back) on Renée Vivien's life -- if not, in some ways, more so, as the poet herself remains a not insubstantial but still shadowy figure in much of this.

One person suggests: 

Truly, it made no sense to write a biography of one who had lived for literature alone. Her verses were the autobiography of her soul. 

And Salomon R. similarly insists: 

It was in literary form that Pauline's loves made full sense and where they ought to be situated, with no shame and from the very beginning. Her literary genius required the inspiration of beauty. It wasn't enough to be Beatrice, she had to be the singer of Beatrice as well.

But Marçal also avoids the too-easy reliance on the poet's own work -- at least until that brief final chapter; even there, it is a reshaped collage -- and, as such, an interpretation -- of Renée Vivien's poetry rather than simple reproduction of it. 

Fundamental to the novel throughout remains the question of how to present a life that seems to have found its full realization in the subject's art: what more need or can be said than the poetry itself ? Like Sara T., Marçal struggles with the subject over many years -- a decade, she suggests in her Author's Note -- and the novel has the feel of an experiment with form. No one perspective is anywhere near adequate; no single voice, no single reading. 

Near the end of the process, Sara T. concludes: 

Through Renée I believe I have come to understand what it means to intermingle literature and life inextricably, to live each day "literarily", or rather "poetically": every gesture, every moment is a rhetorical figure, and systematically the humble, limited, poor signifier knows that it is not up to the requirements of the slippery Signified: the part that stretches and is broken in its slippery efforts to represent the Whole; the totality that realises, with sadness, that it is in the end nothing but an infinitesimal part. 

The Passion according to Renée Vivien certainly suggests such melding of literature and life, and Marçal pulls this off quite well. The different characters that occupy themselves with Renée Vivien, especially the ones that do so after the fact (i.e. after her death), present what amounts to an intriguing, variegated collage, and Marçal's refusal to go with the obvious -- in this and all respects -- is effective. She's particularly good in her use of different registers and voices, from the brief mentions of the unseen narrator -- pure and pointed artifice -- to, say, the account of the chambermaid who attended to Renée Vivien in her last years. 

It all makes for an unusual but interesting work, a striking portrait of a strong but vulnerable woman who remains ever just so slightly out of reach -- of author, reader, and all those here who tried to grasp her. Along the way, it also offers a quite vivid picture of an influential slice of early twentieth-century Paris life among a well-heeled class, with Renée Vivien's circles extending far and wide. Finally, and in so small part, The Passion according to Renée Vivien is about language and expression; it is a poetic text, reveling in language and playing it up. It wants to set itself apart from biography in this regard, too, with many of the scenes and sections intentionally poetic in a way we can hardly imagine or expect biography to be; unsurprisingly, like Renée Vivien, Marçal was primarily known as a poet. 

It is all a bit rich and much, too, but it is certainly an interesting life, and an interesting take on it. - M.A.Orthofer

https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/catalan/marcalmm.htm

This is a very different kind of novel from those I normally read for Translating Women, and will be a treat for anyone who enjoys creative biographies. The Passion According to Renée Vivien represents a literary project to uncover the hidden life of Renée Vivien (the literary pseudonym of Pauline Tarn). Renée Vivien was an English-born poet who wrote in French in the early twentieth century, whose poems are particularly notable for their explicit revelations about her amorous relationships with women, who lived in a “palace of pain” and longed to escape from life, and whose legacy has been “demolished by the victorious blows of mediocrity and stupidity.” Originally published almost thirty years ago, The Passion According to Renée Vivien is a ground-breaking work in Catalan literature, taking on the traditional “academy” from the marginalised perspective of a woman writer – and not just a woman, but a woman who openly proclaims her love for other women, a poet whose name “shines … with its own light amid a tradition that certainly existed but only underground, the victim of invisibility and silence.”

Herself an openly feminist and lesbian author and activist, Maria-Mercè Marçal became obsessed with the idea of lifting Renée Vivien out of the exile which is “the common lot of poets” – an obsession that she transfers to one of the main active voices of the text, Sara T. The decision to create fictional biographers is a clever one: this is no dry, objective account of Vivien’s life, but rather a vivid, impassioned quest to uncover her mystery and her legacy. The Passion According to Renée Vivien is full of beautiful aphorisms (“After all, perhaps glory is just a posthumous form of love: the only form with the capacity to raise the dead”), and Marçal sets out to give voice to an overlooked figure from recent literary history by writing a book about “women who, like me, yearned for deep-rooted changes in the world.”

This polyphonic text is part documentary, part biography and part love song to its subject. We discover much of Pauline’s life through the eyes of Sara T., a 1980s Catalan documentary maker who becomes obsessed with giving voice to Pauline, and in particular Sara reveals the difficulties of piecing together all the details of Pauline’s life to make a coherent whole. The other main source of information is Salomon R., a museum curator, and we also have letters from Pauline’s lovers, as well as a more objective and omniscient third-person narrator from Pauline’s own era, through whom we gain insight into her personal circumstances through observations of her entourage and conversations between courtesans. Though in some ways contemporary readers might find the main narrative’s milieu less recognisable because of the relatively privileged lifestyle it details (for example, one character’s great dilemma regards her “unresolved doubts” about an ivory statue in a museum, and Renée herself “had the fortune to be able to torment herself with only metaphysical problems”), the timeless and universal qualities of love, loss, desire, jealousy, sorrow and despair prevent the text from feeling dated or unrelatable.

My over-riding impression of the translation was that much time, energy and (if I may borrow from the title) passion has gone into making this work available to English-speaking audiences: it’s clear just how much both translators care about this project. The writing is lyrical and eloquent, almost old-fashioned in its language choices, but not dated. It evokes a time of formality in turn-of-the-century Paris, and manages to sustain a formal and authentically period-appropriate narrative style throughout its 350 pages. This formality is also partly owing to a delicate attention on the part of the translators to favour terms that have French etymology, reflecting through this choice Pauline’s own writing “against” English. In the whole book there were only a couple of instances when I thought something more modern might have crept in, but this may well be my own ignorance of when expressions became current in English – or it may reflect potential anachronisms in the original Catalan. Overall, there was something very nostalgic for me about reading this book: its turn-of-the-century style and references to 19th-century writers and culture took me back to my years studying French literature, and locating much of the narrative in Paris is always a way to tug at the nostalgia for me. All it takes is the street names and in my mind I’m already there – so my only regret in that sense was the anglicisation of some of the street names – a number of the more recognisable ones remain in French, but elsewhere there are references to, for example, “Vendôme Square” and “the boulevard of Paix”, which for me snapped the nostalgic connection. But that’s an entirely personal reaction, and for readers who don’t know French – or don’t know Paris – then this might, conversely, bring them closer to the text, particularly given the strategies of writing “against” English that I mentioned earlier.

I’ll leave you with a little scoop that for me was the most fascinating thing about this novel: thanks to an interview with translator Helena Buffery (which you can read here in full next week), I discovered that the final chapter of The Passion According to Renée Vivien is made up entirely of fragments of Renée Vivien’s poetry. This section is breathtakingly beautiful, and the book is worth reading for this alone – not only its beauty, but also the skill of weaving together the (French) fragments to make a narrative (in Catalan) that is now translated into English. Within the fictional biographer’s task, we are told that “her verses were the autobiography of her soul”, and so it feels appropriate to give the last word to Renée Vivien, via Marçal, in a rendering by Buffery and McNerney:

“I am of those laid low by light. Under the implacable face of day, memories devour me like abject vermin. And at dusk when I hear the groaning of the unfortunate land, I have felt in excess the horror of having been born. Who, then, will bring me the hemlock in their hands? Night slithers, slowly and subtly, toward the opal of the hill. The soul resuscitates in the tenebrous shadows.

… I will hurl myself into your eyes, where sadness rhapsodizes.

… Here, words do not hurt, Let us keep the doors closed. Souls without hope have the solitary pride of islands.” - Helen Vassallo

http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2020/07/27/review-the-passion-according-to-renee-vivien/

Restless and inquisitive, a demanding and attentive reader, fascinated by narrative, Marçal had always wanted to be the author of at least one novel, much in the same way that she had expressed (Ibarz, 2000) the desire to write for movies or television.

La Passió segons Renée Vivien (The Passion According to Renée Vivien) is a title that, like all Marçalian names, concentrates various meanings: from the “Passions” of baroque music to The Passion According to G. H ., by Clarice Lispector. The novel, explained Marçal, is a result of falling in love with a figure from the past, the beautiful Pauline Mary Tarn (http:www.reneevivien.com/vie.html), a Parnassian poet from the turn of the century who openly sings of Sapphic love. Pauline lived in a female atmosphere of creative effervescence that transgressed the norms of her times, and died before she was forty. The twentieth century poet had an uncanny sense that she could identify with this Englishwoman who wrote in French, and with the passionate attachment to life and literature she seemed to possess, and thus decided to follow in her footsteps. Her first project was to write a thesis, but afterwards this desire channeled itself towards fiction. The work of the scholar precedes the task of the novelist: in the Library of Catalonia, one can consult two boxes of material related to the long gestation of the project. Marçal made pilgrimages to the significant places of Vivien's life, traveling to Mitilene and spending summers in Paris; she hand-copied the correspondence kept at the National Library and translated some poems that, linked together, form the book's final “Monody,” a poetic text that, while not inventing anything that is not translated from Renée Vivien, is a beautiful Marçalian recreation. 

The result is a novelesque biography in many voices, which are necessary in order to present multiple perspectives of the same person, depending on their relationship with the object of the biography, the place from which she is seen and from which they write. The novel thus incorporates a multiplicity of points of view and registers, which range from the first person of the “Letters of Sara T.”, the contemporary scriptwriter, who has been seen as the narrator's alter ego, to the third person of the narrative voice, wisely distinct from the character of Sara T. The latter is able to incorporate an ironic register, as are the carefree conversations of some fin de siècle courtesans, a register which is not easy to discern in Marçal's poetry. The girl of the late 1980s, the biography of the poet, the narrator, the maid, and the Turkish lover Kerimée: all of these voices revolve around the absent protagonist, the only one in the novel who speaks exclusively through her work. 

The novel contains incisive and original thoughts on love and friendship, on passion in life and writing, on minoritized languages and the literature written in them, on knowledge and knowing, on relationships between women, on death and posterity, all of this from the experience of a woman who is very aware of being a woman. In this ambitious narrative experience, when all is said and done, what one knows is not much more than a sketch. It includes a Rodoredan evocation, a long monologue by the poet's chambermaid, which naturally she does not end up writing down. It is an homage paid to one of the symbolic mothers of Catalan women's fiction. 

Lluïsa Julià has written that, throughout the novel, Marçal constructs a powerful symbolic female subject who may be a stand-in for the writer, the creator herself, who is at once Dante and Beatrice, Laura and Petrarch, the muse and the poet, brilliant author and passionate lover. She praises and at the same time incarnates passion in her life. Renée, dead at thirty-eight in a quasi-religious setting, betrayed lover and singer of love at the same time, can become the archetype. In Renée the late twentieth-century author can see a mirror image of herself, and reflect on episodes from her own life: her relationship with her father, her daughter, or her obsessive loves. She can reflect, too, on her relationship with posterity, which Renée, like a premonition, seems to understand. Various passages in La Passió thus become keys to unlock our reading of Marçal's poetry; in a round trip voyage, the two texts explain and mutually nourish one another. 

Changing for each character or narrative moment, Marçal's beautiful, precise language—as the words of a poet must be—seemed to surprise and seduce readers more quickly than her poetry. Marçal received various honors for this novel: the Carlemany Prize and the Critic's Prize, and the Prudenci Bertrana, Institute for Catalan Letters, and Joan Crexells awards, and it was soon translated into Spanish and German. She felt discovered as a writer once she had made the step towards fiction, and she planned to continue on that path. - Fina Llorca, Trans. by Robin Vogelzang

http://www.visat.cat/traduccions-literatura-catalana/eng/articles/37/20//0//maria-merce-marcal.html

María-Mercè Marçal, The Body’s Reason:Poems

in Catalan, Trans. by Montserrat Abelló

and Noèlia Diaz-Vicedo, Francis Boutle 

Publishers, 2020.

The Body’ Reason is the first book by Catalan poet Mari-Mercè Marçal to be translated into English. She is a key figure in Catalan poetry of the post-Franco era, who was actively engaged in the transition to democracy and the emergence of a feminist movement in Spain. Hers is a uniquely challenging voice expressing a distinctive Catalan gendered perspective.

Written during the last years of her life when she was fighting cancer, the first Catalan edition of this book, Raó del Cos, was published two years after her death. Faced with death she opens a dialogue between life and poetry, the ephemeral and the eternal, marked by subtle images and a language moulded by her feminism. Dealing with love, illness and death, The Body’s Reason is a book full of poetic energy.

Maria-Mercè Marçal (1952–1998) was a Catalan writer, known primarily for her work as a poet, feminist critic and activist, as well as a translator of European women’s writing into her mother tongue.

First translated into English in the 1980s, and recognised as an emerging voice in European letters, she has received increasing admiration for her careful excavation of a poetic landscape capable of expressing the different stages and nuances of women’s lived corporeal experience, from her early work Cau de llunes (Den of moons, 1977), Bruixa de dol (Mourning Witch, 1978) and Sal oberta (Open salt, 1982), via the ground-breaking Terra de mai (Neverland, 1982), La germana, l’estrangera (Sister, stranger, 1985) and Desglaç (Thaw, 1988) to the posthumous collection Raó del cos (The Body’s Reason, 2000).

Her celebration of love between women in all its different forms has made her a touchstone in contemporary lesbian/queer writing in Spain.

Her narrative work as the author of short stories and one novel, The Passion according to Renée Vivien, is less widely known but is rapidly gaining similar acclaim, and has recently been the subject of a number of critical studies. Already translated into four languages (German, Italian, Slovenian and Spanish), not to have an English version of The Passion according to Renée Vivien was difficult to justify.