Cultural Cohesion by Clive James Page A

adjectives:
    My solitary hands recall the kings
    ( Imitations )
    My loving hands recall the absent kings
    ( History )
    Mes solitaires mains appellent les monarques
    (Valéry)
    But this is incidental. As we can see abundantly in other places, Lowell’s minor adjustments are just as likely to impart point as detract from it. Fundamentally important, however, is the way the imitation has been saddled with extraneous properties (Agamemnon, Ulysses) in order to bolster it for the significance it is being asked to provide in its new slot. Though making regular appearances in the early sections of History , Agamemnon and Ulysses are nowhere mentioned in Valéry’s poem. But then, the poem is no longer Valéry’s: in History the source is uncredited.
    Trusting to the itch of memory and ransacking the library shelves in order to scratch it, the reader soon learns that Lowell has been cannibalizing his earlier works of translation and imitation—cutting them up into fourteen-line lengths and introducing them with small ceremony first of all into Notebook and later, on the grand scale, into History . Usually the provenance of the newly installed sonnet is left unmentioned. There are exceptions to this: the “Le Cygne” of Notebook , which the gullible might have attributed to Lowell, has a better chance of being traceable to its origins now that it is called “Mallarmé I. Swan.” It is in fact the second of the “Plusieurs Sonnets” in Poésies and is called—after its first line—“Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui.” In Notebook Lowell had “blind” for vivace , an inscrutable boldness which in History has been softened to “alive.” Other improvements in the new version are less welcome: “the horror of the ice that ties his wings” is a reversal of Mallarmé’s sense, which in the Notebook version had been got right. Mallarmé is saying that the swan accepts the ice. Here Lowell seems to have been improving his first version without reference to the original. On the other hand, he has now substituted “wings” for “feet” and thereby humbly returned much closer to plumage . The key phrase, l’exil inutile , which is ringingly present in the Notebook version, is now strangely absent. Anyone who attempts to trace poems back through Notebook to their sources in foreign literatures is fated to be involved in these niggling questions at all times. But at least, with such a clear signpost of a title, there is a hint that this particular poem has such a history. In many cases even this tenuous condition does not obtain.
    When a bright young American scholar produces a properly indexed Variorum Lowell—preferably with a full concordance—it will be easier to speak with confidence about what appears in History that is not in Notebook . A good few poems appear in both with different titles, and it is difficult for even the keenest student to hold the entire mass of material clearly in his mind. But if History ’s “Baudelaire 1. The Abyss” is not in Notebook , it was in Imitations , where it was billed as a version of “Le Gouffre.” There, it reduced Baudelaire’s fourteen lines to thirteen. Now it is back to being a sonnet again, and the Etres are now rendered as “being” instead of “form,” which one takes to be a net gain. One is less sure that the poem’s provenance would be so recognizable if it were not for the memory of the Imitations version. The question keeps on cropping up—are we supposed to know that such material started out in another poet’s mind, or are we supposed to accept it as somehow being all Lowell’s? Is it perhaps that Lowell is putting himself forward as the representative of all past poets? It should be understood that one is not questioning Lowell’s right to employ allusion, or to embody within his own work a