Paul Claudel’s “Five Great Odes”: A New Translation and Commentary

Lauren Butler Bergier provides an accurate and poetic English translation of Paul Claudel’s Cinq Grandes Odes (1907), with detailed commentary introducing Claudel’s style, his sources, and the poems’ historical context. A seminal text in European literature, this long-awaited critical translation makes available Claudel’s beautiful and edifying poems that speak to doubt and to faith, to love, to grief, and to hope. To great effect, Bergier retains Claudel’s innovative verset structure, affording English readers a true sense of the poems which, with corresponding line numbers throughout, can be read alongside the original French folio edition. In this volume’s comprehensive introduction, Bergier presents the historical and scholarly context in which Claudel was writing; the importance of the verset claudelien to the history of French poetics; and the influence Claudel had on theologians such as 20th-century Swiss theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar. Further providing commentary, each Ode is also accompanied by an essay. These essays not only speak to the main themes of each poem, but also point to Claudel’s key sources of inspiration, from liturgical texts and the Bible to classical literature, philosophy, and 19th-century French poetry. With a preface and postface by distinguished philosophers, Jean-Luc Marion and Rémi Brague, as well as a new translation of Claudel’s essay, ‘Processional to greet the new century’, this volume has everything scholars and students need to enjoy, and moreover, truly understand Claudel’s poetic masterpiece.