The poem Landscapes has been taken from Selected Poems of Andrée Chedid. The piece was originally published in Textes pour une figure (Texts for a Figure), Chedid’s first book of French poetry, which dates back to 1949. It also reappears in the well-known Textes pour un poème (Texts for a Poem, 1987), a compiled volume containing poetry produced by the author between the years 1949 and 1970.

Landscapes, one of Chedid’s earliest poems, is comparatively long, comprising 56 lines. It is also one of her richest in terms of the density of the archetypal images and metaphors it deploys, despite its apparent surface-level opacity. The poem illustrates the convergence of the inner and the outer worlds that is the hallmark of Chedid’s entire poetic project wherein one encounters a deconstructive re-creation of a universal “primordial spiritual reality underlying physical experience” (Cochran iii).

Landscapes opens with an indication on the part of the poet of a reality beyond the apparent, a message that is symbolically postulated in advance through the overall opaque texture of the poem itself. The poet makes it known that obscured by physical reality and the word itself, this mysterious and silent dimension of reality remains invisible and hidden to conscious memory:

Derrière le visage et le geste / les êtres taisent leur
réponse / et la parole dite alourdie / de celles qu’on ignore ou
qu’on tait / deviant trahison;
(Behind faces and gestures / we remain mute / and spoken words heavy / with what we ignore or keep silent / betray us)

Evoking the impossibility of “knowing” this primal source of existence (“I dare not speak for mankind / I know so little of myself”), the poet prepares the ground for the poem’s second movement.

Uniting two levels of experience, the poet thus proceeds, in the next stanza, to project a psychic “elsewhere” onto the body of the Earth in an attempt to “decipher and recreate the archetypal images of the subconscious” and convey complete reality (Cochran ix). The poet turns to the landscape and contemplates it as a reflection that affords her a deferred revelation, mediated through the verb, of the primal psychic impulses of the poet’s individual self and of humankind, too. The projection allows the poet to return to the “deepest depths within herself where all experience is universal” (Cochran xvi).

Reconciling the temporal with the eternal, death with life, the remainder of the poem develops a sequential contemplation of varied landscapes. The poet hints at a dialectical coexistence of death and life using topographic imagery evocative of her native Mediterranean Middle East. Symbols such as “desert,” “bird,” “oasis,” “water,” “tree,” “sea,” and words with connotative power such as open valleys, captive summits, untamed evergreens, and errant pathways are deployed.

The landscape and the natural elements that shape it—associated with the harshness of existence, worldly suffering, and death—are equally a metaphor for beauty, vibrancy, freedom, and peace. The Earth’s body, endowed with primeval spiritual significance, serves as a surface reflecting the unnamable, timeless, hidden principle underlying the ebb and flow of the apparent. The outer landscape depicted also comes across as a landscape reflecting the (hostile) elements of both the inner and the outer worlds that the poet must traverse before self-realization can happen.

Chedid’s poem In the Flesh (Prendre corps), originally published in 1979 in Cavernes et soleils (Caverns and Suns), is an enriching counterpoint to Landscapes because it may be viewed as an extension of the Chedidian concept of landscape. Here, using a less arcane code, the poet turns the flesh and body of the human into an organic and visceral landscape that is the site of the play and display of spirit.

Bibliography
Chedid, Andrée. Cavernes et soleils. Paris: Flammarion, 1979.
———. Textes pour une figure. Paris: Pré-aux-Clercs, 1949.
———. Textes pour un poème. Paris: Flammarion, 1987.
Cochran, Judy, trans. Selected Poems of Andrée Chedid. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995.

Categories: British Literature, French Literature, Literature

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