Yvan Goll’s Jean Sans Terre is a collection of five books of interrelated poems written over eight years (from 1936 to 1944). Goll maps the anguish of dispossession, the suffering and distress of the alienated human individual suffering the worst depredations of mechanization and urbanization.
This aspect, especially marked in the first three volumes, is to be identified with Goll’s expressionistic poetics and his vision of possible healing for human suffering in brotherhood and mutual support against oppression. The language is symbolically rich rather than forcefully immediate: “Des moulins de fièvre / Tournent doucement / Pour moudre le rêve / Des derniers amants” (Fevered mills / Turn sweetly / To grind the dream / Of the final lovers) (70).
The figure of Jean, or Landless John as he is called in some translations of individual poems, can be identified with wanderers: sailors, vagabonds, or pilgrims; with exiles from economic and political persecution: the Diaspora of ancient Jews (he encounters Ahaseurus), and the flight from pogroms and extermination under fascist regimes.
An allegorical figure, Jean represents the countless forms of homelessness. He is a modern man without faith, man alone: “Sans passeport / Sans père sans frère” (Without passport / Without father or brother) (14), who hopes to recover some feeling for the healing power of religion, a very secular Jew who interrogates those whom he meets as well as enacts the roles of the many wandering figures the poem evokes.
In becoming Jean, Yvan finds his personal freedom, discovering an inner world where there is scope for divinity: “Et je me libère / Et je deviens Jean / Tout-à-fait sans Terre / Ange du dedans” (And free myself / And become Jean / Even without a land / Angel of within) (114). Goll’s angel is not a figure of doubt and denial, but a personification of interiority.
The sum of different representations of the human condition, Jean is Don Juan, the lover (42); he is Joan of Arc (92, 94), the figure most identified with France; but also perversely because he is Jean, a hermaphrodite, testifying to the range of brotherly identifications to which Goll opened himself in the writing of this poem.
At different stages in its evolution, Jean Sans Terre represents a reflection of Goll’s personal experience. This feature of the composition is especially true of the fourth book of the collection, written in 1944 in New York City. The fifth book contains uncollected poems and variants. These pages employ images drawn from the uncertainties of forced exile: a harbor without boats or a lighthouse without pity (in “Jean Sans Terre Reaches the Last Port”) (194).
Goll’s language expresses unblinking realism; face to face with the polluting alienation of the industrialized New World, he compares the mouth of the Hudson to pestilent green and black fluids (in “Jean Sans Terre Salutes the Harlem River”) (276). “Goll’s imagery lies somewhere between cubist and surrealist techniques” (Carmody 97). The poet’s insistence is on graphic specificities combined with psychological overtones: “Si tu te dénudes / Jusqu’en ton esprit / Toute solitude / Soudain se guérit” (If you strip bare / To your spirit / All solitude / Of a sudden cures itself) (103).
The six- and eight-syllable lines of the first three parts of Jean Sans Terre, rhythmically similar to the “green grow the rushes o” of English ballads, echo the measures of France’s ancient lais of geste and romance; they pose an almost impossible hurdle for the translator into English. Referencing similar meters, Chaucer’s host complained of the jog trot doggerel used for “The Tale of Sir Thopas.”
Still no English verse can equal the tightly patterned puns and rhymes of “Femme sois ma mère / Femme sois ma mer / En qui Jean sans Père / S’oublie et se perd” (Woman be my mother / Woman be the sea / Where fatherless Jean / Forgets himself, loses his way) (104).
The most widely available English edition of Jean Sans Terre was published in New York City in 1958, with some guidance by Claire Goll. In 1944, four books of Jean Sans Terre appeared in a deluxe edition from the Grabhorn Press in San Francisco. W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, and Allen Tate, among others, wrote introductory notes. Translators included many of the most notable figures in American poetry of the 1940s: Paul Goodman, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Clark Mills, and William Carlos Williams.
The order of the poems varies widely from the order in which they were composed, and the quality of the translations is uneven; nonetheless, Jean Sans Terre is notable testimony to 20th-century social alienation and remarkable poetry in both its imagery and its meters. (Translations are Donald Wellman’s; citations, to the Glauert-Hesse edition.)
Bibliography
Carmody, Francis J. The Poetry of Yvan Goll. Paris: Caractères, 1956.
Goll, Yvan. Die Lyric in Vier Bänden. Vol. 3, Jeans Sans Terre / Johann Ohneland. Edited by Barbara Glauert-Hesse. Berlin: Argon, 1996.
———. Jean sans Terre. Preface by W. H. Auden, translated by Lionel Abel, Louise Bogan, William Carlos Williams, et al. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1958.
Categories: British Literature, French Literature, German Literature, Literature, World Literature