A Certain Plume

The most famous of Henri Michaux's poetry collections, now in a new translation from the French.

The strange bumbling figure of Plume, a poetic personage pretty much like no other, preoccupied the great Belgian poet Henri Michaux throughout most of his career. Plume was, Michaux said, his favorite creation. Plume, which is to say feather or pen, is a character who drifts from one thing to another, losing shape, taking new forms, at perpetual risk from reality. He is a personification of the imagination, but the imagination as subject to innumerable pratfalls and disgraces, and yet indestructible in spite of itself. The whole Plume cycle comes to some forty poems, in prose and verse, many of which have never been translated into English until now. Here the outstanding translator and distinguished scholar Richard Sieburth presents a bilingual edition of a book that he describes as “among the drollest texts in modern French poetry. Michaux adored Charlie Chaplin and seems to be inventing the Marx Brothers avant la lettre. But he’s also quite aware of Franz Kafka and Paul Klee. Like all great comedy, it’s all about tone and timing. Which is what I’ve tried to get in my versions.”

Henri Michaux (1899-1984) was born in Namur, Belgium, the son of a lawyer, and educated at a Jesuit school in Brussels. He contemplated entering the priesthood, turned to the study of medicine, then left school entirely, enlisting instead as a stoker in the French merchant marine. Michaux’s travels, throughout the Americas, Asia, and Africa, were to inspire his first two books, the extraordinary travelogues Ecuador and A Barbarian in Asia (later translated into Spanish by Jorge Luis Borges). Settling in Paris, Michaux began to write and paint, and his work, especially his prose poems recounting the strange and very funny misadventures of the character he called Monsieur Plume, drew the attention and praise of other writers, among them André Gide. In 1948 Michaux’s wife died after accidentally setting her nightgown on fire; devastated, Michaux devoted himself increasingly to his distinctive calligraphic drawings in ink. He also began to take mescaline at regular intervals, recording his deeply disorienting, often traumatic experiences in a series of unflinching texts beginning with Miserable Miracle. Celebrated in France and around the world for his accomplishments as a writer and artist, Michaux remained averse to publicity and public honors throughout his life, and in 1965 refused the French Grand Prix National des Lettres. For many years the only photograph of himself that he allowed to circulate showed his right hand holding a pen over a sheet of paper on a chaotic writing desk.

Richard Sieburth is a translator and professor of French and comparative literature at New York University. He has translated works by Friedrich Hölderlin, Walter Benjamin, Nostradamus, and many others. He received a PEN/Book of the Month Translation Prize for his translation of Gérard de Nerval's Selected Writings, and also translated Louise Labé's Love Sonnets and Elegies (available from NYRB Poets).