Review: Tentacular Cities

Tentacular Cities, by Emile Verhaeren, 1895.

Tr. Jacob Siefring. Sublunary Editions, 2023. 

Review by Stephan Crown-Weber

I was thrown off for years by a simple misunderstanding about the nature of the poetry collection Tentacular Cities (in French: Les Villes tentaculaires). Its supposed status as some kind of poetic examination of the urban condition somewhat marginalized it in my mind: mere “urban poetry.” In truth, it simply was that I had once read an article in French that stated that Emile Verhaeren was attempting to describe a new phase of urban development, the raw reality of new “periurban” spaces snaking along train lines out from Brussels toward Charleroi or the analogous growth from Paris in the direction of Rouen, Tours, Orléans, Amiens. As far as my need to grasp different layers of writing at once in all their complexity goes, it now seems plausible after reading the translation and original that that academic reading was largely the logic of hyperfocused scholarly writing at work, squinting past the work as a multifaceted entity: so much of Tentacular Cities documents, as though creating a guide that others can apply to their own European city, the accretion of history, the statue, for instance, of a founding saint, of metaphysics. A city consumed all at once as though by a flâneur or a superintelligent drifter.

There were still moments on a walk during the winter of 2024–5 when I thought I was reading this fabled, though insufficiently mythic, Tentacular Cities:

The sewers hasten a hairy gunk

Along toward the river it pollutes (4)

And just as much there are moments of transcendence that seem to surmount the very pedestrianism that I feared I would find. 

O Edens at world’s end

With purest trees standing heaven-high,

That these seers of hidden laws

Have endlessly explored,

While never doubting whether they be Gods. 

…

And one steals out of their hands what scantly remains

Of truth that was conquered and of destiny

(52)

This poetry was being written at a moment when God was understood by some in the West to be dying or dead. The horizontality of the mortal frame is crucial. Verhaeren’s mysticism, if the concept of a mystic poet is not redundant, is modern—but it lacks a readymade cohesiveness, a sense of it being an -ism like surrealism or suprematism or unanimism and even in its apophasis feels close to the acquis of something like a Roman Church that admits of there being subdivine heavenly characters within the orb of contemplation (perhaps these are just some of the fruits of neoclassicism). I simply would not have anticipated this.

Jacob Siefring has made some choices that render this poetry even more modern and Whitmanesque than Verhaeren himself intended: notably refusing to rhyme what once was rhymed on the grounds that the alternative would have been “cloying.” I would admit there is propensity amongst rhyming translation, as a general tradition in English, to commit transgressions or total eclipses of intended meaning on the order of the periodic wholesale reworkings of the Rubaiyat on the level of Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 version. In truth, the parameters that have to be true for a rhyme to map from a source language into a target language can be overwhelmingly complex. Sometimes everything has to change for everything to stay the same such that the genius of certain turns of phrase disappears. Much as I see a wisdom in the likes of a Douglas Hofstadter insisting on his Eugene Onegin translation from Russian rhyming, surely there is much salience to the idea that the attempts to get the meter within each line correct are a valiant effort. 

Consider this stanza from what is on the page the collection’s first poem, “La Plaine,”

La plaine est morne et ses chaumes et granges

Et ses fermes dont les pignons sont vermoulus,

La plaine est morne et lasse et ne se défend plus,

La plaine est morne et morte—et la ville la mange.

The grim plain’s barns and thatch and dreary ruts 

That lead to farms with worm-chewed gables

On the grim and weary plain—no longer able 

To defend itself against the city’s gut.

That is my translation that I came up with within the context of reviewing this book with the benefits of having Siefring’s version already in front of me.

I had to invent the ruts whole cloth to find a near rhyme for gut, which is the reworking of a terminal verb manger that merely notes that the city eats, thus getting at the core trope of the tentacular modern city. In the French it is not that a defense of the countryside is impossible, but simply that it is not taking place, though I sense it is implied, to believe the likes of Marx (and of course the narrative where the countryside wins again and civilization collapses is outside the bounds of the reality of the era, the final poem spinning the possibility of a distant future return to such an originary purity outside the city). Ontologically, my description of the plain seems completely in keeping with Verhaeren’s, notwithstanding a little loop to attach line three to the first two lines. 

Siefring’s first stanza of this poem goes:

The plain is dreary, with its straw and its barns,

And the farms with their wormholed gables,

The plain is dreary, and weary, it no longer fights,

The plain is dead and dreary, and the city bites.

The tentacular quality of the metropolis of the late nineteenth century is less blatantly obvious in Siefring’s, which grammatically, is generally truer than mine, and finds an obvious power in the repetition of this incantation about the plain being dreary. I can confidently state that when he gives up this high-stakes game of dealing with end rhymes everywhere (however upsetting this may incidentally be to me), the possibilities for fairly treating syntax and explicit conceptual relations opens up for him within a game in which recasting words into wildly different phrasing is of course judicious. There are some especially obvious moments of genius, then, to Siefring’s version: the Bart Simpson-like double entendre bites brings to mind being transported into centuries past with a partner and winking at them with layers of misgivings that will be lost on everyone else native to those long-lost times. All the same, is it not a little sad that Siefring neglects the word thatch, a picturesque term exotic for practically everyone outside the pre-modern era in favor of straw, which is much more mundane for all that it gets close to the vowels in barns and farms?

This is not to say he did not try to play that game and finds formal beauty that resonates in places far outnumbering the end rhymes alone:

Not far from the port, at night, when the flight

Of the vertiginous towers and palaces settles down

Into shadow—and ember eyes are smoldering,

The dark district like an animal sets aglow

Its ancient decor of vice and gold.(From “The Sprawl,” 54)

There is a cleverness moreover to this poetry insofar as its energy feels calculated within the scope of translation to speak to the moment. At times I did a double take: flagging the genius of the line “One guns them down en masse downtown” (63)  for a bit of a gloss that could not possibly feel this way in French—but of course the francophone world and moreover the West had been through many tumultuous decades and centuries punctuated by such violence. It is just that the line in French is literally “On fusille par tas, là-bas.” (63) The bas (down) in this expression is these days commonly understood to be something of a manner of speaking outside the context of a past in which là-haut is some place  distant and up high like heaven—this down is on the same existential plane as the speaker usually; there is a down here, but come to think of it, the concept of a downtown is not quite found indigenously in the British English of Verhaeren’s era, it being borne in mind that Verhaeren spent time in London. It is very much a reference to cities following the example of the density of Lower Manhattan, a distinctly long island along its north (up) and south (down) axis. All this to note that a very ugly word-for-word translation of this line would be something like:  “One shoots heaps of them there.” Or instead why not insert this allusion to 9/11 and the aura of others such as a rooftop shooting here or there rather than merely the center of a city on a mortal plane? 

There is still a shock to the lines that come a little later: 

“—To kill, to be young again and to create,

Or to fall and to die, what should it matter!

To triumph, or bloody one’s brow at the gate!

And then—whether one’s springtime be green, or red—

Is it hardly in the world, then,

Panting, breathless, through every day,

The lethal, profound power, that acts!—(65)

This is hardly a paean to violence, lost or found. There is a Shakespearean rhythm to some lines.

And first is force

Scattered wide or subterranean,

Multiplied in fists, in arms, in torsos,

Or suddenly serene,

In a supreme and flashing brain.

Opposite terrifying gold…

(82)

It seems to be about physicality, but the topic of the poem is, in Verhaeren’s words, idées,  “ideas.” Verhaeren does make the point that it is the great cities that [have] allow[ed] one to think that thought.

Granted, I wrote much of this review on a walk in the country, a salient factor being what Henri Lefebvre called the overcoming of the dichotomy of urban and rural. 

Siefring doing Tentacular Cities makes for a historical document of great value to a large group of folk, not excluding creative designers looking to reinvigorate the concept of Gotham. This translation is an important literary moment akin to the UFO overtones of Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations earlier this century, recasting the past with layers of sumptuousness and ultraviolence, as though each page is sooted by the ejecta of thousands of smokestacks in a brutal capital that give way to dreams.