T

oward the end of 1909, the poet Anna de Noailles swept into the grand lobby of the Hôtel Liverpool, in the rue de Castiglione in Paris, on her way to meet a young writer by the name of Rainer Maria Rilke. A petite brunette with large, sliding eyes, de Noialles arrived late, as was her habit, wearing a plumed hat so tall it it barely fit through the doorway and a dress laced around the torso “so she looked almost like an Egyptian statuette,” as recalled by an observer who recorded the event.

“A tiny impetuous goddess,” was how Rilke described her. At thirty-three, de Noailles was a sight to see—a celebrated writer, both famous and rich, the daughter of Prince Grégoire de Brancovan, of Wallachia, and married into the aristocratic Noailles family. But, the observer recalled, “all that our poet saw was her huge eyes, black and imperious. She advanced a step, stopped again, and began: ‘Monsieur Rilke, what is love for you? And what do you think about death?’” His overwhelmed response went unrecorded—I suspect he had none—but from that moment, according to Leppman, his biographer, Rilke “began to avoid Anna de Noialles.” [An account of the meeting with Rilke is given in François Broche, Anna de Noailles: Un mystère en pleine lumière (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1989), pp. 270-271. My quotations are taken from Broche; translations are my own.]

As have we all, in English anyway. Partly this is an indication of how little writing is translated from French in the first place, particularly older works by women. In French Women Writers, an anthology for students, Anna de Noailles is sandwiched between the twelfth-century poet Marie de France and the absurdist playwright Marguerite Eymery, better known as Rachilde. I suppose I should be glad she appears at all. Few of the anthologized writers are household names in London or New York, or Paris for that matter. Simone de Beauvoir, maybe.

More’s the pity, particularly with respect to de Noailles. Arguably the most important poet of the Belle Epoque, she was a confidant of Proust and Cocteau, part of the influential group associated with the Nouvelle Revue Française, hailed by the London Times as “the greatest poet that the twentieth century has produced in France—perhaps in Europe” and by the New York Times as “one of the finest poets of present-day France.”[From the London Times: Quoted in Tama Lea Engelking, “Anna de Noailles,” French Women Writers. Eds. Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994): 334-45. From the New York Times: Paul Souday, “Biographical Sketches of Mme. de Noailles,” New York Times, January 6, 1929.] In her lifetime she brought out nineteen books: eleven volumes of poetry and eight of essays, fiction, and criticism. Most were well received; several were bestsellers. She also left a lasting institutional legacy as a founder of the Prix Femina, the only French literary prize juried solely by women. As a writer, as a poet, as a conversationalist, she was inexhaustible. Verse poured from her, “dictated,” she said, “with a perfume of roses.”[Quoted in Engelking, 337.] In the words of literary historian François Raviez: “Everyone fell silent, just to hear her speak.”

On her death in 1933, the French government gave her a state funeral. Apart from her heart, which is interred near the family’s country home at Amphion, she’s buried in the Bibesco-Brancovan vault in Père Lachaise. Her tomb bears the inscription: I was not made to be dead. And she was not—and yet, in English, she very nearly is. Apart from scattered notices on specialist websites and in the occasional little magazine, she is virtually entirely lost to English speakers. (One notable exception is Christina Tudor-Sideri, who opens each chapter of her sublime If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces (Sublunary Editions, 2023) with a translated line from de Noailles’ Les Vivants et Les Morts.(The Living and the Dead, 1913)) De Noailles has not fared much better in France. According to Raviez, who in 2013 brought out an anthology of her poems, she has struggled “to escape the purgatory of forgetting.”[Interview with Geraldine Mosne-Savoye, “Qui était Anna de Noailles?” Sans oser le demander (podcast), Radio France. April 28, 2023.]

The second of three children, Anna de Noailles was born on November 15, 1876 in 22 Boulevard de La-Tour-Maubourg, an impressive building with ceilings decorated by Renoir. Her father was a galaxy: a Wallachian prince in exile who was also an ardent Republican, a decorated soldier and graduate of Saint-Cyr. Her socialite mother was an accomplished pianist who claimed origins in Crete. This growing and remarkable family soon moved across the river, to an opulent home in the Avenue Hoche, in the tranquil 8th arrondissement.

With her older brother and younger sister, de Noailles roamed the rooms of her new home, which soon filled with incredible stuff—suits of armor, ancient tapestries, musical instruments, and furnishings from Algeria and Japan. They were filled as well with music, thanks to her pianist mother whose playing, de Noailles said, formed the foundation of her poetic art. Her father had a role here too, as an impassioned reciter of war stories and poetry learned by heart.

Surely it was sometimes necessary to escape this dramatic household, to retreat to the respectable shade of the nearby Parc Monceau. It’s easy to imagine her on a park bench reading the poems of Leconte de Lisle, pressed upon her by her father, or a volume of Greek myths, indulging her taste for the ancient. There were other escapes. Every year, she spent four idyllic months at the family’s country home, at Amphion on the shores of Lake Geneva, her father’s steamboat docked at the water’s edge.

This opulent childhood was marred by illness and catastrophic loss. Throughout her life she suffered from chronic appendicitis, which she contracted as a child, as well as fevers and insomnia. Her father died when she was nine, a grief from which she seems never to have fully recovered. While her writing overflowed with paeans to the natural world and the pleasures of the senses, this exuberance was tempered by a constant painful awareness of the transience of all attachments. In her own assessment, her work was shaped by two opposed forces, of warm life and cold death, which she figured archetypally as “the bacchante and the nun.”[Quoted in Engelking, p. 340.]

She made her literary debut in the Revue de Paris, on February of 1898, with a clutch of poems called Litanies. When her first collection, Le Coeur innombrable, appeared in 1901, Proust threw her a dinner complete with bouquets the wildflowers she mentioned in her book, and Sarah Bernhardt gave a celebratory reading. Her poems exalted the rhythms, sights and sounds of the countryside, and entangled them with a life-giving eroticism ballasted by her awareness of the constant presence of death.

After her marriage, in August of 1897, to Count Mathieu de Noailles, the newlyweds set up a household at 109 Ave. Henri-Martin, near the Bois de Boulogne, in a building that is now the embassy of Bangladesh. A son arrived in 1900; a decade later, the family moved to a new and spacious Beaux-Arts building just a few blocks away, at 40 rue Sheffer in Passy.

The marriage dissolved. The relationship didn’t satisfy her. As I write these denatured words, I am aware of stepping carefully, perhaps prudishly, over her many tumultuous love affairs. She threw herself into relationships with an intensity that, perhaps inevitably, found full expression only in the haven of her work, where she could more freely explore themes of erotic power and submission. She explored these themes in ways that prove hard to confront, let alone translate—and more on this in a moment.

In 1903, she published a novel, the first of three. La nouvelle espérance opens on a winter day in Paris with two women walking near the Bois de Boulogne. One asks the other, “Are you truly happy?” The other replies, sharply, that yes, of course, she is happy, and the first woman finds that she believes the lie. “Not having found what she was looking for, and having lost both memory and desire,” the older woman subsides, willing to be deceived. Just as she senses the budding conflict, she pulls the wool over her own eyes.

The moment is notable for its stark psychological acuity: one person treads knowingly on the sensitivities of another, is rebuked, and slips into a state of sincere forgetfulness, which is just what permits the moment to be swept under the rug. Meanwhile in the street, the air, like the prose, is so cold and dry the whole world seems on the verge of cracking open—as is the relationship that this cold, dry prose conveys. This moment, from the novel’s first page, gives a clear view of de Noailles’ writing, its intelligence and force.

La nouvelle espérance was put forward for the Prix Goncourt, but the next two novels, featuring characters who grimly renounced their passions and lit out for the convent or the grave, prompted only scandal and criticism. A fourth novel remained unfinished. It turned out that her readers preferred the bacchante to the nun. De Noailles returned to poetry with the publication of Les Eblouissements (1907); this volume included the sensual “La Prière devant le Soleil,” a verse bacchanal if ever there was one, which Proust famously praised as “the most beautiful thing written since Antigone.”

Perhaps because her vitality was both fed and sapped by her erotic entanglements, de Noailles was also a sturdy traveler who understood the benefits of a change of view. There were many trips, of course, to the country house in the Haute Savoie, as well as excursions to Saint-Moritz (where she met Proust) and even to Constantinople. In the spring of 1908, she toured Sicily, Rome, and Naples, and it is this trip that seems to have provided the material for several Italy-inspired poems in Les Vivants et Les Morts as well as the Italian section of Exactitudes, published seventeen years later in 1930, including “A Roman Morning.”

How could such a beloved writer so completely disappear from view? She did write, and speak, in a great gush. Perhaps the gush itself was off-putting. Her writing has a febrile quality, as if drawn from an ancient, overlooked source, or a geyser that’s been capped so tightly, for so long, it can only escape in high-pressure bursts. Or perhaps it is simply her formalism—she adored the alexandrine—that caused her to fall from view; her sympathy for traditional forms put her out of step even with her contemporaries. And then there is her dauntless exploration of the erotic, of sensuality and pain.

One way to euphemize this aesthetic interest would be to say that she was chiefly concerned with “the psychology of love.” But this formulation, which I’ve read more than once in connection with her work, is bloodless, avoidant, and misleading. The psychology of love? De Noailles was concerned with the experience of being wholly—cellularly—transformed by relationship. She painted a picture of what that transformation is like when there is no equality between the parties, when direct contact—her questions to Rilke, for instance—comes off as the impertinence of one who does not know her place. In other words, she was a brilliant observer of love and desire as they are distorted by patriarchy.

A status-conscious onlooker might call this behavior—a blithe transgression of the bounds of propriety—cringe. This is precisely the problem, or opportunity, presented by her work. Some of it—perhaps the best of it, certainly the most interesting element of it—is cringe. Take, for example, “Nuit de Rome,” a prose poem of four paragraphs that opens with a description of the sun setting over a convent in Rome. The convent is a clue: between the nun and the bacchante, the nun is ascendant. The peace is shattered by the arrival of a woman whose laugh reminds the narrator of a line from a book of Greek mythology: “Tu ris enfin du rire qui prélude à la hymen!” With this line, the nun suddenly gives way to the bacchante. The woman’s laugh is specific but hard to specify, a belated laugh that precedes . . . the hymen? The translator’s difficulty is acute. Of course this is a sexual consummation. The laugh is prelude to a fuck.

The vulgarity of this translation is not exactly present in the original, but it’s not not there either. In Greek mythology, Hymen is the god of marriage. By invoking myth, de Noailles evokes the classical world of forms and proprieties. “Hymen” is the voice of the nun. But the laughter erupts from the throat of the bacchante. If “fuck” vulgarizes the reference, it also clarifies the meaning—and modern readers may well need this clarification. A direct translation isn’t going to do it; the hymen belongs now to the discourse of anatomy. As the poem ends, de Noailles continues to stretch the ambiguity. The laughing woman joins her partner, not in bed but in a wedding ceremony with “more than twenty” onlookers who collectively break out into the same laugh. The scene evokes the bacchanal but does not quite become an orgy. What to do with this text, this writer?

The erotic ambiguity of “Nuit de Rome” finds an echo in “A Roman Morning.” Returning from a somber trip to the Protestant cemetery, the narrator spies a priest hustling across a field. She prays that whatever he’s doing, he should not intrude on the joys of any local lovers—certainly not after all that she’s just seen and experienced among the tombs.

De Noailles is at her most cringeworthy when she’s finding a language for sex within a discourse of propriety. But what choice did she have? She was writing from within the patriarchal fin-de-siècle; Freud’s case studies are exactly contemporary. It’s worth pointing out that a hymen is also a threshold, a boundary. By insisting on this language, by refusing to let the bacchante chase away the nun, de Noailles insists on a boundary of her own: she will not be silenced beyond a point. She will use a cringe word if it suits her. This insistence puts her at a distance from current publishing, from books produced in response to an algorithmically produced demand for more of the same well-blended pap that always goes down smooth. Insisting on her visions, she sticks in the modern craw in a way that, if nothing else, makes translating her an adventure.