What the Swedes Read: Saint-John Perse

This issue contains the first of a new column written by Daniel Handler. For each installment, he’ll read and write about one book by each winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. When he’s done, the Believer will throw a party in Stockholm to celebrate his achievement. We’re pretty sure this will be in 2025, but keep your calendar open.

• LAUREATE: Saint-John Perse (1960, France)
• BOOK READ: Seamarks (trans. Wallace Fowlie)

If you want to sell me on something, tell me it’s important. Call a novel interesting and I’m interested, but call it the masterpiece of the greatest Basque novelist of the nineteenth century and it’s on my bedstand before you can say “criminally overlooked.” I’ve read books by the most influential of Louisiana poets, the greatest postwar Western European essayists, and the most powerful Islamic women novelists of their generations, and when I’ve disliked them I’ve sometimes re-read them, so convinced that my skills aren’t up to their stature, rather than vice versa. It’s a bit silly, but I can think of no less silly way of deciding what to read.

This is presumably how Seamarks, by Saint-John Perse, ended up in my home. I don’t have a clear memory of buying it—I’m voracious, impulsive, and ­occasionally tipsy in bookstores—and it sat in my pile for months ­before I took it down to frown at it. Never heard of the guy or his book. Paul Rand’s cover designs are alluring but not always a sign of literary quality. Nevertheless
I started right in, on the English side of the bilingual ­edition of this book-length poem about the sea:

And you, Seas, who have read in wider dreams, will you leave us one evening at the rostra of the City, in the centre of the public stone and the bronze vine leaves?

Larger, O crowd, our audience on this versant of an age without decline: the Sea, immense and green like a dawn to the orient of men,

The Sea, in celebration of its steps, like an ode of stone: vigil and celebration on our frontiers, murmur and celebration to the height of men—the Sea itself our vigil, like a divine promulgation…

At this point I paused and thought some of the things you are thinking now. For instance, Whuh? Or perhaps: Ah, France. And: This is what people who don’t like poetry think of when they think of poetry. Or even: This is why there are so many people who don’t like poetry. And: Remind me what rostra and versant mean, again. (“A big platform in the town...