Commentary |

on The Lascaux Notebooks by Jean-Luc Champerret, edited and translated by Philip Terry

Although The Lascaux Notebooks is the twenty-first book published by Belfast-born poet and translator Philip Terry, he is a shadowy figure as far as American readers are concerned. He may be best known in the U.S.  as the anthologizer of The Penguin Book of Oulipo (2019) or the translator of Georges Perec’s I Remember (Godine, 2014). His own poetry projects have involved virtuosic reformulations of the European canon, among them, Ovid Metamorphosed, 2009; Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 2010;  Tapestry, 2013 (the Norman invasion as described by the Bayeaux creators); Dante’s Inferno, 2014 (with Ted Berrigan taking the role of Virgil); and Dictator, 2018 (Terry’s revisiting of Gilgamesh). Besides his translations of Perec and Raymond Queneau, Terry has also produced original poetic works employing their methodologies (Oulipoems 1, 2007 and Oulipoems 2, 2009), most remarkably and successfully in Quennets (2016).

With his latest offering, The Lascaux Notebooks, Terry takes an even more ambitious step backward into the literary gloaming. The book’s premise is the discovery of the notebooks of the French “linguistic genius” Jean-Luc Champerret, author of the forgotten Chants de la Dordogne (1941). Champerret is presented as a mysterious individual who broke the code of signs found on the Dordognes most famous prehistoric cave walls. (That he was also a member of the Resistance during WWII ostensibly explains his deciphering facility.)  Champerret’s French “translations” of these discovered Upper Paleolithic symbols have been rendered by Terry into English. Terry’s fascinating introduction reads like fiction, which it almost certainly is.

I say “almost,” as Carcanet, the book’s publisher, is presenting the volume with a perfectly straight face. Part of Terry’s introduction was published in the London Review of Books in January without qualification. The online launch on May 18 involved Terry reading from the book, along with an introduction and question-and-answer with the distinguished Marina Warner. Only at times did Warner seem to have trouble keeping her giggles stifled. There is also a truly brilliant faux documentary “preview” for the book in French (both recordings are available on YouTube). Terry’s performance has been so good, I myself sometimes wondered whether I might be wrong about his project’s complete lack of authenticity.

For me, the first textual clue that this might all be an Oulipean-inspired creation had to do with my familiarity with Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, published in 1975, where from his cafe table Perec describes in exact detail the comings and goings on the Place Saint-Sulpice, particularly those of Bus 84 which ends at Porte de Champerret. The train line that begins at Porte de Champerret now ends at the Metro stop Bobigny-Pantin-Raymond Queneau. This dual coincidence of Perec/Queneau with the name of Terry’s French hero seemed to me unlikely to be an accident.

I also found it suspicious that there are no actual photographs of Champerret’s notebooks, “for conservation reasons,” only charcoal renderings by Lou Terry (presumably Phillip’s relative or spouse). Clearly, Terry did his research on prehistoric sites. But though Terry thanks Pierre LeBlanc at the Pôle d’Interprétation de la Préhistoire at Les Eyzies (an extensive research facility on France’s prehistoric caves), there is no mention of him or Champerret through the website’s search engine, despite Terry’s assertion that that is where the Champerret materials are currently stored. Terry also makes reference to an article in the “Proceedings of the Oxford Prehistorical Society,” a publication, as well as an organization, that doesn’t seem to exist.

Finally, any new discovery that adds a chapter to the nation’s cultural patrimony would not have gone unnoticed and uncelebrated by France’s cultural bureaus. That someone from the UK provided first publication of France’s earliest work of literature would certainly cause alarm and extensive discussion in French academic and intellectual circles. There had been none that I, at least, had been able to find through online searches. Terry does note (and it feels an awful lot like track-covering) “that there are discrepancies between Champerret’s signs and those at Lascaux today is beyond question.” A long and rather dubious explanation follows, concluding with this philosophical sleight-of-hand: “Many have testified that what we see when in a cave, and what we see in a photograph, are ontologically different.”

My mounting suspicions, however, have only served to increase my delight in Terry’s wonderful book. (And, in fact, he himself “came clean” about the book in a July 6 piece for The Irish Times.)

The fun begins with Terry’s preface which, in diabolically Nabokovian manner, tells us considerably more than we need to know about the circumstances of his discovery. He unnecessarily explains why it took him so long to translate and publish his Champerret findings. A footnote on the book’s second page provides the text of a satirical lyric Terry composed about the vice-chancellor of his university (modeled on Mandelstam’s poem to Stalin) which forced Professor Terry to “lie low” for a few years: “The broad-breasted boss from the north / savours each early retirement like an exquisite sweet.” (If this stab at academic politics doesn’t sound funny to you, then The Lascaux Notebooks isn’t your kind of book.)

The box of Lascaux materials were given to Terry some years before, so he relates, by an architect friend who was renovating a chateau in Southwest France in which Champerret had once resided. There follows the story of Terry’s rediscovery of the yet-unopened box in a dusty corner of his garage. “This time, I opened it — partly out of curiosity, partly to determine whether or not I should throw it in the skip that was taking up the drive.” Among the assortment of colored boxes, notebooks and papers were drawings on postcards, “a little like some of the graphic work of Henri Michaux.” Other visual poems, proposes Terry, recall the work of Apollinaire and Mallarmé.

His interest piqued by the discoveries, Terry then meets up with an elderly French maid who years before had worked at the chateau. He asks her for biographical details about the almost-forgotten figure. When the Lascaux caves were discovered in 1940, it is explained, Champerret of the French Underground went (literally) underground to survey a possible hideout for his anti-Nazi cell. Two years later the chateau was raided by the Gestapo, and Champerret disappeared, never to be heard of again.  It was during these clandestine wartime visits, before archaeologists arrived, that Lascauxs Ice Age poems were first discovered. “During his long, lonely, nervous nights at the chateau,” Terry proposes, “Champerret must have ruminated on what he had seen in the cave, bringing his skills as a code-breaker to bear on the ancient drawings and signs.” (A pseudo-glossary of some of these is provided as an appendix.)

Terry’s elaborate introduction is only the beginning of his ambitious project. Ahead of the 350 pages of translated poems, Terry describes Champerret’s process, setting them out as occurring in five distinct stages. The method involves first identifying each sign’s meaning, then placing each ideogrammic “word” into a heraldic 3×3 grid also found in the caves. A third step produces stanzas of three lines each in Terry’s English. With the next set of versions/revisions, each of the triplet’s successive syllabic lines grows longer. And then in its fifth and “final” verse rendering, there is poetic elaboration or “embellishment,” as well as Dantean terza rima indentation. Terry, significantly, does not provide any examples of Champerret’s original, though the chapters are identified by French nomenclature, such  as “Boîte Noire,” “Carnet Bleu,” and “Feuilles Détachées.”

All this sounds, at least for a while, vaguely plausible. In his translation of Champerrets stages three, four and five (as in this example given in his introduction), the reader is presented with

 

The eye

of the bison

is the sun

 

which becomes

 

The eye

of the bison

is like the bright sun

 

and ends up as

 

The white eye

of the black bison

is like a star at night

 

But by poem three of the first notebook/section (beginning with nine identical signs of stacked circumflexes: ^^^ / ^^^ / ^^^ ), chuckling takes over.  In this poem, each teepee-shaped sign is “translated” either as bison, mountains, huts, or crossing, all leading to

 

A herd of bison

came down from the mountains

leaping and dancing over the crossing

 

As the book proceeds, inclusion of the all the variants (some now with Champerret experimenting with other grid structures and procedures) is mercifully abandoned, leaving the narrative more readable and swift-moving. Possible line breaks are now sometimes only marked by vertical lines. By page 121, we come to true narrative prose, a sixth stage of Terrys translations,” four pages describing the aftermath of a devastating wildfire. The interlude comes at a welcome moment, for it requires a certain determination to work one’s way through several hundred pages of repeated images. The effort is worth it, however, as it reveals gems such as this set of descending similes:

 

The winking black eye

of the cave’s dark [entrance]

is like the eye of a needle of bone

 

the impenetrable dark

of the cave’s black heart

is like a night with no moon

 

the hidden place

where the cave divides

is like the branching of the stag’s antler

 

Through it all, this poet remains a serious prankster. And Terrys made-up verses can be extremely amusing. One suggests that truffle hunting in Périgord is an activity reaching back many millennia, a proposal not unlikely to be historically accurate.  When we get to the eye-winking Too many men beside the cooking pot and the fish will burn,” or when the ideogrammic birdhandhand / birdbushbush” becomes A bird in the hands is like two in the bushes,” the pull on a readers leg becomes undeniable. Declaring dead-pan in a footnote that “the consonance between Paleolithic parietal art and the art of modernism is beyond doubt,” he defends the use of collage technique in his and Champerret’s poems. Some of the more farcical poems display familiarity with the modernist canon:

 

To say I have eaten

the fruit that

you were keeping in the hut

 

you will have to

make do with

roots when you break fast

 

eating the fruit

I thought

how delicious how cold

 

For me, the poetic lesson of W.C. Williams — how the graceful unrhymed line may capture the simple immediacy of human experience — carries over, despite all the allusive joking involved. The book comes to a close with a series of poems describing the creation of “Paleolithic poetry,”

 

The man takes

the track leading

to the cave

 

holding a flint to

the wall he carves

antlers trees

 

he carves dots

a single feather

a bear’s paw print

 

finishing up with this poetic statement about the subject matter of Lascaux’s cave art:

 

So much depends

upon the red bison …

 

For as page after page of Ice Age poems keep coming, the playfully conceived series of vignettes acquire a poetic reality that is quite moving, touching on matters of love both romantic and familial. In their accretion of repeated detail they forcefully imagine what life and death in Paleolithic hunter society might have been like. (Certain images convincingly presage” Homeric simile, as when dawn comes with cold hands.”) What Terry has produced are genuine poems, whatever their source; and the book ends up as something close to a masterpiece. Through Terry’s cinematic imagination, readers experience the sensibility of early man, as though the wall paintings of an archaic hunting culture have indeed come alive:

 

by the flickering

light of a lamp

he makes out

the brightly coloured

 

forms of horses

galloping across the

vertiginous walls

of the cave

 

he looks in

wonder and with

longing at the horses

flying overhead

 

Terry’s skilled verbal recreation bears comparison to the replicated Lascaux IV that paying tourists are allowed to visit. It is a reconstructed leap, of course, but “taking a leap of the imagination, a leap in the dark,” asks Terry, “is this not quite literally what the bounding Chinese horses lining the ceiling of Lascaux’s Axial Gallery ask us to do by example?”

In his University of Essex biography, Terry describers one of his teaching interests as “a widening of the definition of translation as traditionally and rigidly conceived.” Experimental translation is indeed a significant form of creative writing, in and of itself. But by producing the target text as well as its English rendering, Terry challenges received ideas about the origins, nature and function of the lyric poem; the received poetic canon also becomes subject to radical revision. In short, with this book (as well its experimental predecessors), Terry performs the role of the avant-garde artist.

His radicalism is both conceptural and procedural.  He speaks of the need to “trust in the grid” in Carcanet’s recorded event, and one hears in this exhortation something of Oulipo methodology. Another “framing device” employed (at least as Terry indicates in the book’s promotional interview) is the introduction of aleatory procedures. A version of John Cages indeterminacy, it would appear, is also part of the Champerret/Terry mode of creative translation. Terry’s seemingly random allusion to the I Ching in his introduction, therefore, is not accidental; it’s a kind of clue. Terry also mentions Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dès, a reference followed up mid-book by pages of oversized graphics, all explained as mimicking Champerret’s “playing freely with line spacing and font size.”

Considering Terry’s interest in French literature and thought, his most important source of inspiration must be Georges Bataille’s Lascaux or The Birth of Art (1955), based in part on his 1952 lecture “A Visit to Lascaux.” Immediately pertinent to Terry’s project is Bataille making note of the “coat of arms” grid on the cave walls, as well as the presence of various writing-like signs. Bataille wonders whether these “obscure symbols,” and others like them, might be ideograms. But perhaps more profound is Bataille’s philosophical proposition concerning the power dynamic between humans and animal, a relationship of mutuality he infers from Lascaux’s wall painting. In his art, the Cro-Magnon painter recognizes in animals a shared presence of mind,” or in Batailles French, esprit.” Despite the apparent frivolity of Terry’s project, much of this respectful and yet fearful interspecies acknowledgement comes through in his recreations.  Post-war Bataille was also especially conscious of the fact that the discovery of the caves occurred at the time of Auschwitz. An echo of this historical awareness may be detected in Terry’s imagined narratives, as in this footnote:

“This poem, with its sinister references to captives being led off into the hills, given the historical context of the compositions, cannot fail to evoke the Nazi roundups which were frequent in both the occupied and non-occupied zones in France during the Second World War.”

And then finally, and most relevantly, Bataille identifies the sanctuary as place of ritual preparation for the Paleolithic hunt.  Analogously, formalism (the use of rules of constraints” in the production of texts) is itself a kind of ritualistic process, so that these repetitive texts effectively recreate some sense of preparatory observance. With its ancient forms of charms and spells, poetry (and certainly the “trick” of literacy) is a form of magic. The shaman is ancestor to the poet; he is one who hears and reports the voices of the past.

I do take issue with two elements of Terry’s proposed narrative of Ice Age poetry. Writing, I would argue, comes very late in the poem’s history, as the first written form of the art dates from the time of Sumer. Even now, the chant and hymnal nature of the poem as we know it continues to refer back to a fundamentally oral tradition. In Terry’s created prehistoric chronology,  literacy — even a primitive form of cave-wall literacy— is anachronistic.  But this is a quibble, as I acknowledge that such an anachronism is central the book’s imaginative premise.

Which brings me to another canonical problematic: As the oral tradition of early women’s poetry existed, and for the most part continued, outside of written form, their voices have remained mostly unrecorded. While many admittedly have no “lyric gender,” a majority of Terrys poems are written in what could only be a mans voice. It has generally been assumed that prehistoric cave painting was the work of male humans, though recent discoveries in France and Spain have brought this received idea into question. A majority of painted outlines of hands at numerous sites in Spain and France are distinctly female; women, therefore, likely painted most of the various images we associate with “the birth of art.” If women form even a portion of the era’s visual art, then the long oral tradition of “women’s poetry” (songs of weaving, as one genre that extends into the Middle Ages) would also find its presence there. And so Im disappointed that more of the poems in Terry’s collection are not clearly in a female voice, especially given Terrys wonderful recreation of the voices of the Bayeux Tapestry weavers. There is this lovely triplet in Terry’s Lascaux:

 

We sit with our sharp needles of bone

round the warm glow of the fire

making necklaces from pierced seashells

 

And while I hate to deaden the joke with a call for gender correctness, it would have been nice to have some sense that Paleolithic women made more than jewelry. (A footnote pointing out recent archaeological discoveries and something about Champerrets chauvinism and authorial assumptions, for example, could have been both droll and point-making.)

In any event, through Terry’s shamanism the contemporary reader does seem to encounter the esprit of Paleolithic humans. He dances as a shadow-throwing — if not feather- and antler-headdress wearing — bard. As the word for imagination in French is fantaisie, the English adjective fantastic” well describes the sum of these poems. (In a sort of Game of Thrones prequel, in fact, a cave-inhabiting, talon-snatching dragon makes an appearance.) Terry quotes a pseudo-letter from the Director of the Musée de L’Homme director to Champerret in 1941, “Your work is pure fantasy.” Exactly. Terry’s observation of Champerret’s purported use of the “Mallarméan breakthrough” summarizes even more perfectly the accomplishment of his own Lascaux Notebooks: “Scientifically, this proves nothing, poetically, it is a tour de force.”

[Published by Carcanet on June 30, 2022, 408 pages, $26.99 paperback]

Contributor
Mary Maxwell

Mary Maxwell has published five volumes of poems — An Imaginary Hellas, Emporia, Cultural Tourism, Nine Over Sixes, Oral Lake. She is the author of an art monograph, Serena Rothstein: Discourse in Paint, as well as the omnibus collection, The Longnook Overlook. She also recently completed a volume of nonfiction about the genesis and meaning of the movie, The Night of the Hunter, whose origins can be traced back to her childhood hometown of Clarksburg, West Virginia. A winner of the “Discovery”/The Nation Award and the recipient of residential fellowship from the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, she has also been a visiting artist and scholar at the American Academy in Rome. Her translations of Provençal, Latin and Classical Greek poetry have appeared in The American Voice, Literary Imagination, Pequod, Vanitas, The Washington Post Book World and the anthology, Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry. As an independent scholar she has published in literary periodicals such as Arion, Boston Review, Partisan Review, PN Review, Raritan, Salmagundi and Threepenny Review. A second volume of The Longnook Overlook and a collection of her essays and talks on prosody and translation are forthcoming.

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