THE FRENCH FOR "ours" is "le nôtre," which happens also to be the name of the great master of the French formal garden, André le Nôtre, designer of the garden at Versailles and a few other spectacular examples.
Le Nôtre figures in a costume drama of 2014, A Little Chaos, and also in this volume from 2008. So he's doing pretty well, I'd say. Does Frederick Law Olmstead have a book of poetry and a film? Not that I know of.
Ours is, I would say, a little harder to get into than the other Swensen volumes I've been reading. Partly because the font is tiny. But even if one is a fan of le grand siècle, as I am, the backstory of its gardens is, I suspect, one of the last of the tastes one acquires.
Nonetheless, some interesting ideas circulate. From where, given its scale, does one view such a garden? "The initial impression must be from a height; but only half / that which is gained from the opposite extremity, looking back." Given its size and its symmetries, could the French formal garden only truly be admired after the invention of the hot air balloon? Then there is the question of who one has to be to view the garden, for it was clearly all about Louis XIV. You or I can see Versailles now, but at the time it was built, it was built for particular eyes.
As always, Swensen finds the right sound for the book, a little formal (le grand siècle loved rhyme) but still with its slippages, vanishings, and strangenesses:
It was Henri III
Who shocked in a mirror
Ran into a man
on the end of a knife, and it was here that the Comte de Sancerre
Began his long travels backward
Because a saint somewhere
Left a rollerskate on the stairs
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment