Jorie Graham, _To 2040_ (3) and Saint-John Perse, _Anabase_

AS I READ To 2040, I kept thinking of Saint-John Persse's Anabase, a book-length poem published in France in 1924 and in an English translation by T. S. Eliot (no less) in 1930.

I had not read Anabase since the 1980s and so was surprised to be reminded of it. I don't think the likenesses, such as they are, were intentional on Graham's part. Perhaps she has not even read it; Perse is not often cited these days, although he was well regarded in his own time (Nobel Prize, 1960). Still, it seemed worth thinking a bit on why the one book called up for me memories of the other.

Anabase has orientalist fantasy aspects that render it problematic for a contemporary reader, but its leading quality is that it seems set in an indefinite antiquity somewhere near Asia Minor while at the same time being shot though with the sensibility of the present (i.e., early 20th century). 

It has a little of the effect of Dune or Star Wars in that some of the customs and institutions in those fantasy worlds seem drawn from historical antiquity while others involve highly futuristic technologies. The difference being, though, that the world-building in Anabase is intentionally fragmentary and incomplete, more suggestion than assertion. 

Here is a short bit from the Eliot translation:

   To the place called the Place of the Dry Tree:

   and the starved levin allots me these provinces in the West.

   But beyond are the greater leisures, and in a great

   land of grass without memory, the unconfined unreckoned year, seasoned with dawns and heavenly fires. (Matutinal sacrifice of the heart of a black sheep.)

So it sounds like a modern translation of an ancient text for which the explanatory context has entirely vanished. 

To 2040 sometimes has a similar atmosphere in that it is set in the future, but a denuded future, from which a lot of familiar landmarks have been effaced. An eerie, alien bareness surrounds us in To 2040 as it does in in Anabase. We are conscious of something gone: in Anabase, it is the clutter of modernity, while in To 2040, it is non-human nature.

To 2040 is something akin to The Waste Land, too, especially "What the Thunder Said" with its juxtaposition of the desert of the Gospels with the moral collapse of the First World War. In fact, the last poem in Graham's book, "Then the Rain," certainly made me think of the "Then a damp gust / bringing rain" passage in "What the Thunder Said." The unspeakable relief, the hope of that...but in Graham the coming of rain seems to be about earth gathering strength to renew itself once the last human beings have finally disappeared.