Knowing the East by Paul ClaudelTranslated by James LawlerPrinceton University Press, 2004

Winged details: pinecones like rose petals, the curves of a pagoda’s roof, yellow soil, narrow streets. I love the poem on cities: London, Boston, New York in 1896 but it could almost be now. The trouble is how to capture joy, ideas: sometimes it works, sometimes it’s all overblown, exclamation points and rhetorical form. But the descriptive passages shine enough to make up for the philosophizing: watching the rain fall, visiting temples, listening to funeral processions pass by. I appreciate the precision of Claudel’s vocabulary, and the richness of his similes: echoes of Homer, elegant without being overdone: “a black spider, like Iris who sped straight from heaven into the heart of battle.”