Reading Order
La Jeune Parque Reading Order
La Jeune Parque (The Young Fate, 1917) by Paul Valéry is the poem that announced the return of the greatest French poet of the twentieth century — published after a twenty-year silence during which Valéry had abandoned poetry for mathematics and intellectual notebooks, it is the most demanding long poem in the French Symbolist tradition: 512 lines of Alexandrines in the voice of one of the Fates awakening on a Mediterranean shore, meditating on the experience of consciousness, sleep, death, and the body's relationship to the mind. Valéry had already abandoned poetry in 1892 after what is known as the 'Nuit de Gênes' (Night of Genoa) — a crisis of rationality in which he decided that poetry, with its reliance on the irrational and the emotional, was inferior to the pure operations of the intellect — and spent over two decades writing in his Cahiers rather than publishing. The return to poetry was forced by Gide and by the war; the result was a poem that took four years to write and represents the most sustained attempt in French literature to think through the problem of consciousness in verse. La Jeune Parque is the poem that Mallarmé had been pointing toward but never fully achieved — pure thought in perfect verse.
Where to start
La Jeune Parque is difficult to approach on a first reading because the speaker's situation is initially unclear — a woman awakening, possibly bitten by a snake, on a shore, confused about who and where she is. Begin by reading the poem once straight through without trying to understand everything, then read a critical introduction (Roger Shattuck's or Jackson Mathews's translations both have good prefaces), and then return to the text. The beauty of the verse, and the extraordinary density of thought about consciousness and mortality, reward patient rereading.
Complete La Jeune Parque Book List
- 1Buy
La Jeune Parque (1917)
Paul Valéry·1917·Most authoritatively in the Pléiade Œuvres, vol. 1, edited by Jean Hytier; in English in the bilingual David Paul translation (Princeton, 1971) or the comprehensive James R. Lawler edition. The poem must be read slowly and repeatedly. - 2Buy
Charmes (1922)
Paul Valéry·1922·The collection that contains 'Le Cimetière marin' (The Cemetery by the Sea) and the other major shorter poems — the natural companion to La Jeune Parque, and somewhat more accessible as individual poems. - 3Buy
Poésies (1899)
Stéphane Mallarmé·1899·The master's verse that La Jeune Parque is explicitly continuing — Valéry was Mallarmé's most devoted disciple, and reading the two together shows the direct line of descent and what Valéry added (more explicit thought, less pure suggestion). - 4Buy
Cahiers (1957-61)
Paul Valéry·1957·The twenty-nine volumes of notebooks that Valéry kept daily from 1894 to 1945, published posthumously — the intellectual laboratory where the ideas realized in La Jeune Parque were developed over decades. - 5Buy
An Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci
Paul Valéry·1895·The 1895 essay that announced Valéry's intellectual program — the analysis of pure intelligence, the model of the universal method — and that provides the context for understanding why La Jeune Parque is a poem about consciousness rather than about feeling.
La Jeune Parque — Frequently Asked Questions
Who or what is 'la Jeune Parque'?
The Fates (Parcae in Latin, Moirai in Greek) are the three goddesses who spin, measure, and cut the thread of human life. Valéry takes a 'young Fate' — the youngest of the three, perhaps the spinner — as his speaker, placing her on a Mediterranean shore at dawn, confused, possibly wounded by a snake, meditating on her situation. But the mythology is not really the subject: the 'young Fate' is more like a persona for consciousness itself in the act of self-examination — she is thinking about what it means to be conscious, to be embodied, to experience the conflict between the mind's desire for purity and the body's pull toward life and death.
What was the 'Nuit de Gênes' and why did Valéry stop writing poetry?
In October 1892, Valéry was twenty-one years old and in Genoa, in love with an unavailable woman and in crisis about the relationship between emotion, rationality, and intellectual control. During a night of storm, he made a decision — never fully explained, but reconstructed from letters and the Cahiers — to submit his consciousness and imagination entirely to the discipline of pure intellect: to stop serving 'la Bête' (the beast of emotion and artistic effect) and to pursue the pure operations of the mind. He stopped publishing poetry for twenty years and wrote his intellectual notebooks (the Cahiers) instead. The 'Nuit de Gênes' is the founding event of his intellectual life.
Why did Valéry return to poetry in 1912?
Gide and Gallimard were planning a collected edition of French Symbolist poetry and wanted to include Valéry's early verse — Valéry agreed on the condition that he could revise the early poems, then found that he couldn't stop, and the revising turned into writing. The poem that resulted from four years of work (1913-17) was La Jeune Parque, which exceeded anything he had originally intended. The First World War was also a context for the return — the intellectual crisis of the war made the abstract pursuit of pure intelligence seem less adequate as the only occupation.
What does La Jeune Parque say about death?
Death is one of the central subjects, approached from multiple angles throughout the poem. The 'young Fate' meditates on the possibility of dying, on the experience of sleep (as a kind of small death), on the body's vulnerability and the mind's desire to be free of it, and on the mysterious attractiveness of extinction. But the poem does not arrive at a definitive position: it moves between the seduction of death (the pull toward darkness, rest, dissolution) and the affirmation of consciousness and sensation. The famous lines 'Que si ma tendre odeur irrite ta vipère...' are the most direct engagement with death, and the poem ends not with resolution but with the dawn — consciousness surviving into another day.
Is there an English translation of La Jeune Parque?
There are several English translations, none fully satisfactory for a poem that depends so heavily on the sound of French Alexandrines. The most widely used scholarly translation is by David Paul (1971, with French text opposite). A translation by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody appeared in 2019 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and received good reviews for its attempt to preserve the verse structure. The poem rewards reading even in translation, but French readers who can manage the original language have a qualitatively different experience.
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