Advice to the Good Traveler
Victor Segalen
translation Ad Blankestijn
Town at the end of the road and road extending the town: therefore do not choose one or the other, but take one and the other by turns.
Mountain encircling your gaze confines and contains what the round plain sets free. Love to jump rocks and steps; but caress the flagstones where the foot falls flat.
Rest from sound in silence, and, from silence, deign to return to sound. Alone if you can, if you know how to be alone, sometimes pour yourself into the crowd.
Be careful not to choose a refuge. Do not believe in the virtue of a lasting virtue: break it with some strong spice that burns and bites and even gives a taste to blandness.
Thus, without stopping or stumbling, without halter and without stable, without rewards or punishments, you will arrive, no not, friend, at the swamp of immortal joys,
But at the intoxicating eddies of the great River of Diversity.
Conseils au bon voyageur
Ville au bout de la route et route prolongeant la ville : ne choisis donc pas l'une ou l'autre, mais l'une et l'autre bien alternées.
Montagne encerclant ton regard le rabat et le contient que la : plaine ronde libère. Aime à sauter roches et marches ; mais caresse les dalles où le pied pose bien à plat.
Repose-toi du son dans le silence, et, du silence, daigne revenir au son. Seul si tu peux, si tu sais être seul, déverse-toi parfois jusqu'à la foule.
Garde bien d'élire un asile. Ne crois pas à la, vertu d’une vertu durable : romps-la de quelque forte épice qui brûle et morde et donne un goût même à la fadeur.
Ainsi, sans arrêt ni faux pas, sans licol et sans étable, sans mérites ni peines, tu parviendras, non point, ami, au marais des joies immortelles,
Mais aux remous pleins d'ivresses du grand fleuve Diversité.
[Victor Segalen]
Victor Segalen (1878-1919) was a French writer, physician, archaeologist and ethnologist. Segalen was born in Brest and studied medicine in Bordeaux. He became a naval physician and traveled to Polynesia (1903-1905) and China (1909-14 and 1917). He conducted archaeological research during his travels through China. During the First World War he served as a doctor in France at the front until he became seriously ill. He
suffered from increasing depression during the last years of his life, something connected to his use of opium. He died during a lonely walk in the woods of Huelgoat, not far from his Breton
birthplace. It has never been determined whether his death
was an accident or suicide. Shakespeare's Hamlet was found open next to his body.
[Steles in China, photographed by Segalen]
In 1912, Segalen published in Beijing the collection Stèles, a series of prose poems, inspired by his contact with Chinese civilization. Steles (in Chinese shibei, in Japanese sekihi) are stone plaques, mounted on a plinth, raised towards the sky and bearing an inscription. They can be grave memorials (steles often stood near graves of important people), texts honoring individuals or events, historical inscriptions, or poems. They did not have any practical function (such as pointing the way). In the late second century, also the Chinese Classics were inscribed on steles to keep them unchanged for posterity, and Confucian temples often had a courtyard completely filled with steles ("a forest of steles").
Segalen was a unique writer because he left exoticism and Orientalism far behind him - his work fits a new postcolonial interpretation. Segalen was truly interested in Chinese civilization. However, his Steles are not translations of Chinese texts - rather, they are new French texts that have been inspired by ancient Chinese prose. The style Segalen uses imitates Chinese inscriptions, but the contents belong to Segalen and his personal life and thought. Steles is truly an original work.
Besides Steles, Segalen's work includes an novel set in China (Rene Leys, 1922), and the important Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity.
P.S. The life and work of the Dutch poet J. Slauerhoff was in many ways comparable to that of Segalen.
Full original text of Steles at French Wikisource (as the author died in 1919, Steles is in the public domain)
A full English translation is available as Stèles (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2007) translated and annotated by Timothy Billings & Christopher Bush.
Segalen's novel Simon Leys has been translated by J.A. Underwood in New York Review Books (preface by Ian Buruma).
Photos public domain from Wikipedia.
Lyric Poetry Around the World Index