Five Great Odes

Paul Claudel’s Five Great Odes constitutes one of the great twentieth-century achievements in lyric poetry. Equally earthy and prayerful, the gathered windfall of erotic and religious crises in the poet’s life, perennially and universally relevant in their ecological and sacramental vision, the Odes deserve to be celebrated alongside T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. The Five Great Odes are rendered here anew in English for the first time in more than fifty years.“Claudel’s poetry is generally feared for its spontaneous excess, its Rimbaudian logorrhea, and this has hurt its reception by English readers. This new translation reveals, however, that Claudel is the true Catholic poet, one of mastery and plentitude, and, in this, that strangest of figures comparable perhaps only to J.R.R. Tolkien. Claudel’s Odes show him indeed to be a new Tom Bombadil, who moves through the world without irony because he has already transcended the jaded and impoverished vision typical of the modern age and entered with joy into an experience of the universal and the eternal. Here at last is an English Claudel that does justice to his magnificent vision of grace and abundance.”—JAMES MATTHEW WILSON, author of The Hanging God“With this new translation of Five Great Odes, Jonathan Geltner has reintroduced Claudel’s poetry to the Anglophone world with all the elegance, sensitivity, and power that the magisterial French Catholic poet merits. The poems themselves are minor miracles of both language and spiritual theology: fierce and dramatic and revelatory and full of gift. Indeed, Claudel is much like the biblical Psalmist, variously giving poetic, even sensual, voice to the anguish of desire, the mysteries of creation, and the ineffable, unsettling presence of God within the human soul. Geltner’s splendid translation—precise, fluid, and visceral—absolutely sings.”—JENNIFER NEWSOME MARTIN, author of Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought“‘Translation,’ Kenneth Rexroth famously observed, ‘saves you from your contemporaries.’ English-language readers have long been overdue a fresh translation of Paul Claudel’s sprawling, ambitious, ecstatic, shape-shifting Five Great Odes. And Jonathan Geltner’s utterly absorbing translation not only gives contemporary readers a gorgeous example of one of the twentieth century’s greatest religious poets, but embodies in English Claudel’s singular poetic genius of yoking literal and figurative realms.”—JENNIFER GROTZ, author of Window Left Open: Poems“Jonathan Geltner’s English translation of Paul Claudel’s sublime Cinq Grandes Odes is a rare event. Truly, it is cause for celebration that one of the finest poetic works of the 20th century is now available to an English audience in language so shimmering, so passionate, so deeply-rooted in the grace of poesis. The absolute gratuity and freedom of Claudel’s French finds a proper home in Geltner’s English.”—MICHAEL MARTIN, author of Transfiguration: Notes Toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything Read more