Valéry, Paul (Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry) (1871–1945) Works   en hu fr

Biography

Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry (Sète, October 30, 1871 – Paris, July 20, 1945) was a French author and poet of the Symbolist school.
He was born in Sète, along the Mediterranean coast of the Hérault. Living in Paris from 1892 onwards, where he was for a while part of Stephane Mallarme's circle, he published some dialogues and articles, but no poems until 1917, when his long La Jeune Parque saw the light of day. In 1922, he published Charmes (from Latin carmina, meaning "songs"), the slim book of poems that grounds his reputation as a major French poet. Technically, Valéry was very orthodox; his poems all rhyme and scan.
Valéry was never an academic or a full-time writer. He earned his living first as a civil servant, then as personal assistant to the head of the Agence Havas, and finally in several official positions a grateful French government pressed him to accept. His interests were sufficiently broad that he deserves to be considered a polymath. Besides writing prose, drama, and dialogues, he also wrote on art, music, politics, and human nature. His prose is peppered with a fair number of aphorisms and bons mots, and his views on man and society were conservative and skeptical, with a touch of cynicism. Yet he never said or wrote anything giving aid or comfort to any form of totalitarianism popular (in certain quarters, at least) in his lifetime.
Valéry's most striking achievement is perhaps his monumental Cahiers, an intellectual diary to which he contributed something every morning of his adult life, and whose startling subject is often science and mathematics. The Cahiers reveal that these arcane subjects appear to have commanded far more of his considered attention then the poetry upon which his fame is based. To date, the Cahiers have been published only in photostatic reproduction, and only since 1980 or so have they begun to receive the scholarly scrutiny they deserve.
His poem "Palme" inspired James Merrill's celebrated 1974 poem "Lost in Translation".
Valéry gave the keynote address at the 1932 German conference honoring the 100th anniversary of the death of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This was a fitting choice, given that Goethe too was passionate about science, writing on biology and the theory of light. He was member of the Académie française, Académie des sciences de Lisbonne and Front national des Ecrivains.

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