Wahl Translation Philosophy Today R. Duvernoy 1 This is a pre-publication version. For citation purposes, please see published version in Philosophy Today, Spring 2020, Volume 64, Number 3: Pages 793-796. “Poetry as Spiritual Exercise” Jean Wahl Translated by Russell J. Duvernoy 1 Translator’s Abstract: “La Poésie Comme Exercice Spirituel” first appeared in a 1942 issue of Revue Fontaine edited by Jacques and Raissa Maritain and was subsequently republished in Wah’s 1948 text Poésie, Pensée, Perception, published by Calmann-Lévy. The following is a translation of the Fontaine version. I have noted all of the variations from the latter version in the notes. As I emphasize in my commentary, the piece is a notable display of Wahl’s eclectic range of influences. Most importantly, it shows the extent to which his interest in radical empiricism and process metaphysics informs his creative approach to the intersection of poetics and metaphysics. These interests are not explicitly named in the essay, and yet their influence is pervasive. The essay also includes several moments of substantial resonance with the work of Gilles Deleuze, as noted in the commentary. Translator’s Key Words: Jean Wahl, poetics, metaphysics, process philosophy Spiritual exercise, first in the etymological sense of the word, [is] an exercise of breath, of rhythm – and its rhythm will be passive and active, a passivity that gives rise to an activity. Poetry is also a spiritual exercise in a more profound sense. It is an exercise for becoming conscious of the unconscious (sometimes in an infinitesimal consciousness). Even Valéry would not deny it, who speaks of those first verses that are given to him, of the rhythms that he catches at the origin of his poems and of the intermediate state between the conscious and the unconscious; even Mallarmé, who sees ideas surge up from the white page and a clarity that emerges from the night of Edom. 2 And, inversely, the surrealists must be well aware what role consciousness plays for them. It is an exercise that also consists of manipulating time and space in a mysterious way. Condensing and elongating time, the poet makes a time that is no longer that of the every day. He 1 The author thanks Christopher Lura and Anna-Marie Hansen for help with the translation. 2 Mallarmé refers to Edomite night in Don du Poëme (“Gift of the Poem”), the dedicatory preface to the Hérodiade cycle. Weinfield reports that Mallarmé is invoking a mythical region though Edom also refers to a historical kingdom cited in the Hebrew bible, located in what is now Israel and Jordan. The mythical version is said to have had sexless kings who gave birth to “monsters.” Weinfield reads this as a metaphor for the poetic process and understands the child of the Edomite night to stand for the poem. See Mallarmé 1994: 167.