Hanging On In There: An Essay in Meaning – Selected Poems of Marie Noël
Presented and translated by PAULINE MATARASSO
(CLUNY MEDIA, 284 PP, £14.73)
Available via amazon.com

The very remarkable French Catholic poet Marie Noël was born in Auxerre, a beautiful town in Burgundy, in 1883. She lived there always, and died there in 1967. She wrote poems throughout her life: her Oeuvre poétique, which appeared after her death, runs to 668 pages and doesn’t include the final collection she had prepared when she died. Her work had become reasonably well known in France: she received honours in her old age, and in 2017 a cause for her canonisation was opened in Rome. A 1964 American translation of some of her poems was little noticed in England. She gets three dismissive lines in The Oxford Companion to French Literature.

Now, at last, Pauline Matarasso, a veteran literary scholar – she is 93 and was responsible for editing and translating The Quest of the Holy Grail and The Cistercian World, invaluable Penguin Classics – has translated a selection of Noël’s poems, accompanied by her account of Noël’s life and a helpful commentary on the poems with quotations from the poet’s prose.

The years of Noël’s early adulthood were spent in a bitterly divided France: the Third Republic was in full secularist mode, expelling the religious orders and finally separating Church and State; the Dreyfus affair split opinion between the militaristic, anti-Semitic, mostly Catholic Right, and the liberal, mostly socialist, anticlerical Left. Between Noël’s father, a cold rationalist teacher in the local lycée, and her domineering and shallowly Catholic mother, who was disappointed in her gawky only daughter, Noël grew up solitary and introverted, rescued for Christian faith by her grandmother who took her often to Vespers in Auxerre’s cathedral where she prayed for the rest of her life, and by her own talents for music and above all for words.