Plays
By: trans. by David Paul and Robert Fitzgerald
Series: His Collected works -- v. 3
Publisher: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Published: 1960
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 376
Description: According to Valéry himself, the process of creating “My Faust” took place without a preconceived plan. The observation is not unsurprising, coming from someone called the “poet of the impassive rigor of the mind” by Italo Calvino, who is also a cultist of the demon of exactitude. The French poet’s correspondence and many pages of the Cahiers also revealed the “surroundings” of the elaboration of “My Faust”: Valéry, then a man of sixty-two, falls in love with the young Jeanne Loviton, who will abandon him to marry the editor Robert Denöel, in the end, murdered in 1944, for having collaborated with the Nazis. The poet will never recover from the heavy blow, and dies in the summer of 1945, remaining “My Faust”, which was expected to be Paul Valéry’s greatest achievement, as “sketches”, an open work awaiting continuity in future recreations of the Faust myth.

Valéry's lyrical play about Amphion, who, given the lyre by Apollo, became the father of the arts.

Valéry's lyrical play about Semiramis, the mythological Lydian-Babylonian wife of Onnes and Ninus, who succeeded the latter to the throne of Assyria.

Valéry's lyrical play about Narcissus and his notion of purity.