A Voice and a World
‘THE first of the Paroles de France programmes (from 1YC) forcibly yoked together Francois Rabelais and the late Paul Eluard under the heading of "Men and Liberty." The conjunction remained an odd one, and was not helped by the two fact-packed, quickdelivery biographies which introduced each of the two writers. In fact, Gordon Troup’s tactfully condensed translations could have stood on their own, and more agreeably, as introductions to the extracts. Nothing can really conceal the fact that they stand for different things. Eluard "to Party gave up what was meant for mankind": all the same, his "Liberty," which we heard, is an admirable and moving poem-one of those moments of intense patriotic feeling which happened also in the wartime poetry of Aragon. (By contrast, the Song of the Partisans sounded, with all due
respect, like a French imitation of Oscar Hammerstein.) But Rabelais is a "humanist" in a fuller sense. He is, as Hilaire Belloc said, "the guide of youth, the companion of middle age, the vade mecum of the old, the pleasant introducer of inevitable Death, yea, the general solace of mankind." Eluard is a voice, but Rabelais is a world.
M.K.
J.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 752, 11 December 1953, Page 10
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200A Voice and a World New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 752, 11 December 1953, Page 10
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