Paul Valery

Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry (Sète, October 30, 1871-Paris, July 20, 1945) was a French writer, poet, essayist, and philosopher. As a poet he is the main representative of the so-called pure poetry; As a prose writer and thinker (he considered himself an anti-philosopher), his reading and commentary on his texts has been very notable, from Theodor Adorno and Octavio Paz to Jacques Derrida, who even commented on his last seminar.

Trajectory

He was educated in Sète during his childhood, and as a teenager thought of dedicating himself to a career as a sailor, but various setbacks forced him, in 1884, to give up the preparation for admission to the Naval School. In 1889 he began law studies at the Montpellier Lyceum. According to his memories, “stupidity and insensitivity seem to me to be part of the program. Mediocrity of soul and total absence of imagination among the best of the class. During that time his main activities consisted of longing for his frustrated career as a sailor (“I am drunk with the beauty of the things of the sea, and I strive to seize their risky and triumphant beauty”, he wrote in 1891) and discovering, from reading Against the grain by Huysmans, literature, mainly the work of poets such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and later Mallarmé. By then he already found in art "the only solid thing", in metaphysics "nothing more than foolishness", in science "a power that is too special", in practical life "a decadence, an ignominy". In Montpellier he met Pierre Louys, and, through him, André Gide, with whom he established a lasting friendship. They were the first listeners of the verses he had written and that would be published in the magazine La Conque (founded by Gide, Léon Blum and Henry Béranger), and of the poem Narcisse parle, later published in L` Hermitage.

Stéphane Mallarmé (oil of Edouard Manet)

On the night of October 4 to 5, 1892, a crisis occurred in his life that is known as the Genoa Night, because it happened in that port city. The event began to take shape in June 1891, when Valéry accidentally ran into a Catalan woman on the street, with whom he fell in love. She was a woman ten years older than her, whom he saw again on other occasions but without daring to approach her. According to the testimony of his friend Henri Mondor, “her languor towards him, the slight swaying of her waist, her horsewoman costumes and a coquetry of disturbing ease had wounded him and then made him fall in love, each day more, with tears, obsessions, strange omens. He hardly knew her name. She didn't know him." In a later letter to Guy de Pourtalès, Valéry confided: “I thought I went mad there in 1892, on a certain white night —white with lightning— that I spent sitting wishing to be struck down”. And in another text more or less contemporary with the event: “Infinite night. CRITICISM. Perhaps the effect of this tension of the air and the spirit... I feel ANOTHER this morning. But—feeling Other—this cannot last. Whether one is again, and the first triumph; or that the new man absorbs and annuls the first one”.

It was, as Charles Moeller points out, something similar to Paul Claudel's “night” at Notre-Dame, when he was converted; to that of Brasillach in Toledo; fundamentally to that of Pascal. The last quoted text by Valéry (“Infinite Night. CRITICAL…”) is related to the Pascalian Mémorial (that piece of paper on which the Port-Royal philosopher wrote the details of his revelation and which he wore sewn to his jacket until his death). But for Moeller “Valéry's night was neither of human love nor of divine love; not even feeling of presence of any kind: it was fright, discovery of the radical vanity of all his previous life. Mystical night, but under the sign of nothingness”.

As a result of the event, Valéry decided to separate from himself, from that self that he classified as false, while separating from himself the “idols”, as he called them. First of all, the idol of love, concentrated in an image that disarticulated his intellect, the Catalan Amazon; then literature, religion; emotionality, which destroyed the balance of intelligence. But then, the violence of his sensibility forced him to look for a stable existential site. He chose, according to his own words, the intellect, the idol intellect . From that point on, the content would no longer be important to him, it would only be vanity; what is essential would be the mechanism of the fact, the secret of the form. In any case, and since it would be impossible to totally do without a content (emptiness would be its result) he resolved to at least distance himself as much as possible from it, to always be beyond, in those places that the asceticism that would constitute his life from then on would create: meditations and intellectual investigations developed at dawn, on a small blackboard, for twenty years.

Edgar A. Poe, “Make the Synthesis of Vertigos” (daguerrotype of 1848)

Meanwhile, and after completing his military service, he moved to Paris. In the literary aspect, it was the time when he discovered Edgar Allan Poe, something he found more important than Mallarmé's previous discovery, since "with lucidity and good fortune," as he wrote to Gide, "Poe made the synthesis of the vertigos”. In the French capital he settled on the rue Gay-Lussac, in a room once occupied by Auguste Comte. He began to frequent the house of Marcel Schwob, that of Huysmans, that of Mallarmé. Around that time, the magazine El Centauro asked him for a text. Valéry decided to resume a barely sketched work in which he intended to describe the memoirs of C. Auguste Dupin, Poe's character. This manuscript, which began with the phrase “Stupidity is not my forte”, became, with the addition of notes in which he described himself, La soirée avec monsieur Teste . Like Valéry, Edmund Teste, the character, rejects appearances, those appearances with which, regardless of the subject, the majority is satisfied; he does not accept approximate definitions regarding words either, he demands more and more rigor where the essence of language is at stake. Like Valéry, he is also a seeker of the absolute.

Shortly thereafter, during a visit to Schwob's home, he spoke so brilliantly about Leonardo Da Vinci that Leon Daudet, then director of La Nouvelle Revue, asked him for an article on the artist. This request gave rise to the Introduction to Leonardo Da Vinci's method, which will be published a year before the Soirée, in 1895.

After working for a time as a writer in the War Office, he was hired as a press attaché by Sir Cecil Rhodes' Chartered Company. For work reasons he moved to London, where in the spring of 1896 he nearly committed suicide. He saved him, when he already had the rope tied around his neck, the sight of a book that was resting there, the work of a French humorist from the Boulevard. He read a few lines of an absurd text and felt liberated. From that incident he left behind a stage of his life in which he reigned, as he confessed to Gide, "the morality of death."

In 1900, he married Jeannie Gobillard, a distant relative of the painter Edouard Manet. With her he will have three children and her marriage will go smoothly. From that moment he will continue with his daily work, which allows him to live, and, in the secluded environment and far from the world that he himself has chosen, his research tending to reinforce his knowledge of spirit and language.

Paul Valéry, wife and son, 1904

Before the start of the First World War, in 1913, André Gide, who had just founded the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, asked permission to publish the verses that had previously appeared in some magazines. Valéry refused, but the friends collected all those back issues, had them typed, and presented them to the poet. After hesitating a bit, he finally agreed to correct them. “Contact with my monsters. Dislike. I start groping them. Tinkering,” he wrote in his notes. Then, as the length of the work did not seem sufficient to him, he decided to complete it by adding a small poem, something that would also be, according to his thoughts, his farewell to his poetry. He started in 1913. The following year the war broke out and his work was delayed. At last, in 1917, he completed it. It was titled The Young Grim Reaper.

This book made him a celebrity, something Valéry accepted with modesty and irony. In 1920 he published The Marine Cemetery and his fame grew even more. A year later, a survey revealed that the majority considered him the greatest French poet of that time. In 1922 his complete poetry appeared under the title Charmes, in a reduced edition. Honors and official recognition began to follow one another. In 1925 he was elected a member of the French Academy. In his reception speech, made in honor of his predecessor, Anatole France, he did not mention him once, as a kind of revenge for France having once refused to publish Mallarmé's verses. From that year he began to publish a series of prose works on the most varied subjects, some of them commissioned. During the German occupation he not only refused to collaborate, but even dared, in his capacity as secretary of the French Academy, to deliver the funeral eulogy "of the Jew Henri Bergson." This got him removed from his position as Administrator of the University Center of Nice.

Tomb of Paul Valéry in the cemetery of Sète, the “marine cemetery”

From 1938 to 1945, he lived a secret romantic relationship with Jeanne Loviton, a lawyer thirty-two years his junior, who wrote novels under the pseudonym Jean Voilier, and whose love life had been linked to various writers of the time. This romance (“Oh triumph of my sunset, that gilds my twilight with a look of love”) inspired Valéry to write hundreds of love poems, which he himself corrected and ordered and which he decided to title Crown & Coronilla, like this, in Spanish. He further enclosed notes declaring that “there are good things in this heap, this poor heap of singing, devout hours... It was well worth it. It forms a group like no other, I think, in our poetry”. A set that realizes that the heart finally triumphs in Valéry over the spirit and his idol his intellect . He himself writes it in one of his last entries in the Notebooks : “… I know my heart too. This one triumphs. Stronger than everything, than the spirit, than the organization. It is a fact. The darkest of facts. Stronger, then, than wanting to live and wanting to understand is this blessed C”. For some of the poet's biographers, the fact that his lover abandoned him to marry the publisher Robert Denoël plunged Valéry into sadness and was an important cause of his death, which occurred two months after that abandonment, on July 15, 1945. Then After a national funeral, ordered by President Charles De Gaulle, he was buried in Séte, in the marine cemetery that had inspired his poem.

In recent years, the monumental biography of Michel Jarrety, Paul Valéry (Fayard, 2008), an inescapable reference, and the outstanding interpretative essay by Benoît Peeters, Valéry. Tenter de vivre (Flammarion, 2014), which contains a bibliographic balance.

Main work

Six titles stand out among Valéry's works: The Evening with Monsieur Teste, The Young Grim Reaper, The Marine Cemetery, the series of essays called Variedad, the unfinished play Mi Fausto, and the Notebooks, a title that groups the annotations he recorded for fifty years in more than two hundred notebooks.

Monsieur Teste

Monsieur Teste, “a fantastic character engendered during days of intoxication of his will and between strange excesses of self-consciousness”, as Valéry himself wrote, illustrates for the critic Pierre de Boisdeffre “the Valerinian ideal of the wise man, of the man completely owner of his thought, delivered entirely to the ruthless disciplines of the spirit. True Chimera of intellectual mythology, as its author also called it, no feature distinguishes it; he speaks without gesturing, he doesn't smile, he barely says hello, he lives in a small furnished apartment without books or a desk, “any” accommodation, “similar to any of the theorems and perhaps just as useful”. There, in that "pure and trivial" place, he reviews the extraordinary methods he has found to achieve a high degree of precision in his thinking, so that language acquires definitions chiseled by diamond edges, which section to the minimum what lazy and ill-considered. He sometimes stops and notes: "I confess that I have made an idol of my spirit, but I have not found another." He ends up resembling, as Boisdeffre adds, "a glass man with such clear vision, such net sensitivity, such subtle representation and such perfect science, that he reflects, reverberates and responds as in an infinite series of limpid mirrors". In the end, however, tired of being right, of the efficiency of his procedures, of achieving everything thanks to the power of his spirit, M. Teste considers trying "something different", something that allows him to overcome this passing "of the insensitive unconscious to the insensitive unconscious” to which his life was taken by that feverish glimpse of his own self.

The Young Grim Reaper

“A nightmare in which the character is, at the same time as the object, conscious awareness. Imagine that someone woke up in the middle of the night and for a lifetime talked to himself and revived himself”: this is how Valéry tried to define his poem The Young Grim Reaper, published in 1917, “ after many years of having abandoned the art of versifying and trying to force myself back to it”, as the dedication to his friend André Gide reads. For many critics, a poem of consciousness, of memory, of becoming, its development in various directions transforms it, in the words of its creator, into a "painting of psychological substitutions... and in the transformation of a consciousness during the course of a night ”. The essayist and philosopher Alain wrote in the preface to the first French edition that it is an intimate epic, that the Grim Reaper unravels from her own being the thread of every destiny; and according to herself, not according to an external necessity. “Hence her name, her double name, the Young Grim Reaper. Reaper, because there will never be a life other than this one, moved, risky, saved according to its own storms and with the tides of blood, that is, according to the pure laws of the world, in detriment of history. Young, because the epic life is the virgin, powerful, passionate life of itself —not the torn life— and already transmitted to the next”.

The Marine Cemetery

The Marine Cemetery originated from a rhythm that Valéry remembered one day, a rhythm hardly used since the epic songs of the Middle Ages: the decasyllable with accent and caesura on the fourth syllable. Conceived as a kind of symphony whose melodic phrases resonated within the poet, in its beginnings it resembled a sound framework within which floating images were framed. According to his own confession, the clearest of these was a vision of his youth, an elongated hill that dominated his hometown of Sète and ended in the rectangle of the cemetery, always called, due to the view of the sea that was had from there, “ The Marine Cemetery”. Gustave Cohen, a professor at the Sorbonne who "explained" the poem to the students in Valéry's presence, attaches importance to this personal element, "which implies a kind of sentimental confession, albeit extremely veiled, and which is justified above all by the fact that the conclusion will be the determination of an attitude, the passage from pure contemplation to creative action”. For him, the poem recalls the structure of a classic tragedy, carried out not in five but in four acts, with its exposition, its plot and its denouement. These four acts or moments, he identifies as Immobility of Non-Being or of the eternal and unconscious Nothingness (stanzas I-IV), the first; Mobility of the ephemeral and conscious Being (stanzas V-VIII), the second; Death or Immortality? (stanzas IX-XVIII), the third; and Triumph of the momentary and the successive, of change and of poetic creation (stanzas XIX-XXIV), the fourth. His conclusion is that it is about an art and a doctrine that did not pretend "more than to express the anguished ecstasy of the poet-philosopher between the immobile splendor of Non-Being and the trembling restlessness of Being, between the Universe that is ignored and the conscience that is known, between the Eternal, which is pure light, and the momentary, which possesses the wealth, fecundity and iridescent appearance of existence”.

Variety

Variety includes a series of essays classified as Literary Studies, Philosophical Studies, Almost Political Essays, Poetic and Aesthetic Theory, and Memoirs of the Poet.

In Literary Studies the ones dedicated to Stendhal, Baudelaire and Mallarmé stand out, the latter a detailed account of his impressions when having before him for the first time, presented by its author, the typographical arrangement of the famous poem Un coup de dés.

In Philosophical Studies there are three studies on Descartes, one of his favorite authors, and, just as important as these, a study on Eureka by Edgar Allan Poe and another about Swedenborg.

In Essays Almost Political appears "Balance of intelligence" which is the most significant trial; in Poetic and aesthetic theory, “About poetry”, “Discourse on aesthetics” and “Poetry and abstract thought”. In Memories of the poet, finally, the work entitled “About The Marine Cemetery” stands out, in which Valéry recounts the details that gave rise to the poem and then reflects, in a more general way, on issues related to poetic work.

My Faust

The first idea about Mi Fausto appeared in July 1928, in the annotations of the Notes. They are sketches that will later be discarded: a monologue by Adam that would express the situation of man outside of Paradise and his acceptance of mortality; a dialogue between the devil and God; some bizarre subject: "Margarita is presented to Fausto, who requests a boy"; a kind of "memoir" story, similar to the fragments that appear later in the current version, when she dictates to his secretary. In 1930 two of the central ideas of the work appear: the threat that the spirit of man means to the world, and the idea of the “pure self, of the self that transcends”. The first is communicated to Mephistopheles between reproaches: “Now you hardly cause fear. Hell only appears in the last act... While you rested in the laziness of your eternity, on your procedures of year I, the spirit of man, awakened by yourself!..., has ended up attacking the foundations of Creation... Imagine that they have found... the old CHAOS!... And now they begin, groping, to feel the very principles of life... Do you know that this is, perhaps, the end of the soul? It is about a time of humanity in which “the fool flies and nonsense rides on the light”, and which Valéry, at the end of his days, will call “ignoble” and judge irreversible. The second idea, that of the pure-I, is communicated by Fausto saying that he wishes to end up "light, forever unbound from everything that resembles something", although later, as if struck by the existential cold of that too abstract area, he goes back to Accept the possibility that in your life the only form of love that finds grace in your eyes is installed: tenderness. Lust, “the glass lady”, the young secretary to whom he dictates, will then embody that tenderness, establishing a balance between extreme intelligence and a dark heart. For the critic Charles Moeller, the surprising novelty of this Faust resides in the fact that Valéry, and according to what he himself wrote about it, is going to try to make “of love a power capable of appearing in the spirit and to combine with him in such a way that one and the other, reciprocally, exalt each other”. This was not reflected in the work, which remained unfinished, but Valéry's confession in his Notes: “Well, Lust and Faust are me —and nothing more than me”, is for Moeller an “astonishing indication and essential” of the poet's intentions.

Notebooks

Valéry's Notebooks bring together his daily notes, made at dawn (“between the lamp and the sun”) and with the discipline and obstinate rigor of someone who considered that “to be is to be disciplined ”. The first annotation of these Notebooks belongs to the year 1894; the last one, written with a pencil and a trembling hand, in the summer of 1945, says: "The word Love has only been associated with the name of God since Christ."

Andrés Sánchez Robayna, translator and prologue writer for the Spanish edition (a selection that reduced the more than twenty-five thousand pages of the original to around five hundred), notes that what leads Valéry to such a practice of writing “is a stubborn, obsessive desire for knowledge. But a will in which understanding is not different from creating. He had learned it from Leonardo da Vinci ”. Aphorisms, mathematical formulas, studies on art and aesthetics, on philosophy (Ilya Prigogine affirmed that the current theories of Physics about time are most clearly anticipated in these Notes), drawings, prose poems, notes on biography, politics, psychology, sociology, literary criticism, even fragments of erotic cryptography, allow us to witness the evolution of Valerian thought and, also, the gestation of his poetic and essay works.

The scholar Judith Robinson highlights in her book The analysis of the spirit in Valéry's Notebooks, that the analytical thought of this author has less affinity with the traditional French method of reflection than with Ludwig Wittgenstein, with the Vienna Circle and with the English school of Bertrand Russell. Jacques Bouveresse has also affirmed it, when bringing him closer to Musil and Wittgenstein.

He did not leave philosophers insensitive: Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Adorno frequented his work. He was considered by Octavio Paz, perhaps at a time of Sartrean decline, as a more important philosopher than Sartre, and for Theodor Adorno he was the one who had the greatest influence on the thought of Walter Benjamin, with whom he has sometimes been more closely matched, as thinker and writer. For his part, Jacques Derrida commented a lot on his books, even in his last seminar, La bête et le souverain .

Works in French

• Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci (1895)
• La Soirée avec monsieur Teste (1896)
• Essai d'une conquête méthodique (1897)
• The Jeune Park (1917)
• La Crise de l’esprit (1919)
• Le cimetière marin (1920)
• Album de vers anciens (1920)
• Charmes (1922)
• Eupalinos ou l’Architecte (1923)
• L'Âme et la danse (1923)
• Variété I (1924)
• Propos sur l'intelligence (1925)
• Monsieur Teste (1926)
• Variété II (1930)
• Regards sur le monde actuel (1931)
• Amphion (1931)
• Pièces sur l'art (1931)
• L'idée fixe ou Deux Hommes à la mer (1932)
• Discours en l'honneur de Goethe (1932)
• Sémiramis (1934)
• Notion générale de l’art (1935)
• Variété III (1936)
• Degas, danse, desin (1938)
• Discours aux chirurgiens (1938)
• Variété IV (1938)
• Mauvaises thoughtes et autres (1942)
• Tel quel (1941, puis 1943) (Cahier B 1910; Moralités; Littérature et Choses tues)
• Dialogue de l'arbre (1943)
• Variété V (1944)

Posthumous:

• Mon Faust (1946)
• L'Ange (1947)
• Histoires brisées (1950)
• Lettres à quelques uns (1952) Correspondance of Paul Valéry s'étageant tout au long de sa vie.
• Vues (1948)
• Œuvres I (1957), edition of Jean Hytier, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade - Gallimard
• Œuvres II (1960), edition of Jean Hytier, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade - Gallimard
• Cahiers I (1973), edition of Judith Robinson-Valéry, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade - Gallimard
• Cahiers II (1974), edition of Judith Robinson-Valéry, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade - Gallimard
  • Totalité des Cahiers est consultable en fac-similé à la bibliothèque du Centre Georges-Pompidou de Paris. Réédition, Gallimard, 2009.
• Les Principes d'anarchie pure et appliquée (1984)
• Corona " Coronilla: poèmes à Jean Voilier (2008)
• Lettres à Jean Voilier. Choix de lettres 1937-1945 (2014)

Editions in Spanish

• Valéry, Paul (2021). Bad thoughts & others. Abada Editors. Translation of Malika Embarek López. Epilogue by José Luis Gallero.
• Valéry, Paul (2017). Narcis. Hermida Editores. Edition of Pedro Gandía. Bilingual edition.
• Valéry, Paul (2016). Guns. Visor Collection of Poetry. Translation and prologue by Pedro Gandía. Bilingual edition.
• Valéry, Paul (2015). The young parca. Linteous Editions. Translation by Antonio Martínez Sarrión. Bilingual edition.
• Valéry, Paul (2009). Corona & Coronilla. Poems to Jean Voilier. Editions Hyperion. Spanish version of Jesus Munarriz. ISBN 978-84-7517-957-5.

• Valéry, Paul (2007). Notebooks 1894-1945. Gutenberg Galaxy / Reading Circle. Selection, edition and introduction of Andrés Sánchez Robayna. Translations by Maryse Privat, Fátima Sainz and Andrés Sánchez Robayna. ISBN 978-84-8109-684-2.

• Valéry, Paul (2006). Le cimetière marin / The marine cemetery. Editorial Lucina / Ritmic version of Agustín García Calvo. ISBN 84-85708-69-5.

• Valéry, Paul (1930). The marine cemetery. Jorge Guillén version. With illustrations by Gino Severini.

• Valéry, Paul (1930). The marine cemetery. Castilian version of Mariano Brull.

• Valéry, Paul (1931). The marine cemetery. Schillinger Editions. Néstor Ibarra translation. Preface by Jorge Luis Borges. Bilingual edition.

• Valéry, Paul (1932). The marine cemetery. Editions of the magazine Letters. Translation by Emilio Oribe.

• Valéry, Paul (1998). The marine cemetery. Editions The Moon That. Translation by Mario Sampaolesi. Bilingual edition.

• Valéry, Paul (2001). The marine cemetery. Linteous Editions. Translation by Héctor E. Ciocchini and Héctor Blas González. ISBN 978-84-930058-9-4.

• Valéry, Paul (2002). The marine cemetery. Editorial Alliance. Jorge Guillén version. Bilingual edition. ISBN 978-84-206-7274-8.

• Valéry, Paul (2002). The marine cemetery. Calima Ediciones. ISBN 978-84-89972-38-4.

• Valéry, Paul (2005). The marine cemetery. Goyanes Tower. ISBN 978-84-95101-34-1.

• Valéry, Paul (2006). The marine cemetery. Alhulia. ISBN 978-84-96083-87-5.

• Valéry, Paul (1987). Written by Leonardo Da Vinci. A.Machado Libros. ISBN 978-84-7774-004-9.

• Valéry, Paul (1993). Philosophical studies. A.Machado Libros. ISBN 978-84-7774-562-4.
• Valéry, Paul (1999). Monsieur Teste. A.Machado Libros.

• Valéry, Paul (1995). Literary studies. A.Machado Libros. ISBN 978-84-7774-564-8.

• Valéry, Paul (2004). Eupalinos or the architect. Official Colegio de Aparejadores y Arquitectos Técnicos de Murcia. ISBN 978-84-500-7702-5.

• Valéry, Paul (2001). Eupalinos or the architect; The soul and the dance. A.Machado Libros. ISBN 978-84-7774-610-2.

• Valéry, Paul (1988). The fixed idea, the. A.Machado Libros. ISBN 978-84-7774-518-1.

• Valéry, Paul (1973). The young parca. Tusquets Editors. ISBN 978-84-7223-034-7.

• Valéry, Paul (1999). The Young Plot; The Marine Cemetery. Editions Chair. ISBN 978-84-376-1780-0.

• Valéry, Paul (1987). My Fausto. Icaria. ISBN 978-84-7426-131-8.

• Valéry, Paul (2004). My Faust; Tree Dialogue. A.Machado Libros. ISBN 978-84-7774-634-8.

• Valéry, Paul (1994). Poems. Visor Books. ISBN 978-84-7522-038-3.

• Valéry, Paul (1973). Poetry. Alberto Corazón. ISBN 978-84-7053-092-0.

• Valéry, Paul (1987). Principles of pure and applied anarchy. Tusquets Editors. ISBN 978-84-7223-095-8.

• Valéry, Paul (1991). Poetic and aesthetic theory. A.Machado Libros. ISBN 978-84-7774-539-6.

• Valéry, Paul (1967). The marine cemetery. Editorial Alliance. M 18.073-1967.

• Valéry, Paul (1941). The Fifth. Editions de la Gacela, Madrid-Barcelona. Studio and selection of Luis Ignacio Bertran.

• Valéry, Paul (1940). The soul and the dance – Eupalinos or the Architect. Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires. Translation by José Carner.

• Valéry, Paul (1954). The fixed idea. Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires. Translation by José Bianco.

• Valéry, Paul (1954). Look at the current world. Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires. Translation by José Bianco.

• Valéry, Paul (1956). Variety (I) – Literary Studies – Philosophical Studies. Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires. Translation by Aurora Bernárdez and Jorge Zalamea.

• Valéry, Paul (1956). Variety (II) – Almost political essays – Poetic and aesthetic theory – Memories of the poet. Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires. Translation by Aurora Bernárdez and Jorge Zalamea.