Journey to the Land of the Real:
A Translation of Equipée
by victor segalen
translated by natasha lehrer
atlas, 136 pages, $17.20
The death of Victor Segalen (January 14, 1878–May 21, 1919) was perhaps an enviable one. This is not to say that it was not also tragic: He was still quite young, and his demise came unexpectedly for his family, and by an agonizingly trivial mischance. But I tend to be something of a fatalist in regard to the lifespans of artists (the great ones, at least). Mozart was divinely destined to die young, an impossible prodigy appearing and vanishing like a flash of lightning crossing the heavens, while it was ordained from everlasting that Haydn should enjoy a serene longevity in which to unfold his genius; Keats grown old would have been a drastic error of taste on the part of providence, while it was absolutely necessary that Wordsworth begin as a “lyrical” radical but end up a withered Tory sage penning sonorous banalities. And I suspect that Segalen, having reached early middle age, was already putting a strain on the short, bright length of thread Lachesis had allotted him.
All the evidence suggests that his health was rapidly fading; one way or another, his days were coming to an end. And it was somehow fitting. For most of his life, he had been a living tempest of wildly diverse accomplishments, haunting inspirations, gnomic insights, and startlingly original ideas, but his was definitely a young man’s genius, sustained by spiritual restlessness. With age, he might have succumbed to the temptation to elucidate, to dispel the enigmas and clarify the inchoate intuitions, to produce a system rather than give free expression to his natural creative ferment, and that would have been a great pity. It is everything unfinished, evocative, and frustratingly suggestive in his writings that makes them uniquely fascinating. Anyway, by the time of his death he had probably already achieved as much as he might reasonably have hoped: He had been a certified naval physician, an explorer, a poet, a novelist, an essayist, an ethnographer, a linguist, a sinologist, an aesthetic theorist, and a few other things besides. And he had produced a body of work of indelible novelty and brilliance. Borges, for instance, believed him a far more important figure in French letters than any of his more celebrated near contemporaries, and credited him with having invented an entirely new approach to aesthetic experience, reconciling (without merging) the traditions of Asia and Europe. He had nothing left to do.
And, frankly, even though Segalen would probably not have chosen to die at forty-one, he almost certainly would have delighted in the sheer mysteriousness of his death, and especially in the uncanny way in which it seemed to bind his life together in a closed circle. He died east of Brest, deep in the woodlands of Huelgoat, a place that had been a frequent retreat when he was a child and where his imagination had first begun to float free from its moorings in ordinary life. In his final days, he had been using opium in increasing quantities to alleviate a number of ailments, and had been suffering from fainting spells for some months. One day he failed to come home from a long walk. His corpse was later discovered in the forest, resting against a tree as if he were sleeping, pale but apparently quite at peace. Flies had begun to gather at his eyes and the corners of his mouth. At his side was a complete edition of Shakespeare, bound in blue Moroccan leather, opened to a page of Hamlet. He had apparently bled to death from a deep laceration in one of his ankles, which he had probably gashed on a stone or root (though at least one old acquaintance suspected he might have made the incision himself). If I could add an apocryphal detail to the record here (as Segalen himself might have done), I would claim that his forefinger was resting on the lines “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns . . .” A bit of an obvious conceit, perhaps, but, in a sense, he had spent much of his life in search of an undiscovered country, and had wandered the globe looking for it; and yet, if he ever truly found it, it was there that day, in the quiet of the woodlands he had known from childhood, near the place of his birth.