France can be slow to give its literary greats their due. Only in 2004 were the fascinating letters of the French prose poet, novelist, doctor, and archaeologist Victor Segalen (1878–1919) published by Fayard in Paris, in an edition containing some 1,500 letters of which around 1,300 were previously unpublished. In America, Segalen’s available work has been the novel “René Leys” (New York Review Books, 240 pages, $14), translated by J.A. Underwood and prefaced amusingly by Ian Buruma. Now, fortunately, a new translation of Segalen’s “Stèles,” a collection of prose poems from 1912, has also appeared (Wesleyan University Press, 417 pages, $34.95), translated by Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush.

Segalen, born in the Breton city of Brest, earned a medical degree at the University of Bordeaux, and soon began to write for the prestigious Parisian literary journal Mercure de France, where he became friendly with such literati as Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) and the essayist Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915). As a naval doctor, Segalen was on his way to Tahiti in 1903, when he was stranded in San Francisco with an attack of typhoid fever. No time-waster, he purchased a Chinese writing set in Chinatown and became entranced by the country and its literature.

Segalen would eventually travel to China by 1908 — after detours to Tahiti and elsewhere — where he would work to assist plague victims and labor to establish an archaeological museum. Segalen’s grasp of Chinese makes other literary modernists with an interest in Asian writing, such as Ezra Pound, seem like amateurs.

The steles in Segalen’s title are stone slabs engraved with texts, scattered around China in temple courtyards, tombs, and along roads. The book is divided into chapters according to whether the stele faces south (with messages about the Empire and power); north (concerning friendship); east (love); west (military deeds); or centrally as “stele of the ego, or selfhood.”

These Chinese inscriptions, which appeared in Segalen’s original book, serve as inspiration for the accompanying prose poems. In the new translation they are fully described in helpful notes by the translators (a further volume of notes will be posted online shortly at www.wesleyan.edu/wespress/segalen2), which is a notable benefit. Yet the true interest in “Stèles” is not for any documentary information it offers about China, but in its exceptional poetic quality in French. A student of Baudelaire and appreciator of Rimbaud, Segalen’s prose poems have powerful rhythms, which recall antecedents such as La Bruyère, and predict future writers such as Francis Ponge and Henri Michaux. Segalen’s “Musical Stone,” evoking a romance, is one example:

Here is the place where they discovered each other, the lovers in love with the variable flute;
Here is the table where they both rejoiced, the talented husband & the tipsy girl;
Here is the platform where they loved each other through the fundamental tones…
Let me be touched: all of these voices live in my musical stone.

The prose poem “In Praise of a Western Virgin,” presents a supercilious view of Christian tradition: “Reason is not offended. Certainly a western virgin conceived.” “Pious Vision,” also views religious miracles with Cartesian skepticism: “The engraver was not a witness. The stone is not accountable. We are no guarantor.”

These poems hardly idealize China; descriptions of military deeds include torture, rape, and pillage, while “Written in Blood” describes a starving city under siege resorting to cannibalism. Yet subject matter is always secondary to poetic inspiration, as in “Memorial Jewel,” with its echoes of Heinrich Heine and Paul Verlaine: “Je vois un home épouvanté qui me ressemble & qui me fuit” (“I see a terrified man, who looks like me & is fleeing from me”).

The translators have succeeded in providing a clear crib for convenient comparison to the French original on the facing page. Here and there the English can seem a trifle literal and clunky: They translate “perdre le Midi quotidien” as “To lose the quotidian South.” Or “Faithful Betrayal” which doggedly renders “C’est pour toi seul que je joue” as “It is only for you that I play.” Yet overall this is a helpful and useful edition of a wonderful text, despite a crabbed, cryptic preface by Haun Saussy, a professor of comparative literature at Yale.

After a final voyage to Nanking, China, in 1919 Segalen was found dead at age 41, possibly a suicide, in a forest in the Finistère region. Heavily in debt and abusing opium, Segalen did not have the time or inclination to promote his books, which also included studies of Gauguin, Chinese sculpture, and journals. Only in recent decades have they finally appeared in France, and English readers are now lucky to be able to appreciate the literary achievement that “Stèles” represents.

Mr. Ivry last wrote for these pages on Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic.