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Apollinaire: Poems
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Apollinaire's first collection of poetry was L'enchanteur pourrissant (1909), but it was Alcools (1913) which established his reputation. These poems, influenced in part by the symbolistss, juxtapose the old and the new, using traditional forms and modern imagery.
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The real importance of Apollinaire is as a poet, and the place to start is with Alcools (pronounced al-coal and meaning “spirits”). The poems in that book, although not arranged chronologically and occasionally hard to date, were mainly written from 1902 to 1912 and have for immediate inspiration a cluster of themes: the poet’s 1902–5 obsession with Annie Playden, his 1907–12 obsession with Marie Laurencin, Catholicism, homemade erotic-hermetic substitutes for Catholicism, modern technology, Paris.
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In The Self-Dismembered Man, poet Donald Revell offers new English translations of the most powerful poems Apollinaire wrote during those years: poems of nascent surrealism, of combat and of war-weariness. Here, too, is Apollinaire’s last testament, “The Pretty Redhead,” a farewell to the epoch that he—as poet, convict, art-critic, artilleryman and boulevardier—did so much to conjure and sustain until his death on Armistice Day in 1918. Readers of Apollinaire’s more familiar early work, Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995), will find here a darker and yet more tender poet, a poet of the broken world who shares entirely the world’s catastrophe even as he praises to the end its glamour and its strange innocence. This English translation, facing the original French, illuminates Apollinaire’s crucial and continuing influence on the European and American avant-garde. The volume includes a short translator’s preface.
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Apollinaire must have suspected that the contest needed to be taken up there. Before then, alongside work on Peintres cubistes (1913), between "The False Amphion" and the First World War, he wrote his masterwork, "Zone," about which one may say a decent portion of everything. For the moment, suffice to say that it is a poem trying to find its way into the modern, or rather one that has found itself in modernity’s midst and is trying to reconcile itself with the forces that drove it there like the storm blowing Benjamin’s reluctant Angel forward through history. It ends with a sparagmos heisted from classical Greek tragedy, the head of the old century (played by the sun) ripped off to make way for the new, a wound that can’t help but remind one ... of the guillotine, if one is a citoyen.
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Apollinaire's masterpiece, composed of 59 quintils of octosyllables, subdivided into seven sections of unequal length, opens with an explanatory, summarizing stanza, which is of the utmost importance in elucidating the reasoning of the poem. Hartley and Revell have come close enough to the original to give the readers a taste of the autobiographical nature of these verses. Yet Meredith exhibits his skill as a specialist by his translation of "romance" as "song" (remember the musical overtones of Apollinaire's work!) and by his happy rendering of the succeeding line as "before my love was clear to me," which leads us straight to the very beginning of the poem, "un soir de demi-brume à Londres."
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The notes to the texts, besides referencing the numerous quotations from Apollinaire, provide some intriguing indications of LZ’s additional reading, but, as in “Poem beginning ‘The,’” they are not necessarily always reliable. Most of the references to Dante are in fact quotations, although not indicated as such, from LZ’s Temple Classics edition of Dante’s Latin Works
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