by Various
At the end of the bridge that crushes the water, a policeman has taken out his notebook.
Le ciel s’est couvert de nuit et un glas tinte dans le soir, et les vieux rentiers bien vite ont fermé leurs volets; mais leurs chiens se sauvent. Tout le monde est parti, une lanterne – là-bas – s’est cachée derrière un tronc noir. Debout dans le ruisseau de la rue, je sens l’eau grasse et boueuse aspirer tout le sang de mon corps.
The sky has covered itself in darkness and a knell tolls in the evening, and the old men of independent means have closed their shutters pretty swiftly; but their dogs run off. Everyone has gone, a lantern – there – has hidden itself behind a black trunk. Standing in the gutter of the street, I feel the greasy, muddy water sucking away all the blood in my body.
Présence de Dieu
Une nuit que je parcourais le ciel amour
une nuit de douce mère
où les étoiles étaient les feux du retour
et diaprées comme l’arc-en-ciel
une nuit que les étoiles disaient: ‘Je reviens!’
Leur pitié saignait de mon sans repos
Car le malheur a percé mes pieds et mes mains
O résignation, c’est toi qui chantes le laus
Une nuit que les étoiles couvaient mon vol
j’aperçus un astre qui m’approchait
et il me versait un opium qui rend fol
et l’astre me séduisait avec son oeil épais.
Tes caresses désenchevêtrent mes membres.
L’amour n’attend pas, il n’attend pas.
Il est astre et je suis plante: nous sommes ensemble
Presence of God
One night as I was surveying the love sky / a gentle mother night when the stars were the signal-lights of homecoming and dappled like the rainbow / a night when the stars said: ‘I am coming again!’ Their pity bled for my restlessness For misfortune has pierced my feet and my hands O resignation, it is you who sing the laud1 On a night when the stars brooded over my flight I saw a star approaching me and it poured for me an opium of delirium and the star beguiled me with its dense eye. Your caresses disentangled my limbs. Love does not wait, it does not wait. It is a star and I am a plant: we are together You will make me grow like a panorama. And when I was near the star-climax, I saw that it was the Beautiful God, the Conceiver of the world, the Lord, the Gentleman-Genius. Then he absorbed me like a liquid: this is a secret and there are no words to say that my blood ebbs into Him God as into a single heart.
Tu me feras pousser comme un panorama.
Et quand je fus près de l’astre-événement,
je vis que c’ètait le Beau Dieu, le Concepteur
du monde, le Seigneur, le Génie-Gentleman.
Alors il m’absorba comme une liqueur:
c’est un secret et il n’y a pas de mots pour dire
que mon sang en Lui Dieu se retire
comme en un seul cœur.
Guillaume Apollinaire
(1880–1918)
This is the pen-name of Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Alexandre Apollinaris de Kostrowitski, the illegitimate son of a nomadic Polish mother and an unknown father, probably an Italian army officer whose absence and obscurity provided the first of many identity problems for the rootless young poet. Apollinaire sought an answer in Paris, at the turn of the century, to his sense of statelessness. He quickly developed a wide range of literary and artistic friendships, and became a colourful and gregarious leader of the modernist movement as well as a fervent advocate in print of Cubist painting. His larger-than-life personality, with its perplexing mixture of extrovert buffoonery and introvert vulnerability, gave him a legendary status which at times has perhaps obscured a proper perception of his work.
Apollinaire’s reputation reached its peak with the publication of Alcools in 1913. The success of this innovative volume helped him recover from the trauma of wrongful arrest and imprisonment in 1911, on suspicion of involvement in the theft of the ‘Mona Lisa’.
He played many roles, and arguably they were all authentic. He was an immensely energetic man, provocative, mysterious and temperamental; a talented raconteur, a gargantuan eater and drinker, a great lover, an intermittently devout Catholic, a generous friend, a clown and a scholar and a tragic hero. Above all he was an artistic revolutionary exploring new areas of consciousness with a courage and integrity that he also brought to bear on his periodic despair at the ending of relationships.
Apollinaire’s final commitment was to France itself, his adopted country. In 1914 he was an enthusiastic and sincerely proud recruit, first into the artillery and then to the front-line trenches. A serious head wound brought him back to Paris after an operation in 1916, subject to fainting fits and partial paralysis, but still writing poetry with a voice perhaps more assured than before. He assembled his second major volume, Calligrammes, with its typographical experiments; wrote further articles on the arts and a Jarryesque play, Les Mamelles de Tirésias; coined the word ‘Surrealism’; worked as a censor; delivered a significant lecture entitled ‘L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes’; and in May 1918 married the last of a series of lovers, Jacqueline Kolb (‘la jolie rousse’). In November of that year he died of complications following an attack of influenza. His funeral moved, with an irony he would have appreciated, through Paris streets decked for the Armistice.
A prophet and exponent of modernism who demanded total expressive freedom, Apollinaire nevertheless paid frequent homage to a French literary tradition, both popular and refined, that he loved and respected not so much in spite of his cosmopolitan upbringing as because of it. That tradition was not to be smashed by the new adventurers but reconstructed, its elements reselected and surprisingly juxtaposed to reflect the accelerated discontinuity of experience and simultaneity of perception of the modern artist. Order and Adventure are his two poles, sometimes approaching integration.
The new spirit brings an increased concern for the visual form of the poem on the page, favouring to some extent the eye over the ear, though the musicality of Apollinaire’s best work remains memorable. Syntactic units – phrase, line, stanza – are strongly articulated with an intrinsic rhythmical logic, and must be perceived in their relationship with the intervening and surrounding blank spaces. Punctuation is abolished, at least partly through the prompting of Cendrars, in the interests of a more authentic, simultaneous notation of the flux of consciousness, that wanderer through both the streets of Paris and the starry skies. As with Reverdy, mimesis is broken in favour of an autonomous, concrete art form based on bold juxtaposition of imagery (see introduction to Reverdy), as the Cubist urge battles with the problem of language and the conventionally linear reception of it by the reader. Apollinaire’s extreme experiments in this direction are concentrated in Calligrammes, but in Alcools too the lyrical traditions and elegiac themes that underpin the free verse are challenged by this new demand, and the organization of the volume itself is more a matter of the surprise principle than of any chronological or thematic criteria.
His style blends an awareness of metrical tradition with a new rhythmic and rhyming freedom, and his insistence on naturalness leads him into the frequent, wilfully incongruous and stimulating clashing of registers. Poetry for Apollinaire is to be found in all aspects of life, and he correspondingly rejects the notion of a rarefied, specialized mode of expression: ‘A falling handkerchief can be for the poet the lever with which he will lift up an entire universe.’ The poet translates the ordinary into the extraordinary, turning imaginative experience into myth through his burning creativity, throwing his past and present into ‘le brasier’ in pursuit of a sublime transformation. Thus he extends our consciousness by passing through and beyond the familiar. Unlike Mallarmé, who becomes clearer as you penetrate his opaque surface, Apollinaire is immediately transparent but mysterious and divergent beneath the surface; and in this, as in his whole artistic stance, he is seen as a forerunner of Surrealism. His work is uneven and does not always fulfil his intention
s, but Le Bestiaire (1911), Alcools and Calligrammes contain enough work of originality and quality to place him in the front rank of modern poets.
Zone
A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin
Tu en as assez de vivre dans l’antiquité grecque et romaine
Ici même les automobiles ont l’air d’être anciennes
La religion seule est restée toute neuve la religion
Est restée simple comme les hangars de Port-Aviation
Seul en Europe tu n’es pas antique ô Christianisme
L’Européen le plus moderne c’est vous Pape Pie X
Et toi que les fenêtres observent la honte te retient
D’entrer dans une église et de t’y confesser ce matin
Tu lis les prospectus les catalogues les affiches qui chantent tout haut
Zone
In the end you are weary of this ancient world
O Eiffel Tower shepherdess the flock of bridges bleats this morning
You’ve had enough of living in Greek and Roman antiquity
Here even the motorcars look antique Religion alone has remained brand new religion Has stayed simple like Port-Aviation’s hangars
You alone in Europe are not ancient O Christianity The most modern European is you Pope Pius X And you whom the windows watch shame restrains you From entering a church and confessing there this morning You read handbills catalogues posters that sing aloud That’s what poetry is this morning and for prose there are the papers There are 25-centime instalments full of detective stories Portraits of great men and a thousand assorted titles
Voilà la poésie ce matin et pour la prose il y a les journaux
Il y a les livraisons à 25 centimes pleines d’aventures policières
Portraits des grands hommes et mille titres divers
J’ai vu ce matin une jolie rue dont j’ai oublié le nom
Neuve et propre du soleil elle était le clairon
Les directeurs les ouvriers et les belles sténo-dactylographes
Du lundi matin au samedi soir quatre fois par jour y passent
Le matin par trois fois la sirène y gémit
Une cloche rageuse y aboie vers midi
Les inscriptions des enseignes et des murailles
Les plaques les avis à la façon des perroquets criaillent
J’aime la grâce de cette rue industrielle
Située à Paris entre la rue Aumont-Thiéville et l’avenue des Ternes
I saw this morning a pretty street whose name I’ve forgotten Fresh and clean it was the bugle of the sunlight The directors the workers and the lovely shorthand typists Pass through it four times a day from Monday morning to Saturday evening In the morning the siren wails there three times A querulous bell yelps there towards midday The lettering on the signs and walls The nameplates the notices shriek like parrots I love the grace of this industrial street Located in Paris between the Rue Aumont-Thiéville and the Avenue des Ternes
Voilà la jeune rue et tu n’es encore qu’un petit enfant
Ta mère ne t’habille que de bleu et de blanc
Tu es très pieux et avec le plus ancien de tes camarades René Dalize
Vous n’aimez rien tant que les pompes de l’Église
Il est neuf heures le gaz est baissé tout bleu vous sortez du
dortoir en cachette
Vous priez toute la nuit dans la chapelle du collège
Tandis qu’éternelle et adorable profondeur améthyste
Tourne à jamais la flamboyante gloire du Christ
C’est le beau lys que tous nous cultivons
C’est la torche aux cheveux roux que n’éteint pas le vent
C’est le fils pâle et vermeil de la douloureuse mère
C’est l’arbre toujours touffu de toutes les prières
C’est la double potence de l’honneur et de l’éternité
C’est l’étoile à six branches
C’est Dieu qui meurt le vendredi et ressuscite le dimanche
C’est le Christ qui monte au ciel mieux que les aviateurs
Il détient le record du monde pour la hauteur
There is the young street and you’re still just a little child Your mother dresses you only in blue and white You’re very pious and with your oldest friend René Dalize You love nothing so much as church ceremonies It’s nine o’clock the gas turned low is blue you slip secretly out of the dormitory You pray all night in the college chapel While the everlasting adorable amethyst depth Turns eternally the blazing glory of Christ It is the beautiful lily we all nurture It is the redhaired torch that the wind cannot blow out It is the pale and rose-red son of the grieving mother It is the ever leafy tree of all prayers It is the double cross potent of honour and eternity It is the six-pointed star It is God who dies on Friday and is restored to life on Sunday It is Christ rising heavenward outdoing the aviators He holds the world altitude record
Pupille Christ de l’œil
Vingtième pupille des siècles il sait y faire
Et changé en oiseau ce siècle comme Jésus monte dans l’air
Les diables dans les abîmes lèvent la tête pour le regarder
Ils disent qu’il imite Simon Mage en Judée
Ils crient s’il sait voler qu’on l’appelle voleur
Les anges voltigent autour du joli voltigeur
Icare Enoch Elie Apollonius de Thyane
Flottent autour du premier aéroplane
Ils s’écartent parfois pour laisser passer ceux que transporte la Sainte-Eucharistie
Ces prêtres qui montent éternellement élevant l’hostie
L’avion se pose enfin sans refermer les ailes
Le ciel s’emplit alors de millions d’hirondelles
A tire-d’aile viennent les corbeaux les faucons les hiboux
D’Afrique arrivent les ibis les flamants les marabouts
L’oiseau Roc célébré par les conteurs et les poètes
Plane tenant dans les serres le crâne d’Adam la première tête
L’aigle fond de l’horizon en poussant un grand cri
Et d’Amérique vient le petit colibri
De Chine sont venus les pihis longs et souples
Christ pupil of the eye Twentieth pupil of the centuries it knows how And changed into a bird this century like Jesus soars into the air The devils in the chasms raise their heads to look at it They say it is imitating Simon Magus in Judea They shout if it knows how to fly then call it a fly-by-night The angels flutter around the pretty acrobat Icarus Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana Hover around the first aeroplane Making way sometimes for those borne up by the Holy Eucharist to pass Those priests who rise eternally lifting up the host The aeroplane touches down at last without folding its wings The sky then is filled with millions of swallows Crows and falcons and owls come winging Ibis flamingos and marabou storks from Africa The Roc bird extolled by storytellers and poets Glides down holding in its talons Adam’s skull the first head The eagle swoops down from the horizon with a great cry And from America comes the little humming-bird From China have come the long and sinuous pihis Which have only one wing and fly in couples Now here is the dove the immaculate spirit Escorted by the lyre-bird and the ocellated peacock The phoenix that self-creating pyre Veils all for an instant with its glowing ashes The sirens leaving the perilous straits Arrive all three singing beautifully And all eagle phoenix and pihis of China Fraternize with the flying machine
Qui n’ont qu’une seule aile et qui volent par couples
Puis voici la colombe esprit immaculé
Qu’escortent l’oiseau-lyre et le paon ocellé
Le phénix ce bucher qui soi-même s’engendre
Un instant voile tout de son ardente cendre
Les sirènes laissant les périlleux détroits
Arrivent en chantant bellement toutes trois
Et tous aigle phénix et pihis de la Chine
Fraternisent avec la volant
e machine
Maintenant tu marches dans Paris tout seul parmi la foule
Des troupeaux d’autobus mugissants près de toi roulent
L’angoisse de l’amour te serre le gosier
Comme si tu ne devais jamais plus être aimé
Si tu vivais dans l’ancien temps tu entrerais dans un monastère
Vous avez honte quand vous vous surprenez à dire une prière
Tu te moques de toi et comme le feu de l’Enfer ton rire pétille
Les étincelles de ton rire dorent le fond de ta vie
C’est un tableau pendu dans un sombre musée
Et quelquefois tu vas le regarder de près
Aujourd’hui tu marches dans Paris les femmes sont ensanglantées
C’était et je voudrais ne pas m’en souvenir c’était au déclin de la beauté
Now you are walking in Paris all alone among the crowd Bellowing herds of buses roll past you The anguish of love tightens your throat As though you were never to be loved again If you lived in olden times you would enter a monastery You are ashamed when you catch yourself at prayer You laugh at yourself and like hellfire your laughter crackles The sparks of your laughter gild the depths of your life It is a picture hung in a gloomy gallery And sometimes you go and look at it close up
Today you are walking in Paris the women are stained with blood It was and would I could forget it it was at the twilight of beauty
Entourée de flammes ferventes Notre-Dame m’a regardé à Chartres
Le sang de votre Sacré-Coeur m’a inondé à Montmartre
Je suis malade d’ouïr les paroles bienheureuses
L’amour dont je souffre est une maladie honteuse
Et l’image qui te possède te fait survivre dans l’insomnie et dans l’angoisse
C’est toujours près de toi cette image qui passe
Maintenant tu es au bord de la Méditerranée