By Thomas Sanfilip

To draw inspiration from a poet like Guillame Apollinaire—one of the foremost French poets of the early 20^th century and who died over a hundred years ago—and to translate his work for a modern audience today is definitely a project worthy of acknowledgment and praise. Poet Donald Revell has done just that in his translation of selected later poems from Apollinaire’s major collection of poetry, Calligrammes. His translations are an inspired example of how poetic language can be revitalized and transmuted from one language into another. He brings an accessibility to the poetry that thrives on the natural feel he shows for the poet’s work.

Apollinaire proclaimed shortly after the end of World War I that a “new spirit” for poetry was hovering on the horizon. “There are a thousand natural combinations which have not yet been composed,” he wrote. “The divine games of life and imagination give free rein to a totally new poetic activity . . . These new combinations, these new works—they are the art of life which is called progress.” 

To appreciate Apollinaire’s poetic accomplishment born out of the earliest dawn of modernism, one must be willing to cross an imaginary line that allows entry into a zone of new imaginative expression. Revell is aware of this at every turn and brings the poetry to life, allowing for a continuous forward motion that allows for no staid expressionism to intervene.  Sense is not the object, but the explication of unexpected places and aspects of reality on which the reader is allowed to meditate.

All the yellow dies from red to green

Where parakeets sing in the first woods

Pihi giblets

There is a poem to write about a bird with just one wing

We’ll telephone it in

Gigantic trauma

Brings tears to my eyes

Behold a pretty young girl amid the youth of Turin

From “The Windows”

Revell’s selections in my view compresses Apollinaire’s Calligrammes unique poetic features into a sharper approximation of the poet’s poetic strength. The experimental and radical nature of Apollinaire’s original is brought into keener focus and presented in a seamless flow of integrated expression. As such, Revell captures the dynamism of Apollinaire’s language, creating an internal rhythm to each poem that is measured out in the pictorial balance he achieves in his treatment of Apollinaire’s poetic persona.

There will be time for suffering

There will be time for kindness

Goodbye youth soon now

We’ll know the future

And no harm done

It will be a time of avid grace

Fire refining human will

Seven years incredible labor

And the godhood

Pure increase and pure knowledge.

From “The Hills”

Urging a complete transformation of the poetic vernacular of his time, Apollinaire wrote that “poets are not simply men devoted to the beautiful. They are also and especially devoted to the truth, insofar as the unknown can be penetrated, so much that the unexpected, the surprising is one of the principal sources of poetry.” As Revell himself explains—”I found the fullest and most beautiful horizons of Apollinaire’s combat, contoured to sweet reason and to new, new music.” Examples of this in his translation abound.

I built a house in the middle of Ocean

Its windows are the rivers that flow from my eyes

Octopuses swarm over every wall

Hear their triple hearts beating and their beaks pecking the panes

Humid house

Fiery house

Fast season

Song season

       Airplanes lay eggs

       Look out for the dropping anchor

Fr. Ocean of Earth

Given the cultural malaise of the humanities these days, for any poet today balancing their weight against prophetic statements about the future of poetry, let alone the arts in general, would be rare, indeed. I myself have no qualms about making such statements, since I believe a genuine crisis of consciousness permeates every level of the arts—so I can respect Apollinaire’s futurist vision at the end of World War I that a “new spirit” for poetry hovered on the horizon and admire him for his penache, his unwavering belief in individuality as a opposed to collectivist thinking, that the false and duplicitous would eventually be exposed by true artists.

These ideas fall outside the normal perimeters for most poets today who are generally content with mere photographs of reality—but for true poets who struggle to express both beauty and truth, Apollinaire was hopeful new artists would emerge from society. To this extent, I think Apollinaire’s poetry needs to be read in context more than just an interesting literary figure who advocated for the radicalism of Picasso’s Cubism and gave us the term “surrealism” to identify an artistic movement that liberated the unconscious in new and shocking ways both visual and poetic.

As Apollinaire wrote with soaring optimism, “At a later date, those who study the literary history of our time will be amazed that, like the alchemists, the dreamers and poets devoted themselves, without even the pretext of a philosopher’s stone, to inquiries and to notations which exposed them to the ridicule of their contemporaries, of journalists and of snobs.”

Apollinaire did not live long enough to see the flowering of these artistic movements, but his spirit lurks most assuredly in their background. Revell’s well-titled, The Self-Dismembered Man, reassembles the inspired semblance the poet’s persona into a living voice that makes whole and complete again the dismembered consciousness of the world Apollinaire himself desired so fervently to resurrect and reconstruct.

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References

• The Self-Dismembered Man, Selected Later Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire, (Wesleyan University Press)
• “The New Spirit and the Poets” in Selected Writings of Guillame Apollinaire, translated by Roger Shattuck (New Directions, 1971)