Alcools

Guillaume Apollinaire, Translated by Donald Revell. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1995.

A SHORT REVIEW DOES WELL TO CONCENTRATE on a few key points: Apollinaire is far too large a presence to be scanted. I will therefore discuss, more or less simultaneously, (1) "Zone," the first and emphatically the most important poem in Alcools; (2) the translator's approach; and (3) the structure of the book.

Though it comes to the reader first, "Zone" was the last of the book's major poems to be written: it "clearly implies," as Francis Steegmuller has said, "the actual birth of a new poetry . . ." Like Ezra Pound, the "new" is Apollinaire's basic theme, as "antiquity" is his major target (what Pound termed "two gross of broken statues . . . a few thousand battered books"). "A la fin," "Zone" begins, in a line set off, like each of the first three lines, from the rest of the poem, "tu es las de ce monde ancien" ["you're finally tired of that ancient world"]. The poem's third line then makes absolutely specific just what "mode ancien" "Zone" is concerned with, "l'antiquite grecque et romaine" ["Greek and Roman antiquity"]. What Revell gives us for "ce monde ancien," however, is "this elderly world," and the "antiquity" Apollinaire so carefully spells out becomes simply the one word "antiquity." There is no more: in this translation, Greece and Rome have disappeared without a trace. In short, a late-twentieth-century age-related fatigue has been substituted for Apollinaire's infinitely larger, historically-based weariness, and the vital historical specifics have been eliminated.

Why? Well, Revell explains, in a strained, portentous introduction: "as the audacities of 1913 may not seem audacious now, I have tried, in translating Apollinaire to the end of his century, to present him a new suit of grammars, a suit cut after his own audacious style." There is nothing wrong with "adaptations" or "imitations," a la Lowell or anyone else. The difficulty stems from not clearly indicating (or recognizing) what one is up to. Revell is determinedly vague, even evasive: "I have attempted a new translation of Alcools because, as a poet and as a reader of poetry, I feel lonely for joy and for the spur of joy."

Worse, his vagueness is both deliberate and uninformed. In line 7, Apollinaire pivots away from "l'antiquite grecque et romaine" and toward the "tu" ["you," in personal and intimate terms] to whom the poem is addressed. "Seul en Europe tu nes pas antique, o Christianisme" ["Only you, in all Europe, are not antique, oh Christianity"]. Revell's translation, "In all Europe only you O Christianism are not old," is doubly blurring. "Christianism" -- a rare term referring only to the formal tenets and rituals of Christianity -- is emphatically not what "Christianisme" means or Apollinaire is talking about, and "antique," once again, is not merely age-related.

There are fine things in the translation. Revell is a good poet; he has a first-rate ear. "For prose you're reading the tabloids" is a wonderfully good rendering of "pour la prose il y a les journaux"; disposable paperbacks" is an absolutely brilliant rendering of "livraisons a 25 centimes." Yet these are in a sense only details; on truly important matters he remains both erratic and unreliable. "It takes a thief to catch a thief " is pretty, musical, catchy -- but it is not what Apollinaire says. "S'il salt voler qu'on l'appelle voleur" ["if it knows how to fly, we can call it a flyer/thief"] is perhaps untranslatable, but one is required to try. Revell evades. "L'amour dont je souffre est une maladie honteuse" ["I suffer from a secret/shameful love"] should not be coarsely ratcheted down to "The love I feel is a venereal disease." Nor should "souffrir" be scaled down to a merely personal "feel": "souffrir"'s strong sense of felt pain must not be omitted. "Eau-de-vie" ["brandy"] should not be flattened into "alcohol," especially when Apollinaire has carefully distinguished, in consecutive lines, "alcool brulant" ["fiery/burning/scorching alcohol"] from "eau-de-vie." Revell turns "Ta vie que tu bois comme une eau-de-vie" into a sort of teetotaler's tract: "Your life you drink as alcohol." The poem's vivid final line, "Soleil cou coupe" ["Sun with its throat slit"] is, again, probably untranslatable, but Revell's "Sun cut throated" is facilely over-cute.

Finally, Revell has omitted three early poems because they are early and because they "do not, I feel, share in [the book's] true project and accomplishment." Opinions can well differ, in such matters. Steegmuller has said of one of the omitted poems, e.g., that it contains "one of Apollinaire's most characteristic lines" and of another that it "is dense and dark" stubbornly indirect and allusive." In any case, it is neither Revell's nor Steegmuller's (nor mine nor your) opinion that must control, but Apollinaire's. Scott Bates has written of Alcool's structure that "Apollinaire assembles the principal poetic achievements of his life, . . . break[ing] away from chronology to establish a simultaneous unity of poetic personality and theme . . . Except for a section of Rhenish poems and one of prison poems, he has placed after each poem one of a different period (usually) and of a different type (always)."