Apollinaire on the Métro
How I, of all people, came to translate Apollinaire
This year I will be ten years older than Guillaume Apollinaire ever was. Recorded on his birth certificate as Guglielmo Alberto Wladimiro Alessandro Apollinare de Kostrowitzky1, to an unknown father and a Polish mother, he became France’s great poet of modernity. Though he died in 1918, aged 38, a victim of the infamous pandemic known (unfairly) as the Spanish flu, he was nevertheless declared mort pour la France, a distinction usually given to those killed by war; a head wound from shrapnel was considered by the state to have mortally weakened him.
A few months before, he had married. In November he was gone. In his time he had already transformed both French literature and the modern art that fills the world’s museums. He was the man who introduced Picasso to Braque. He invented the words “Orphism” and “Surrealism” and wrote an influential treatise on Cubism. His head, represented in classical grisaille with sunglasses on, is the main interest in a famous painting by Giorgio de Chirico. He was also drawn and painted by, among many, Jean Metzinger, the Douanier Rousseau, Marie Laurencin (his longtime girlfriend), and of course, in cartoonish doodles or fractured and sliding apart in Cubist prisms, his close friend Picasso. He even spent a week in Paris jail, falsely accused of having stolen the Mona Lisa.
And I confess I barely knew a shred of this, despite my affection for modern art, poetry and France, until I visited Paris for the first time, with Luca, and read a few lines of Apollinaire on the metro.
It was one of those poetry placards set up as an earnest public service, to occupy the dreamy minutes a commuter might otherwise spend rereading an optician’s ad while avoiding making eye contact with strangers. I can’t remember much of it now. I know it contained the word brume2, which I had to ask about. But reading those lines over and over, backed by my three years of high school French and a few months eavesdropping on Luca and his mother, I felt seized by them. They lit me with delight. I whispered them repeatedly, as if forced under a spell, alongside the rhythm of the rumbling traincar. I felt as I’d felt when at thirteen I’d read Eliot for the first time, an incantatory hypnosis. I recognized immediately that Apollinaire must be great, and I set out to read him at once but, I thought naively, in English, because it would be easier.
However, though I acquired several translations, I was soon frustrated. None of them replicated the music I heard in my head in the metro. They must certainly be true to someone’s Apollinaire. Not mine.3 I decided I would read him after my French improved.
Some years later, after I had finished translating Luca’s first book on perfume, Parfums le guide, he proposed we work on something together, and I declared, “Apollinaire.” He was game (though he wished I’d also do Rimbaud). So we sat at the kitchen table and read one of the shorter poems aloud. I told Luca what I thought it meant, and he told me what it actually meant. Then I went away and fretted and burnished and carved into the body of it until, to my mind’s ear, it sang like the French did. And this was my translation of “Les colchiques” (“The Crocuses”).
As of today, I have completed translations of Apollinaire’s three most famous poems: '“Zone,” “Le pont Mirabeau” (“Mirabeau Bridge”) and “La chanson du Mal-Aimé” (“The Song of the Unloved”), which together make up the first three poems of Alcools (Alcohols), his 1913 collection.
My goal in translation has been to seek an English poem equivalent in content, spirit, and form. There is no reason that such an equivalent should exist, but I set out as if I were certain it does, the way branches of mathematics are built on supports as flimsy as, “Suppose Riemann’s hypothesis is correct.”
Readers of my previous writings on perfume may be surprised at this switch. If anything, these translations are a return to my primary interest. I wrote poetry incessantly between the ages of ten and twenty-one. As the daughter of a Filipino tractor-mechanic and a Chinese insurance-underwriter from Vietnam, however, I felt obligated to do something my parents would understand, so I set my toys aside when I graduated university and tried to be serious. I thought I was content. I loved New York City. I paid the rent. I fell for a guy who made me laugh, and we got married. I earned enough to get a drink after work a few times a week. And then I met Luca. My reasonable life ended, and my unreasonable life, the one I’m in now, began.
To sum up, I translate Apollinaire so I can read him. As I can only translate what I understand, this has turned out to be a task of scholarship as much as poetry. I hope my annotations help the reader comprehend the text and the choices I have made, and that I have conveyed as faithfully as possible the sense and sound of the Apollinaire I met on the metro.
Because he was born in Italy. But in Polish, it was Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Aleksander Apolinary Kostrowicki.
brume = mist
When I first tried reading Apollinaire, I found three translators: Roger Shattuck, Donald Revell, and Oliver Bernard. Shattuck’s version was academic and did not capture the spirit of the poetry; Revell is an inspired, idiosyncratic poet, and his translations are frequently more Revell than Apollinaire, playing loosely with ideas and words found in the originals; and Oliver Bernard seemed to cope with any difficulty by just making stuff up, pretty ballsy in a side-by-side bilingual edition. It was just yesterday, on the 15th of March, after I had finished formatting my translations and footnotes for “Zone,” “Le pont Mirabeau,” and “La chanson du Mal-Aimé,” readying them to go live on Monday, that I got my hands on Ron Padgett’s lauded translations from 2016. I admit I was frightened. What if it made my work redundant? It turns out our translation goals are identical, and I greatly admire what he’s done. Yet thank goodness, my versions differ widely enough to be worth doing, especially given variations in interpretation of the French, our different choices as poets in diction and versification, and my annotations.