Zone
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE (1880–1918) was born Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky in Rome, the illegitimate son of an impoverished Polish woman and an Italian army officer. He spent his boyhood on the French Riviera with his mother and younger brother, Albert, attending schools in Monaco, Cannes, and Nice, until the family moved to Paris in 1899. Apollinaire did not pass the baccalauréat but began writing on his own, leaving Paris in 1901 to work as a private tutor for a family in the Rhineland for two years. Upon his return to Paris, he was employed as a bank clerk while writing plays and essays and becoming acquainted with Symbolist poets and playwrights, avant-garde musicians, choreographers, and visual artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Rousseau, and Marcel Duchamp. In 1910 Apollinaire published a collection of short stories, L’Hérésiarque et cie, that was nominated for the Goncourt Prize, and in 1913 he published his first significant collection of poetry, Alcools. At the onset of World War I, Apollinaire joined the French army, first serving as a member of the artillery division and then as part of the infantry fighting on the front lines where he suffered a head wound in March 1916. He returned to Paris and oversaw the production a year later of his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, a work in which the word “surréaliste” appears for the first time. A major influence on the artists and writers who would come to be known as surrealists, Apollinaire died of influenza two days before Armistice Day.
RON PADGETT is a poet and translator whose Collected Poems won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the 2014 Los Angeles Times Prize for the best poetry book. Padgett has translated the poetry of Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Valery Larbaud, and Blaise Cendrars.
PETER READ is a professor of modern French literature and visual arts at the University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom. He has published books and essays on Apollinaire and his circle, on other French poets, and on artists including Pablo Picasso, Raoul Dufy, Auguste Rodin, and Alberto Giacometti.
Guillaume Apollinaire
Zone
Selected Poems
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Translation, preface, and notes copyright © 2015 by Ron Padgett
Introduction copyright © 2015 by Peter Read
All rights reserved.
The Publisher would like to thank Wesleyan University Press for permission to reprint poems from Meteoric Flowers and Address, and Burning Deck Press for permission to reprint poems from Turneresque.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 1880–1918.
[Poems. Selections. English]
Zone : selected poems / by Guillaume Apollinaire ; selected and translated by Ron Padgett ; introduction by Peter Read.
1 online resource. — (New York Review Books Poets)
ISBN 978-1-59017-925-3 () — ISBN 978-1-59017-924-6 (paperback)
I. Title.
PQ2601.P6
841'.912—dc23
2015029731
Cover design by Emily Singer
978-1-59017-925-3
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB/Poets series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Contents
Biographical Notes
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
Translator’s Preface
Acknowledgments
Zone →
The Pont Mirabeau →
The Song of the Badly Loved →
Poem Read at the Wedding of André Salmon →
Inscription for the Tomb of the Painter Henri Rousseau Customs Inspector →
Marizibill →
Annie →
The House of the Dead →
The White Snow →
Prayer →
[Untitled] (“Come along”) →
La Grenouillère →
The Gypsy →
Hunting Horns →
The Lady →
The Traveler →
In La Santé →
Procession →
The Brazier →
The Autumn Crocuses →
The Women →
Vendémiaire →
Hotel →
Before the Movies →
Trip to Paris →
Advertisement for the House of Walk-Over →
To →
The Musician of Saint-Merri →
The Windows →
Tree →
A Phantom Made of Clouds →
Monday rue Christine →
Across Europe →
It’s Raining →
The Little Car →
Nuptials →
There →
The Nine Doors of Your Body →
4 O’Clock →
Festival →
Postcard →
Shadow →
The Seasons →
The Rediscovered Lock →
The Cavalryman’s Farewell →
Ocean of Earth →
The Pretty Redhead →
Notes →
Recommended Reading →
INTRODUCTION
Men of the future remember my living
At a time when kingship was dying
—Apollinaire, “Vendémiaire”
WILHELM APOLLINARIS de Kostrowitzky, alias Guillaume Apollinaire, entered adult life with few assets or advantages, apart from ambition, imagination, and poetic genius. Born in Rome in 1880, he was the son of Angélique de Kostrowitzky, an unmarried young woman of noble Polish ancestry, and he never knew his father, who was probably an Italian army officer. As a child, his mother dressed him in blue and white, the colors of the Virgin Mary, and then sent him to Saint Charles College, a Catholic boarding school in Monaco. He was a prizewinning pupil and was appointed secretary of a religious club, the Congregation of the Immaculate Conception. His education was disrupted, however, by the closure of Saint Charles and his transfer to a school in Cannes from which he managed to get expelled, apparently for possessing a banned book. He spent his last year of formal education at the high school in Nice, where he edited his own anarchist newspaper, Le Vengeur, and left at the age of sixteen without his final diploma, the baccalauréat.
His mother, meanwhile, was making a precarious living in Monte Carlo, where for a while she was barred from the casino. She eventually took Wilhelm and his young brother, Albert, north, stopping at Aix-les-Bains, Lyons, and Paris before moving on to the gaming tables of Spa, in the Belgian Ardennes. The boys were dropped off at a guest-house in nearby Stavelot, where local customs and legends, forests, marshlands, rivers, and waterfalls contrasted dramatically with everything they had known under Mediterranean skies. Wilhelm took a gap year beginning in August 1901 as a tutor for an aristocratic German family, a job which allowed him to explore the Rhineland and visit Bonn, Cologne, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, and Munich. At the end of his contract, he settled definitively in Paris, the city he compared to an amethyst, his “capital of the modern world.”
Apollinaire had been writing poetry since the age of twelve, first encouraged by a classics teacher named Becker. He reached expressive maturity in a series of harmonious and strikingly visual Rhineland poems, steeped in folklore, songs, and stories, carried along by “the eternal sound of a wide and somber river,” sometimes interrupted by narrative pirouettes, a smashed glass, or other sudden incongruities. Itinerant entertainers, marching soldiers, young lovers, and a Gypsy fortune-teller inhabit these vividly atmospheric landscapes, studded with farmhouses, cafés, and cemeteries. “The Gypsy,” “The Women,” “The House of the Dead,” and “Marizibill” all commemorate experiences and encounters from that time in Germany, while “The Autumn Crocuses” exemplifies Apollinaire’s penchant for lovelorn melancholy, disrupted by a burst of discordant joie de vivre.
Apollinaire always had faith in his literary genius, writing in an early notebook, “I’m a king who can’t be sure of his daily bread.” His situation as an illegitimate, fatherless, stateless immigrant left him with deep-seated insecurities, but through his writing, he sought to build an ambitious, enduring identity, grounded in French language and literature, layered with ancestral cultural traditions from all across Europe and farther afield. It was a cumulative enterprise of personal reinvention, explicitly invoked in his poem “Procession.” This historical awareness in no way restricted, however, the poet’s inventive impulse and his determination to reshape the language of French poetry, so it could match contemporary urban experience and express his own fluctuating emotions. Writing proved to be a means of self-discovery, affirmation, and metamorphosis, allowing Wilhelm de Kostrowitzky to grow into Guillaume Apollinaire, the celebrated French poet.
Apollinaire’s two major collections of poetry—Alcools (1913) and Calligrammes (1918)—lead French verse away from the rarefied beauty of turn-of-the-century symbolism into an era where everyday life could seem as astonishing as any heroic legend and so itself provide the matter of art. One of his greatest achievements is “The Song of the Badly Loved,” inspired by his ill-starred infatuation with Annie Playden, the English governess who worked beside him in Germany. Probably completed by April 1905, the poem is an extended tapestry, united by chronological narrative threads.
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