He lived near Saint-Merri.

Processions: Those involving Louis XIV and various ambassadors. Louis had the rue de la Verrerie widened to accommodate his passage to Vincennes, and foreign ambassadors used it for their ceremonious arrivals in Paris.

the uprising: Probably the rebellion against the monarchy of Louis-Philippe in June of 1832.

THE NINE DOORS OF YOUR BODY ↩

Apollinaire included this poem in a letter to Madeleine Pagès, dated September 15, 1915, and written from the front. It became the first of a series of “secret” poems to her, secret because he knew that if her parents discovered them he would never stand a chance with her. His letters to her served as a form of gradual, long-distance seduction, a pursuit that also maintained his morale in the face of very difficult conditions.

Madeleine: Madeleine Pagès (1892–1965) was a twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher when she met Apollinaire on a train during the war. The two became engaged and in late 1915 he visited her in Oran on leave, but they never married, and after his head wound his letters to her dwindled and ceased. Apollinaire and Pagès met only the two times.

smoke and aromas: The original’s des fumées et des fumets is an untranslatable pun. Fumée means smoke (of all kinds) or steam (from food). Fumet refers to the pleasant aroma of food being cooked or fresh from the stove, the bouquet of a wine, or the scent of an animal being tracked.

chevaux-de-frise: This military term is the same in French and English. Literally it means “Frisian horse.” It was a portable defensive barrier made of a beam or log into which sharp stakes were inserted, pointing outward. During World War I they were sometimes festooned with barbed wire. Attacking enemy foot soldiers could be more easily shot as they struggled to get through these obstacles.

Erebus: A primordial Greek god, the personification of darkness. Erebus also designated a region of the underworld.

Dodona: An Ancient Greek oracle, second only to Delphi in importance.

Castalia: A Greek naiad, the daughter of the river god Acheloos. The spring of Castalia was thought to inspire poets who drank or even heard its waters.

NUPTIALS ↩

Written in the summer of 1901 to Linda Molina da Silva while she was on vacation at Cabourg, on the coast of Normandy. The beautiful sister of one of Apollinaire’s friends, she was sixteen when he met her in 1900. She regretted that she could not return his affection.

OCEAN OF EARTH ↩

This poem was written after Apollinaire had gotten himself transferred to the infantry, and thus to the nightmarish trenches of Champagne. Some of the imagery probably refers to gas attacks: tears from the eyes, soldiers in gas masks that make them resemble octopi, swarming on the walls of their trenches. Years of artillery shellings had so denuded the chalky landscape and churned up so many ruts and holes that Apollinaire remarked elsewhere that it looked like the sea. Octopi seem to have terrified him since his encounters with them in his childhood (in “Zone” he says, “The octopi from the depths fill our hearts with fear”). As for the references to houses and gravedigging, soldiers, required to build their own dugouts, also hollowed out protective individual spaces in the walls of the trenches, trenches sometimes littered with rotting corpses.

G. de Chirico: Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), an Italian artist living in Paris who in 1914 had painted a portrait of the poet (now in the Centre Pompidou, Paris), initially titled The Target-man and later Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire. In it, there is a circle on the side of the head, which turned out to be where, in 1916, Apollinaire would be struck by a piece of shrapnel. That it was on the other side of his head lessens the accuracy of the premonition only slightly. Apollinaire dedicated the poem to de Chirico in return for the paintings, including Premonitory Portrait, the artist had given him.

House of dampness: In this tight quatrain the French rhymes, both initial and terminal, pose a difficult challenge for the translator: Maison humide / Maison ardente / Saison rapide / Saison qui chante.

A PHANTOM MADE OF CLOUDS ↩

Apollinaire’s friend André Billy (1882–1971) revealed that Apollinaire began this poem as a story, then continued it as a poem. Its first publication came in December 1913. The descriptions of the performers recall certain paintings of Picasso’s Blue and Pink Periods, especially L’Acrobate à la boule (1905). One also thinks of the weight lifter and the airy, acrobatic child in Pierre Reverdy’s prose poem “Les saltimbanques” (in Poèmes en prose, published in 1915).

A Phantom Made of Clouds: Recalls the Greek story of Ixion and Hera, in which Hera’s husband, Zeus, created a cloud version of her to trick Ixion, who lusted after her. In a November 26, 1915, letter written from the front, Apollinaire refers to this same story and its “phantom made of clouds.”

saltimbanques: I use the French word for these street circus performers in Apollinaire’s time: jugglers, acrobats, and strongmen.

Longwy: An industrial city in northeastern France, near the Belgian border.

POEM READ AT THE WEDDING OF ANDRÉ SALMON ↩

André Salmon (1881–1969) was a writer and friend of Apollinaire. The wedding took place at Saint-Merri church. (See the note on “The Musician of Saint-Merri.”)

flags this morning: Paris was decked out for the French national holiday, July 14.

a cursed basement bar: Probably the Café du Départ (formerly called Café du Soleil d’Or) in the place Saint-Michel in Paris. By all accounts, the bar’s basement, where the literary magazine La Plume packed in 150 to 200 people for its weekly poetry readings, was lively and friendly.