According to Ardengo Soffici, the magazine’s editor, Apollinaire thought of these poems as light little things of no great importance. It is by far his easiest poem to translate.

THE TRAVELER ↩

Fernand Fleuret: Poet, writer, and friend of Apollinaire. Fleuret (1884–1945), Apollinaire, and Louis Perceau secretly compiled and then in 1913 published a 415-page annotated bibliography of all the “forbidden” books in the section of the French National Library known as “Hell.” The initial publication of “The Traveler” (September 1912) bore no dedication.

Euripos: A strait in the Aegean Sea between Boeotia and Euboea where the strong tidal currents flow in one direction, then the opposite. Aristotle is said to have drowned there.

supermarine: Apollinaire coined the word surmarine.

TREE ↩

Frédéric Boutet: Fiction writer and journalist. Boutet (1874–1941) and Apollinaire first met in 1903.

Isfahan: The interior of the large dome of the Shah Mosque in Isfahan is made of light blue, yellow, and white tiles.

Mole-Ariadne: Both the mole and Ariadne are known for using underground passageways. Apollinaire’s use of this term might have derived from Nietzsche or from Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings, as well as the French slang for prostitute, taupe (mole). The poet was also familiar with Remy de Gourmant’s description, in The Physiology of Love (1903), of the female mole’s annual flight through tunnels to elude the male.

We had rented two compartments on the Trans-Siberian: This line and the following two are blatant paraphrases of a passage in Blaise Cendrars’s poem “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian.”

Dame Habonde: In popular legend, a fairy or good witch who bestows material goods, especially on the poor. Hence a figure of abundance, sometimes called Abondia.

La Coruña: A port in northwestern Spain. Perhaps the postcard was from Marie Laurencin, who had gone to Spain with her new husband.

VENDÉMIAIRE ↩

The title is the name of the first month of the French revolutionary Republican calendar, September 22–October 21. Apollinaire had planned to write a poem for each month, of which this was the first, but he never completed the project. He used sections of the second poem, “Brumaire,” in what became “Cortège” (“Procession”).

At a time when kingship was dying: Refers to the assassinations of King Umberto of Italy in 1900 and of King Carlos of Portugal (and his son and heir, Luís Filipe) in 1908. If, as many Apollinaire scholars believe, this poem was written in late 1909, it could have been touched off by the execution of the Catalan anarchist, freethinker, and educator Francisco Ferrer (1859–1909) for his part in the Barcelona civil uprisings against the monarchy.

trismegist: Thrice powerful. Apollinaire was interested in the legendary figure of Hermes Trismegistus, but here I suspect he simply liked the unusual rhyme, which also serves as an alert, early in the poem, that other recondite allusions are to follow.

drunken birds: In the fall, when fruits and berries ripen and begin to ferment, the birds that eat them can become intoxicated.

Double reason: A number of Apollinaire scholars believe that this is a reference to the old Breton literature that advocated the twin allegiance to women (courtly love) and religion (the quest for the Holy Grail). Merlin was an important character in Breton literature and in Apollinaire’s work as well. Sometimes it’s hard to discern exactly what Apollinaire meant by the word reason, though he often associates it with tradition. He refers to reason in several other poems, such as “In la Santé” (“In my cell we are all alone / Beautiful brightness Beloved reason”), “The Pretty Redhead” (“O Sun now is the time of burning Reason”), and in an interview in 1916 with Pierre Albert-Birot, where he said, “From knowledge of the past reason is born, from the vision of the future boldness and foresight rise” (Adéma, 234).

Fourvière: The Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourvière in Lyons. Its neighborhood has long been a center of convents, monasteries, and chapels.

silk: By the sixteenth century Lyons had become the silk capital of Europe.

A child watches the windows as they open up: According to Apollinaire, he and his family lived in Lyons briefly in 1899, sometime between the start of the year and April. There is a remote possibility that his reference to open windows came from the Festival of Lights in Lyons, where every December 8 the citizens displayed candles in their windows in honor of the Virgin Mary. However, as he does not seem to have been in Lyons in early December, it is unlikely that he witnessed the festival.

orphan dance: The Orphans (in Czech, Sirotcí) were one of the Bohemian sects that developed from the teachings of pre-Reformation reformer Jan Hus (1369–1415). Other such sects included the Adamites, Taborites, Orebites, Ultraquists, and Praguers. Formed in 1423, the Orphans consisted mainly of city nobles. According to Dr. J.J.N. Palmer (referred to in Garnet Rees’s edition of Alcools, 178), the Adamites “were given to naked ritual dances” as part of their attempt to return to a pre-lapsarian state of innocence. It seems that Apollinaire might have confused the Orphans and the Adamites, who had such sharply differing beliefs that they even went to war against each other.

an infinite rattling coming from Sicily: Probably a reference to the huge earthquake and tidal wave that shattered eastern Sicily (especially Messina) and Calabria on December 28, 1908. More than 70,000 citizens of Messina were killed.

the oblique creator Ixion: In Greek mythology, Ixion lusted after the goddess Hera, the wife of Zeus, who, to trick Ixion, created a cloud version of her for him to sleep with. Anne Hyde Greet points out that Ixion was oblique in several ways: as an indirect creator (his union with Hera produced centaurs) and as an underhanded or crooked person (Ixion had lured his father-in-law to his house and then shoved him onto a bed of hot coals).

the sirens: In Greek mythology, the Sirens were beautiful creatures, part young woman and part bird, whose hypnotic singing lured sailors to crash upon the rocks of their flowery island.

Scylla’s rocks: In Greek mythology, Scylla was a monster who lived on a rocky crag on what is today called the Straits of Messina.

Hydra: In Greek mythology, Hydra was a many-headed reptilian sea monster whose breath was so strong it could kill.

this past winter: Refers to the December 1908 earthquake in Sicily.

the fleur de lys in the Vatican: This might refer to the Vatican’s having sanctioned two French bishops and then the French Chamber of Deputies’ having retaliated by voting, in 1904, for a rupture in diplomatic relations with the Holy See. In 1905 the French government instituted a formal separation of church and state, creating an entirely secular state, reducing monasteries and religious instruction in the schools, and thus lessening the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in France.

plantlike liberty: Apollinaire uses the same phrase (liberté végétale) in “Poem Read at the Wedding of André Salmon.” One commentator suggests that the phrase means “organic freedom,” as distinct from political or artificial freedom. In any case, it’s an odd combination of words, especially in light of the fact that plants lack freedom of mobility.

Coblenz: This German city, for twenty years a part of France, has long been the center of the Moselle and Rhine wine business.

My bunches of strong men bleed in the wine-press: This blood flowing from a winepress echoes the imagery in Revelation 14:18–20.

names six by six: Scott Bates suggests that this might refer to the six names Apollinaire’s mother registered him with (Wilhelm Albert Wladimir Alexander Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky) and to the numerous names of Croniamantal, the thinly veiled protagonist (Apollinaire himself) in Apollinaire’s novella The Poet Assassinated.

The immortal worms: Other translators have chosen to render the ambiguous vers as lines, poems, or verses, not as worms.

THE WHITE SNOW ↩

This is one of the few poems in Apollinaire’s first major collection, Alcools, that was previously unpublished. An anachronistic coincidence: Two years after the appearance of that volume, Apollinaire, while at the front, made the acquaintance of an artillery lieutenant and his cook, two figures who could have stepped out of his poem, especially since the cook was named Loiseau (add an apostrophe to it and you have the French word for bird).

officer: Given that Apollinaire often associated blue military uniforms with the sky, I think he means here a military officer.

Fall snow / Fall and now no: This is my attempt to catch the original’s playful rhyming of neige and n’ai-je.

THE WINDOWS ↩

There are two accounts of the origin of this “simultaneous” poem.