In one, Apollinaire and his friends René Dalize and André Billy wrote at least the beginning of it together spontaneously at a café. In the other, Apollinaire wrote it alone in the studio of Robert Delaunay, whose theories of color and simultaneity, not to mention his shoes, are reflected in this poem. Reasonable commentators suggest that part of it might have been drafted at the café and then rewritten from memory and given its final shape at the studio. In any case, the poem was intended for a catalogue of an exhibition of Delaunay’s paintings in Germany (January 1913). It turned out to be one of Apollinaire’s favorite poems of his own.

Windows: Delaunay had done a series of paintings based on the view through a window, with titles such as Windows and Simultaneous Windows.

Pihi: A bird in Chinese legend. Apollinaire also mentions it in his poem “Zone”: “From China come the pihis long and supple / Which have only one wing and fly in couples.” In his youth he had read about this creature in the January–February 1896 issue of Journal asiatique.

When you have time you are free: The original Quand on a le temps on a la liberté might be a play on the names of two Paris newspapers, Le Temps and La Liberté. Some decades ago, this line could have been translated in the United States as “When you have time you have life.”

The Octoroons: Chabins is a word used in the Antilles to signify octoroons. The French word chabanais means “noise,” but it also suggests the most luxurious and well-known brothel in Paris, Le Chabanais, which opened in 1878. I would bet that Apollinaire intended the erotic tinge here.

maroon women: The French word marronne indicates the color maroon, but it also means “runaway slave,” as it does in English.

the wa wa goose: The Ojibwe word for wild goose is wa wa, as it is for the Lenni Lanape Indians of the Delaware Valley. Apollinaire originally spelled it wa wa, then changed it to oua oua and oua-oua. He discovered this word in The Quadroon (1856), a melodramatic popular novel by Thomas Mayne Reid (1818–1883), an Irish American whose works were translated into many languages, including French. In order to suggest honk-honk, I have retained Apollinaire’s use of lowercase letters.

Old Port Newport: My attempt to render Apollinaire’s pun on the names of two French towns, Hyères and Maintenon (hier “yesterday” and maintenant “now”). In the United States we do have an Old Port, Maine, and a Newport, Rhode Island, but the translation is less explicit than the original in furthering the poem’s use of simultaneity.

THE WOMEN ↩

The reader can assume that this early conversation-poem, given the names in it, is set in a German-speaking country. Apollinaire’s notation on the manuscript is “Honnef, December 1901.” Honnef is in the Rhineland, where he was employed as a tutor. Eventually he placed the poem in a sequence entitled Rhénanes.

the priest’s day: His name day.

Herr Traum: German for Mr. Dream.

Frau Sorge: German for Mrs. Worry. It’s also the title of a poem by Heinrich Heine; a name in Goethe’s Faust, part II; and the title of a novel (1887) by Hermann Sudermann, translated as Dame Care.

ZONE ↩

Originally titled “Cri” (“Cry” or “Scream”), this poem, which covers a morning-to-morning cycle as Apollinaire walks from his apartment in Auteuil into central Paris and back the next day while simultaneously traveling back in time, is, in my opinion, one of the great poems of the twentieth century. The despair in it came partly from the ending of the poet’s love affair with the artist Marie Laurencin (1885–1956), but that is only one of the powerful engines driving this expansive poem. So natural is Apollinaire’s diction that it takes a while for many readers to realize that the poem is written mostly in rhymed (or off-rhymed) couplets. Samuel Beckett’s translation of this poem attempts, with considerable success, to bring over the rhymes. The title might refer to a very poor area on the western edge of Paris or to a region in the Jura mountains that Apollinaire visited at a time when he had just finished a poem called “Cri,” which he retitled “Zone.”

The flock of the bridges: That is, the traffic going over the bridges, not the bridges themselves.

shepherdess Eiffel Tower: In the nineteenth century, the Eiffel Tower was called the Shepherdess (La Bergère) because it stood on one bank (berge) of the Seine.

Port Aviation: Primarily an airfield but also a racetrack for airplanes, complete with a grandstand and restaurants, just south of Paris. It opened in May 1909, the first in the world. A few years later, when this poem was written, airplanes were still a new and striking phenomenon. The design of Port Aviation was clean and ultra-functional (“simple like the hangars at Port Aviation”).

Pope Pius X: In May 1911 Pius X blessed André Beaumont, the pilot who had won an air race from Port Aviation to Rome. The June 18, 1911, cover of the French illustrated Sunday supplement Le Petit Journal carried a full-page color image of the pope watching Beaumont’s airplane fly over St. Peter’s Basilica, an image that Apollinaire might well have seen. Francis J. Carmody makes a case for Apollinaire’s having been influenced by Marinetti’s Le Monoplan du pape: roman politique en vers libres (1912).

street whose name I have forgotten: According to André Durand, the rue Guersant.

Your mother dresses you in blue and white only: Apollinaire’s mother often dressed him and his little brother, Albert, in blue and white, colors associated with the Virgin Mary. (See the note on “Prayer.”)

René Dalize: Dalize (1879–1917) and Apollinaire had been schoolmates in Monaco.