We’re living like cowboys in the Far West,” he wrote in a letter of April 7, 1915. Dating from September of that year, his poem “Festival” has a title as deliberately provocative as the epithet “charming” applied to the light from flares, or the comparison between airborne explosions and the beauty of naked breasts. Apollinaire, like other eyewitnesses, was amazed by the epic pyrotechnics of nocturnal artillery battles, but he doesn’t ignore the havoc being wrought at ground level. In “Festival,” he imagines his own magnificent epitaph, then a head suddenly droops and the air is steeped in “a terrible alcohol,” the toxic gas that seeps into many of Apollinaire’s war poems.

“The Cavalryman’s Farewell” is one of the most famous French poems of the Great War, mainly because its opening line is so often quoted alone, out of context: “Ah well! and Oh what a lovely war this is” (“Ah Dieu! que la guerre est jolie”). The word lovely (jolie), which often describes an attractive young woman, is applied here to the war, endowing the first line with a shock value that has outraged many readers. In its entirety, however, the poem crucially hinges on the disturbingly ironic, punning transition between its two quatrains, from “Ah well!” to “Farewell!,” from “Ah Dieu!” to “Adieu!” The poem moves from a cry of wonder to definitive separation, as the soldier on horseback is suddenly killed. Its trajectory is tragic.

As “The Cavalryman’s Farewell” suggests, war was often a waiting game and included long hours of not much happening. Apollinaire, like other French soldiers, used aluminum from German rockets to shape and chisel rings, which he sent to close friends (including Picasso). His war poems also capture other aspects of soldiering routine, in appropriately prosaic language. “4 O’Clock” fits that category, but the closing lines, which refer to his uniform, colored blue as a kind of camouflage, are nevertheless intentionally ambiguous: this blending with the sky, becoming invisible, disappearing, also implies the imminent possibility of being wiped out.

In “There,” which Apollinaire sent to his girlfriend Louise de Coligny, the repetitive pattern matches the rhythm of the train in which it was written, while the soldier’s keen scanning of his environment alternates with the persistent and poignant tug of nostalgia, love, and desire. There was a free military mail service and correspondence was essential to the morale of the troops, maintaining contacts with home, but also highlighting distance and separation. “At mail call / We are squeezed in tighter than on a bus,” Apollinaire wrote in an artillery poem, “The Seasons.” His pen “flows and flows” and his many letters to Lou Coligny, and to his sweetheart Madeleine Pagès, often contain both tender love poems and carnal fantasies, building in words an alternative reality that increasingly provided the poet in uniform with a privileged place of refuge from worsening material conditions.

In all these ways, and throughout the war, Apollinaire strove to save poetry from what he called the “mechanical rhetoric” of poets who “sing of battles from afar in truly stupid language.” As dispatches from the front, his war poems achieve stunning immediacy, communicating day-by-day activities, survival strategies, and emotions. He carried the cause of modernist creativity into the maelstrom and there continued his incessant explorations of form, vocabulary, and subject matter, while the dust from explosions occasionally dried the ink on the page (“It’s very handy,” he wrote).

In November 1915, Apollinaire took up a commission in the infantry and went forward into the wintry trenches. Thenceforth his letters to Madeleine Pagès describe an existence infested with lice and vermin, where parapets are built from mud and corpses, and the soldiers continually rebuild collapsing defenses, “Sysiphus with his rock.” Apollinaire’s production slowed, but his poems from that time include “Ocean of Earth,” where shells are falling, men slither in the chalky slime, a gas attack sets eyes streaming, octopus beaks peck at fragile protective goggles, hearts pound, and fearfully spurted ink forms a long and sorrowful line: “And so very many of us have become our own gravediggers” (“Et puis nous sommes tant et tant à être nos propres fossoyeurs”). In “Shadow,” sorrow at the loss of so many companions is sharpened by barely contained anger that “thousands of wounds make just one newspaper article.”

On March 17, 1916, a splinter of shrapnel pierced Apollinaire’s helmet as he sat in a trench reading a literary magazine. Evacuated to Paris, trepanned, he was left with a star-shaped scar, awarded French nationality, and decorated with the Croix de Guerre. “O cross of heavy torment,” he wrote in a calligram shaped like the medal.

Weakened by his head wound, his lungs ruined by gas, Apollinaire fell victim to the influenza pandemic and died in November 1918, two days before the Armistice, in his apartment perched high above the boulevard Saint-Germain. During the last eighteen months of his life, still in uniform, in and out of hospital, he had been astonishingly productive, writing plays, program notes, film scripts, fiction, newspaper columns, magazine articles, and essays for exhibition catalogues. He coined the word surrealism, adopted after the war by Europe’s most turbulent group of young poets and painters, and in his manifesto-lecture “The New Spirit,” he inspiringly declared, “You can be a poet in any field of activity, provided you go forward in a spirit of adventure, seeking new discoveries.” As distinctive and original as ever, he continued to compose fine poems, including “The Pretty Redhead,” a tribute to Jacqueline Kolb, whom he married in 1918, and which he used to close Calligrammes. Infused with intimations of mortality, the poem reads as a valedictory statement from a poet who has been to hell and back, who still admires the ordered writing of the classical French tradition but also requests indulgence for those who, like himself, rise up, take risks, and invent the future by opening new territories for creative and conceptual exploration.

—Peter Read

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

I BEGAN translating French poetry in high school in 1958, when I had only the slightest acquaintance with the language but was convinced that there was something in Rimbaud’s Illuminations that I could find only if I could decipher the text for myself. Since then I have translated a number of French poets, mainly Cendrars, Reverdy, Jacob, and Larbaud, but the one poet I have kept coming back to most often over the decades is Guillaume Apollinaire. I have done so for my own pleasure and with the hope, I think, that some of his magic would rub off on my own poetry.

It was Kenneth Koch, first my college professor and then my colleague and friend, whose enthusiasm for Apollinaire confirmed my hunch that this French poet was something special. By graduation (1964) I had done some rather shaky versions of Apollinaire’s poems. Kenneth urged me to apply for a Fulbright to study in France, and then he guided me through the application process. Shortly after I got to Paris (1965) I began translating Apollinaire’s novella The Poet Assassinated for my own pleasure. (Astonishingly, my translation was published a few years later by Holt, Rinehart & Winston.) In Paris I was able to gain access to a wealth of Apollinaire’s books, manuscripts, and letters that had been unavailable to me. During that Fulbright year, increasingly less insecure in the French language, I also translated more of his poems, as well as poems by his immediate forebears and his contemporaries.

A year later, back in America, I tried to keep up with the burgeoning Apollinaire scholarship, which was spearheaded by the International Association of the Friends of Guillaume Apollinaire. In Europe in 1972 I visited the then tiny Apollinaire Museum in Stavelot, Belgium. Over the next three decades my attention drifted away from reading about Apollinaire, but I continued to produce new translations and revise old ones, always for my own pleasure, though occasionally I published a few in anthologies and in little magazines.

An editor of one such magazine kept urging me to collect my translations of French poetry into a single volume, an invitation I finally declined. However, the thought led me to gather my Apollinaire translations and to consider them as a group.