Guillaume ApollinaireRessenyes

Zoloé, Justine, Juliette, la Philosophie dans le boudoir, les Crimes de l'Amour, Aline et Valcour : pages choisies comprenant des morceaux inédits et des lettres publiées pour la première fois, tirées des Archives de la Comédie française.
Introduction, essai bibliographique et notes par Guillaume Apollinaire.
Ouvrage orné de huit illustrations hors texte.

I purchased this book for the collection value. I took a chance and read it, knowing what I was getting into (any of the Obelisk and Olympia Press books are generally the same genre) but this one really breached the limits of nasty. Basically, if you're a freak, you might like it.

8475910076

Es una fantasía desmadrada, una ensoñación sadomasoquista sin límites, llena de una humor macabro y violento, morbosamente recomendable para lectores faltos de seriedad.

Desde su aparición en la «Bibliothèque des Curieuxm» en 1913, La Roma de los Borgia ha sido calificada indistintamente de blasfema, pornográfica, antirreligiosa, etc. Sin embargo, la obra de Apollinaire intenta reflejar a modo de fresco la atmósfera del crimen, crueldad y terror de una época que llegó al máximo grado de depravación con la familia Borgia, cuyos miembros más destacados fueron el papa libertino Alejandro, entregado a los placeres más abyectos en el Vaticano, el asesino y verdugo César Borgia y la hermosa envenenadora Lucrecia.

Best Apollinaire edition that you could read in Romanian. Several translators put a lot of effort into translating not just the already well-known Alcools, but also most of his other texts, including even a few Calligrammes. Brilliant poet, what a pity this edition has not been republsihed ever since... if you see it, grab it!

paperback

El Heresiarca y Cía. recoge el clima funambulesco, vibrante y abigarrado de los lugares y las gentes con los que Apollinaire tuvo que convivir. Un pintoresco panorama de una humanidad que aún puede reír, tener sueños y esperanzas, preocuparse por los pequeños problemas de la sagrada vida cotidiana, beber a la salud de la amada o los amigos, enamorarse locamente y cantar locamente a la belleza.

4/25/22

I'm sure I was thrilled to be reading an erotica bk by a great French poet associated w/ Surrealism.. but, then, it just seemed like disappointingly regular porn. I was hoping for something a bit more bizarre. I was probably too young & inexperienced to appreciate the humor.

La sonrisa vertical

Ce qui commence bien gentiment finit dans une débauche de sexe, de foutre et de jouissances.

Avec des fluides, du goût, des odeurs, du poil, du ferme et du gras.

Dispensable, même s’il m’a parfois tiré un sourire au coin d’une page

1a edizione

Guillaume Apollinaire who coined the term "Surrealism" and influenced absurdist writer Alfred Jarry makes merry here of Orpheus's inclination towards wooing animals and other living creatures - although Sirens are included amongst the bestiary, which Orpheus makes analogous to his own 'curse' of continuous song. The poems are mostly four or five lined poems about various animals and insects such as the Fly, Elephant, Ox, Crayfish, Owl, Ibis et cetera, and through-out several observational lyricisms by Orpheus admiring the lousy life around him. Rather than read too much into each poem I settled back and enjoyed the nuances of Apollinaire's text, and took to them all in the spirit of Guillaume's poem on the Peacock who in dragging plumage on the grass, showing its beauty, is also baring its arse.

> Bibliographie indicative sur la pensée de sa mort
Toffanello, J. & Bergeron, P. (2007). Bibliographie indicative sur la pensée de sa mort. Frontières, 19 (2), 82–83… ; (en ligne),
URL : https://doi.org/10.7202/017512ar

"There is only one way today of saving our unfortunate and holy Russia, and that is through pederasty...".

Who says edification can't be entertaining? In this slim volume we have nothing less than a richly erudite compendium of the amatory culture of the western world - to be cherished and passed on in the family, alongside your Bibles, Sades and Beardsleys.

A word to those who would be wise: have handy your OED and a box of tissues (or a sock, or, ideally, a still warm, well-worn satin lederhosen).½

Prenez des lettres, des mots, des phrases. Disposez-les sur une feuille blanche de façon que les phrases, les mots, les lettres composent des figures. Plissez les yeux, et apparaissent une montre, une cravate, un jet d'eau. Associés l'un à l'autre, le dessin et l'écriture créent une forme neuve et intrigante. Et si la guerre de 14-18 accable le monde, dans le même temps, l'esprit nouveau surgit et souffle sur la poésie avec enthousiasme. Le poète-soldat Guillaume Apollinaire, de la pointe de sa plume-pinceau, ouvre des horizons : du jamais vu et du jamais lu.

L'accompagnement pédagogique fait l'historique du calligramme, depuis les idéogrammes chinois jusqu'à la poésie contemporaine, en passant par les Djinns de Victor Hugo. Privilégiant cette forme singulière, le commentaire propose de nombreux exercices d'écriture, invitant à réinterpréter les poèmes d'Apollinaire. Par ailleurs, le contexte historique est précisément mis en relation avec la construction du recueil.

OUT

« Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine »

> Ces vers du "Pont Mirabeau", comme ceux de "La Chanson du mal-aimé" ou de "Zone", tous issus du recueil Alcools ont fait la fortune littéraire d'Apollinaire, et un grand classique de la poésie. Toutefois, ce classicisme ne doit pas faire oublier qu'en son temps ce recueil constitua une véritable révolution poétique : après Rimbaud, Apollinaire transforme toutes les règles d'un lyrisme devenu vieillot à son goût. Il faut pouvoir chanter le monde, jusque dans sa réalité la plus crue, mais aussi jusque dans ses progrès les plus récents : la tour Eiffel ("Zone") côtoiera donc les cellules de la prison de la Santé ("À la Santé"). Sur ce modèle se succéderont alors la mort, la fuite du temps et surtout l'amour : tantôt lumineux, tantôt obscur, mais toujours au centre de ces ivresses poétiques.
Avec Alcools, Apollinaire deviendra le modèle de tous les poètes à venir, et en particulier des surréalistes.
--Karla Manuele, Amazon.fr

> Par Adrian (Laculturegenerale.com) : Les 150 classiques de la littérature française qu’il faut avoir lus !
07/05/2017 - L’esthétique totalement nouvelle des poèmes d’Apollinaire traduit une ambition : que la poésie s’empare du monde moderne. Mais Alcools est aussi le recueil d’un « mal-aimé »…

Cyril Connolly incluiu este livro entre os '100 Livros-chave do Movimento Modernista' e o jornal Le Monde entre os '100 Livros do Seculo XX'. Eles estavam absolutamente certos. Logo no primeiro poema,"Zone", o autor francês, romano de nascimento, um patriota cuja conturbada biografia inclui uma participação na Primeira Guerra Mundial como soldado voluntário, elimina a pontuação a fim de para criar um ritmo nervoso e, à futurista, louvar a modernidade emergente.½

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), poet par excellence of the early 20th century Parisian literary world, inventor of the word "surrealism," champion of cubism and other innovative forms of modern art, wrote The Poet Assassinated in a hospital bed recovering from shrapnel wounds inflicted during World War One.

Reading this novella is like entering a dream world of a De Chirico cityscape or the montage of Max Ernst – and every couple of paragraphs the surreal panorama shifts – one of the most unique reading experiences one can encounter. With Apollinaire we have truly transitioned from the naturalism of Zola and the decadence of Huysmans into the Eiffel Tower world of modernity. Hello Picasso, hello Cubism, hello Dali Surrealism.

Apollinaire’s novella is comprised of 18 micro-chapters, all with one-word titles, such as Name, Nobility, Pedagogy, Poetry, Love, Fashion – like 18 pieces of torn paper, dropped randomly but not too randomly, fluttering down on a blank mat. In order to have a more intimate feel for the tone of this bizarre, whimsical work, please view Entr’acte, a short French 1924 black-and-white film by René Clair (easily located on YouTube) and featuring three well-known surrealist artists: Francis Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

How powerful is your imagination? The author provides the mythic outline of the life of our main character, the god-like, world conquering poet Croniamanta, a man born in a year where his birth was saluted with an erection – the Eiffel Tower (sexual image directly from the text) but Apollinaire invites us to fill in the blanks and create our own version of Croniamanta. After all, even the place of his birth is claimed by no less than 127 towns and 7 countries!

Respecting that mythic outline we are given the following: Croniamanta’s mother died in childbirth and his father put a gun to his head after losing a fortune in a Monaco casino. He was raised by a well-learned man urging him to love all of nature and schooling him in Greek and Latin, the French of Racine, the English of Shakespeare and the Italian of Petrarch. Also, he was introduced to fencing and horsemanship, so by age 15 Croniamanta imagined himself as both knight and lover. At 21, poems in hand and filled with a love of literature, Croniamanta sets off for Paris where his eyes devoured everything and he eventually smashed eternity to pieces.

The great poet proclaims he will never write a poem again that is not free of all shackles, even the shackles of language. Croniamanta then becomes famous but enemies of poetry are on the rise. At one point a prophet tells him the earth can no longer stand its contact with poets. This is born out with the discovery that the United States has started electrocuting people who claim poetry as a profession. To add to this horror, Germany forbids all poets from going outdoors and four countries -- France, Italy, Spain, Portugal -- put all poets in jail. In Paris mobs are reported to have strangled poets in public.

Standing tall before an angry crowd, Croniamanta denounces all haters of poets as swine and murderers. But an angry crowd is an angry crowd; they turn on Croniamanta and kill him. In the aftermath a sculptor creates a monument to the great poet – a hole with reinforced concrete, the void in the ground has the shape of Croniamanta; the hole is filled but filled in a unique way: the hole is filled with Croniamanta’s phantom.

This brief sketch is like describing Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory as a number of flaccid watches out in the desert. This is surrealism; this is the realm of dreams; this is where the umbrella meets the sewing machine on the operating table; this is a novella by Guillaume Apollinaire. One is obliged to enter the work itself with fresh, open imagination.

Een eigenzinnige keuze en prachtige vertaling: niet alleen het eerder vertaalde Zone; ook sommige andere gedichten werden wel eerder vertaald. maar veel 'typografische' poëzie, en ook een consequent modernistische keuze.
Hier volgt de nominatie voor de Filter Vertaalprijs 2018:
Eigenlijk is het, gezien de grote invloed van het werk van Apollinaire op andere dichters en kunstenaars, verbazingwekkend dat een heel aantal van deze gedichten nu pas voor het eerst in Nederlandse vertaling verschijnt. Ja, in 2007 verscheen er ook al een selectie in de reeks ‘De mooiste van…’, vertaald door Jan Pieter van der Sterre, maar op de een of andere manier oogden de gedichten in die bundeling toch tamelijk klassiek en daardoor niet overal in overeenstemming met de poëzieopvattingen van de dichter zelf, die in zijn moderne gedichten de grenzen van het mogelijke opzoekt.
Die rijkdom, evenals de sprekende kracht van de beeldgedichten, komen in Coumans’ vertaling wel goed uit de verf. Ze tóónt in welke opzichten deze gedichten vernieuwend waren. Niet door erover te vertellen, maar door het de lezer te laten beleven in goedlopende, levenslustige zinnen.
Dat ze de opgewonden en uitgelaten sfeer rondom ‘de moderne tijd’ en het stadsleven met zijn nieuwe technologieën weet te vangen, is een hele kunst – de lezer bevindt zich immers in een nóg modernere tijd. En toch fonkelen deze gedichten, zo’n honderd jaar later, bijna als nieuw.
Het eerste gedicht, Zone, valt meteen met de deur in huis: ‘Ten slotte ben je deze ouderwetse wereld beu’. De vertaalster koos ervoor dit rijmende gedicht te vertalen met de focus op het ritme, het zingende karakter ervan. Daardoor moet het (eind)rijm weliswaar soms wijken, maar het komt de natuurlijkheid en de stuwende kracht van de woorden absoluut ten goede. Overtuigend en geslaagd, vanaf de eerste bladzijde.
Ook haar vertaling van de beeldgedichten of ‘lyrische ideogrammen’ is fijnzinnig en precies. In Oceaan-brief, bijvoorbeeld, met de zichtbare zonnen en golven en het knerpen van de nieuwe schoenen van de dichter. Of in Reis (‘Waar heen gaat deze trein die sterft in de verte’), waar de c in het woord ‘nacht’ een maan is tussen de losse letters die de sterren uithangen. Of in Watten in de oren:

Zoveel explosies hier VITAAL
Schrijf een woord als je durft
(…)
OMegafoon

Het fascinerende is dat Apollinaire surrealisme en een voorliefde voor de avant-garde combineerde met herhaaldelijk terugkerende en toch weer afgestoten vormvaste kenmerken. Traditie en vernieuwing gaan soms arm in arm, omdat de een natuurlijk ook niet zonder de ander kan. De bijzondere combinatie van deze verschillende registers zorgt bij de lezer voor een geprikkelde verbeelding: waar de taal met al zijn raadselen aan het werk is, zijn associaties vrij. Uit Er is:

‘Er zijn zes kabelballonnen in de lucht en als de nacht valt lijken het wel maden waaruit sterren werden geboren
(…)
Er is een infanterist die blind van het gifgas voorbijloopt
(…)
Er zijn rivieren die niet meer terug zullen stromen
Er is de liefde die me zachtjes betovert’

Prachtig is ook de dageraad in Winterdageraad, die ‘haast beschaamd’ is ‘moeder te zijn / van een doodgeboren zon’.
Het raam gaat open als een sinaasappel sluit af met het gedicht ‘Overpeinzing’ dat zacht zingend een einde aankondigt:

Deze nacht is zo mooi met zijn koerende kogels
Een rivier van granaten stroomt boven ons hoofd
Soms licht de nacht even op door een ontploffing
Als een bloem die zich opent en dan weer verdwijnt
De aarde weeklaagt en als een getijde
Stijgt de zingende zee in mijn schuilplaats van krijt

In alles lijkt deze bundel te doen en te zijn wat Apollinaire van zijn gedichten wilde: vitaliteit voorop, een schat aan beelden en vormen, met ruimte voor compositie en experiment. Oftewel: ‘Duizend ongrijpbare fantasieën / Die werkelijkheid moeten worden’.

J’ai accroché de manière extrêmement non homogène à ce recueil de poèmes. Certains m’ont laissée complètement indifférente, a priori les plus perchés/décousus ; d’autres m’ont intéressée mais sans plus – les dits calligrammes, justement, qui sont intéressants sur le principe, mais pas forcément émouvants poétiquement parlant ; d’autres, enfin, m’ont prise à la gorge... Cette dernière catégorie abordant principalement le thème de la guerre... Appollinaire en parle avec un mélange assez détonant de recul, d’ironie, de froideur, de violence, aussi. En y mêlant l’amour, en comparant parfois amour et guerre, avec une petite touche esthétique de-ci de-là, c’en est parfois décoiffant.
On l’aura compris, cette troisième catégorie ne m’a pas laissée indifférente. Violent et chouette.

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), poet par excellence of the early 20th century Parisian literary world, inventor of the word "surrealism," champion of cubism and other innovative forms of modern art, wrote The Poet Assassinated in a hospital bed recovering from shrapnel wounds inflicted during World War One.

Reading this novella is like entering a dream world of a De Chirico cityscape or the montage of Max Ernst – and every couple of paragraphs the surreal panorama shifts – one of the most unique reading experiences one can encounter. With Apollinaire we have truly transitioned from the naturalism of Zola and the decadence of Huysmans into the Eiffel Tower world of modernity. Hello Picasso, hello Cubism, hello Dali Surrealism.

Apollinaire’s novella is comprised of 18 micro-chapters, all with one-word titles, such as Name, Nobility, Pedagogy, Poetry, Love, Fashion – like 18 pieces of torn paper, dropped randomly but not too randomly, fluttering down on a blank mat. In order to have a more intimate feel for the tone of this bizarre, whimsical work, please view Entr’acte, a short French 1924 black-and-white film by René Clair (easily located on YouTube) and featuring three well-known surrealist artists: Francis Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

How powerful is your imagination? The author provides the mythic outline of the life of our main character, the god-like, world conquering poet Croniamanta, a man born in a year where his birth was saluted with an erection – the Eiffel Tower (sexual image directly from the text) but Apollinaire invites us to fill in the blanks and create our own version of Croniamanta. After all, even the place of his birth is claimed by no less than 127 towns and 7 countries!

Respecting that mythic outline we are given the following: Croniamanta’s mother died in childbirth and his father put a gun to his head after losing a fortune in a Monaco casino. He was raised by a well-learned man urging him to love all of nature and schooling him in Greek and Latin, the French of Racine, the English of Shakespeare and the Italian of Petrarch. Also, he was introduced to fencing and horsemanship, so by age 15 Croniamanta imagined himself as both knight and lover. At 21, poems in hand and filled with a love of literature, Croniamanta sets off for Paris where his eyes devoured everything and he eventually smashed eternity to pieces.

The great poet proclaims he will never write a poem again that is not free of all shackles, even the shackles of language. Croniamanta then becomes famous but enemies of poetry are on the rise. At one point a prophet tells him the earth can no longer stand its contact with poets. This is born out with the discovery that the United States has started electrocuting people who claim poetry as a profession. To add to this horror, Germany forbids all poets from going outdoors and four countries -- France, Italy, Spain, Portugal -- put all poets in jail. In Paris mobs are reported to have strangled poets in public.

Standing tall before an angry crowd, Croniamanta denounces all haters of poets as swine and murderers. But an angry crowd is an angry crowd; they turn on Croniamanta and kill him. In the aftermath a sculptor creates a monument to the great poet – a hole with reinforced concrete, the void in the ground has the shape of Croniamanta; the hole is filled but filled in a unique way: the hole is filled with Croniamanta’s phantom.

This brief sketch is like describing Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory as a number of flaccid watches out in the desert. This is surrealism; this is the realm of dreams; this is where the umbrella meets the sewing machine on the operating table; this is a novella by Guillaume Apollinaire. One is obliged to enter the work itself with fresh, open imagination.

When I die I’ll come back, to fetch the moments I didn’t live by the sea: "Obra Poética" by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (Obra Poética = Poetic Oeuvre)
 
Published 2010. 
 
Quando eu morrer voltarei para buscar
Os instantes que não vivi junto do mar
(When I die I’ll come back
To fetch the moments I didn’t live by the sea)
 

 

 
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, one of the greatest poets of Portuguese Literature, 1919 – 2004 (Camoens Award). Her paternal great-grandfather was Danish, and on her mother’s side she belonged to Portuguese aristocracy.
 
I know Sophia’s poetry like I know myself.
 
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen is one of the best poets I've ever read. I wish everyone would read her one day, be it in Portuguese, German, or English. Portuguese literature from its roots is a literature of the seas (Portugal is located on the western coast of the Iberian Peninsula and plateau, that divides the inland Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean); Sophia is also a poet of the water. The sea is something that’s deeply ingrained within every Portuguese, even in the ones living in the countryside. The sea is always in our minds…
 
Read on, if you want to be blown away...