Alcools

Guillaume Apollinaire

What is there to review about Alcools itself? It's Guillaume Apollinaire. It was published ninety years ago. It's one of the documents Tristan Tzara was reading obsessively while forming the dada movement, and thus was also a heavy influence on surrealism, and between the two was an influence on most modern writing. It contains some of Apollinaire's best-known poems. If you haven't read it yet, what are you waiting for? It's a literary classic, and one that should be in every home.

What I'm reviewing here is Donald Revell's new translation of Alcools. I hadn't got the book out thinking that; I was planning to use this as a platform to mouth the same old words about the greatness of Apollinaire and how you should have all read him already, in high school if not before, and how horrible it is that our educational system doesn't teach the man. But then I read Revell's (thankfully brief; I hate fifty-page introductions to books of poetry in translation) intro to this, and I realized that at least writing, if not reading, this review would be more interesting than usual. For Revell talks about the poetic license he took with the original text in order to preserve the spirit of Guillaume Apollinaire, rather than be slavish to the original words.

For the most part, it works pretty well. Revell, after all, is a fantastic poet in his own right, and you can trust his judgment as to what sounds good and what doesn't. Those who know French (or even a smattering of French, or those capable of easily recognizing cognates) will be able to check the original text, on the facing page, and see differences pretty readily. One wonders whether the perceived strengths and weaknesses in this translation (as one must wonder with all translations) have more to do with the original translations of these poems a reader has read than with the original (because it's very rare to find a poem that translates literally and still sounds poetic in the new language). I cut my teeth on Apollinaire with the translations in The Poetry of Surrealism (mostly by Michael Hamburger, with a few contributions by other translators), and I've always thought of those as the definitive translations of the Apollinaire poems included in both volumes. "Zone," for example, sounds completely different in the two books; it keeps the same spirit, of course, but other things (the pace, specifically) come off completely differently.

In the end, it most likely comes down to the reader. For the newcomer to Apollinaire, you may get more enjoyment out of this book than the seasoned reader. Yet the seasoned reader will find a good deal of enjoyment here as well, and possibly much food for thought on the nature of translation, as well.