Apollinaire. The god of our youth

With the seal of Antítese, a small and intermittent publisher whose signal explodes over the waters in punctual and decisive reflections, comes to us an isolated translation of Álcoois (1913), a precursor work of so many of the movements that defined the avant-garde period of a century ago, and which established Apollinaire at the center of the vital constellation centered in Paris.

If a beginning is worth anything, so sudden, more than the crack of a gun being fired, that noise that announces a terrifying stampede, few books of verse, even among those that inaugurated modernism with such fabulous fanfare, will have offered us such a momentous start as Guillaume Apollinaire did in Álcoois: “In the end you are tired of this ancient world// Shepherdess, oh Eiffel Tower, the flock of bridges bleats this morning// You are tired of living in Greek and Roman antiquity// Even here the automobiles seem to be ancient/ Only religion has remained brand new, religion/ Has remained simple like the hangars of Port-Aviation// In Europe you are the only one who is not ancient, oh Christianity/ The most modern European is you, Pope Pius X/ And you who watch the windows, shame prevents you/ From entering a church and confessing there this morning/ You read the brochures, the catalogs, the posters that sing aloud/ Here's poetry this morning, and for prose there are the newspapers/ There are 25-cent issues full of detective stories/ portraits of important men and thousands of different headlines"... There's what most resembles the tolling of a bell that suddenly cracks the tower and comes crashing down, hurtling into the streets, that irascible bell that, to the poet's ear, instead of chiming, sounds more like a bark. Instead of sumptuous images, of a magnificent announcement, we are "in the decline of beauty," but everywhere one feels the throb of a new life, full of unbridled fervor, needing no punctuation, vibrating with indecorous rhythms and motifs, a wave that swallows everything and survives in insomnia and anguish, radiating with its strange smile in a "painting hanging in a dark museum" that the poet visits to look at it closely, with a fascination that cannot be freed from a certain dose of recrimination. With all that impetus, Apollinaire crafted a poem from which one could watch the world pass by, as Llansol noted. True to the start, the rhythm opens, pushing diastole to its limit, and from there, captures unexpected syncopations. This is difficult to convey in Portuguese if we cling to the literal, more fragile meaning, without seeking the instability of its variations, echoes of the night, which mimic the very helplessness of a time of great exoduses in Europe... "You observe with eyes full of tears these poor emigrants / They believe in God, they pray, the women breastfeed children / They fill the atrium of Saint-Lazare station with their odor." There is a forced awareness of being faced with the flagrant characteristics of such exposed and delicate existences. He would traverse the symbolism that left its mark on his early poems, which today reek of antiquarianism. But he would later boast of being a herald of the new, as Roger Allard pointed out. He preserved his soul as an antiquarian and collector. If so many of his verses still seem fresh today, it is due to this rare combination of such disparate elements: a bold music, a gaze that lingers on everything that tore him apart, yet without ceasing to seek in new things a reminder of the past, enjoying their distant concordances, unexpected and diffuse rhymes. In Allard's view, he was neither given to a sense of fashion, nor were truly modern objects captivating him, but those graceful and baroque analogies reveal how, at such a keen level, he grasped the anachronistic aspects of things and beings. How everything transforms, yet life never entirely frees itself from its vices. "This taste for literary and aesthetic bric-a-brac was often criticized. In truth, he knew how to ennoble it and harmonize it with the nostalgia that was the essence of his lyricism. Nostalgia for the past and the future, nostalgia for vanished or ignored landscapes; Alcools's most beautiful verses were born of this dual anguish: that of the exiles, of the emigrants, of all the exiled, of all those uprooted from time and space," the art critic adds.

This book, published in 1913, immerses us in the atmosphere of the years preceding World War I, in the mystifications of an exalted youth, then seized by an artistic daring that allowed him to break free from conventions, explore form, and seek inspiration in experimental advances in painting and other fields. Thus, we encounter this poet who celebrated in his verse the fusion of science and metaphysics; who, in his Calligrammes , found images for a new poetry in airplanes, submarine cables, bombs, the telephone, and the phonograph; who superimposed images in sudden and illogical juxtapositions, thus producing that effect of "simultaneity," capturing the real and confusing flow of sensory perceptions. After his death in 1918, André Breton saw him as the "re-inventor" of poetry and saw in the apparent disorder of his texts the defining feature of modern poetry in France. It was he who coined the term "surrealist," to which he gave a distinct meaning from that later adopted by the unconscious-hunting pack led by Breton. For Apollinaire, "surrealist" is the form that reaches the essential truth of things, expressible only by transcending naturalism and the optical illusion with which it envelopes reality. As Llansol recalls, he asked himself "how to make beauty a combatant," emerge from it alive, break with a discourse that moves in one direction, arrange the voices, the debate and the emotion, the doubt, accounting for those reliefs and angles that can only be suggested. This is so that the poem becomes a process of inquiry, with its movement of passage, and the poet becomes that being who learns the most appropriate tone to live his life. Essentially, a superb reader. It fell to him to rid himself of the sublime not only by the transfusion of new blood that would be fulfilled in an aesthetic that challenged taste, but also by abandoning metrical rigors, giving impetus to a vaster circulatory network, so much so that Álcoois's poems sounded crude, unbridled, offending the ear that then needed the cadences and rhythm of that upright 19th-century lyricism. Even some of his friends did not spare him, and that poetry was mercilessly savaged, as Aníbal Fernandes notes, "taken as banal prose cut into verses by Paul Léautaud and Georges Duhamel." But even then, others were struck by this outrage. Besides Breton, Cendrars, Cocteau, Reverdy, Aragon, and Soupault saw how this promised an overflow of genres, freeing syntax and measure between steps, giving verse room to explore irregularity, giving it some chance to catch up with prose, which then dominated all assaults, while simultaneously shaking off once and for all the torpor of symbolism and the ashes of decadence. One would have to go back to the Greeks and Romans, to that antiquity that, without imagining how it would be dissected, to extract from it the models and measures for the following centuries, or even to a criminal like François Villon, to find examples that would dilute the intrepidity and level of outrage that Apollinaire offered. Even Léuataud, who had initially been exasperated by that register, later spoke wonders of this strange and musical poetry, “at once barbaric and refined, equivocal and penetrating like the song of nostalgic bohemians, and which also makes one think of those women’s voices which a slight break in tone makes even more delightful.”

Let us then serve up some verses that justify this enthusiasm: “Milky Way, oh luminous sister/ Of the white streams of Canaan/ And of the white bodies of lovers/ Dead swimmers we will follow in eagerness/ Your course towards other nebulae// The demons of chance, according to/ The song of the firmament, lead us/ With their violins’ muffled sounds/ Make our human race dance/ On the backward slope// Impenetrable destinies, destinies/ Kings shaken by madness/ And those shivering stars/ Of false women in your beds/ In the deserts that history oppresses (…)”

Here, while editions of his work are not rare, with two poetry anthologies having been published, a separate edition of this book was missing, as it is his first collection, and the one that brings together the poems with which he sought to take French poetry “to the frontiers of the unlimited and the future”. Diogo Paiva's translation is particularly careful in conveying semantic vigor, fully capturing the brilliance of the images, which are stirring yet vivid and unexpected. While the Portuguese punishes sonority and rhythm, and there are so many half-erased verses, we occasionally sense the effect of a long necklace of stones plucked from the depths of dreams. It is well known that Apollinaire took great care in the way the verses sounded, managing to overcome the resistance they provoked by reading them simply, "with a voice without ornamentation but which cast a spell on every verse, on every word," as Louise Faure-Favier recalls in Souvenirs sur Apollinaire. "And it was a new harmony that began by surprising us and then fixed itself in our memory." In this regard, Llansol offered a rhythmically more exuberant translation in "Mais Novembro do que Setembro," while Jorge Sousa Braga, in "O Século das Nuvens," defended himself with a fairly narrow selection of those poems that suffer least from the transfer from one language to another. Diogo Paiva polishes the arsenal to preserve the imagery, and if the prosodically the result is not always stimulating, at least the language seems bristling; there is a voluptuousness in the choice of terms, a dry vigor in the diction that makes everything crystal clear, as if reflected in the water. "At the edge of a lake/ We amused ourselves by ricocheting/ With smooth pebbles/ On the water that barely danced// Boats were tied/ To a pontoon/ We untied them/ After which the troupe embarked/ And some of the dead rowed/ With as much vigor as the living."

This last image serves well to hold us in that wonder that poetry should provoke, as it compels the living to resume the conversation, to seek in the memory of the dead those rare vices that bring to language other levels of meaning, a tension as strong as those invisible chains that leave us captive, struggling not to lose our footing. Life got in the way of this poet, the most unusual episodes happened to her, she died of the Spanish flu, in 1918, at just 38 years old, this after during the war – in which he enlisted as a volunteer, being sent to the front, in 1915, rising from brigadier in a short time to second sergeant –, having been hit by a German grenade shrapnel in the head, at a time when she wanted to sit among the trees of a Berry-au-Bac forest to read the latest issue of the Mercure de France, and after being trepanned and returning to Montmartre, and to her work as a writer, she was still forced to return to the Villa Molière hospital, this time to be treated for pulmonary congestion. And it is this poet who, incapable of leading the life of an ordinary man, became a bohemian at his own expense and suffered badly, living in low-ceilinged attics in that Parisian neighborhood, someone who, despite his prodigious appetite, given to gargantuan meals, spent long periods poorly fed by work as a journalist, as a "black" writer for others lacking the talent to illuminate their prose, as Aníbal Fernandes points out. This poet accumulated ruinous loves, and these were only not tragic because he possessed an instinct that led him to cure each madness with some new misfortune, then having the talent to transfigure them through writing, never forgetting that he would only create something memorable if he knew how to live up to a world that now imposed itself in such a way that from now on art would be nothing more than something that would fall apart if it could not contain its movement: “One day / One day I was waiting for myself / I thought, Guillaume, it is time for you to come / So that you may finally know who I am / I who know others / I know them by the five senses and a few others / It is enough for me to see their feet to be able to remake these people by the thousands / To see their frightened feet, a single hair on their head / To see their tongues when I feel like playing doctor / Or their children when I feel like playing prophet / The ships of the shipowners, the pen of my brothers / The coin of the blind, the hands of the mute / Or still because of the vocabulary and not the writing/ A letter written for those who are over twenty/ It is enough for me to smell their churches/ the smell of laughter in their cities/ The perfume of the flowers in the public gardens (…) The procession passed and I looked for my body in it/ All those who came along and were not myself/ Took away one by one the pieces of myself/ They built me little by little as a tower is built/ The people piled up and I myself appeared/ Formed by all the bodies and all human things// Past times Deceased The gods who formed me/ I live only passing by as you passed by/ and diverting my eyes from that future void/ Within myself I see the past increase everything”.

It was this poet who, two years before publishing this book, just as his literary reputation was beginning to take hold, suddenly found himself embroiled in a scandal that reached absurd proportions, even ending up in prison, allegedly for having stolen Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa from the walls of the Louvre. And there are several poems in this collection that recount the terror of those five days of imprisonment in the Santé, after being considered an accomplice of Géry Piéret, a delinquent whom Apollinaire welcomed into his home and whom he had made his intermittent secretary. He was attracted by his amoral mythomaniac side, even using him as the model for one of the characters in the short story collection *The Heresiarch & Co.*. There we find Baron D'Ormesan, a sort of adventurer, when Piéret, despite the gratifying company, was nothing more than a thief who had the impulse to slip some Phoenician statuettes under his coat in the Louvre before going to chat with the security guard who was supposed to be guarding them. And, if he succeeded, he managed to get some peace of mind, heading straight to Apollinaire's house. Unfortunately, this theft coincided with another that would make one of Da Vinci's paintings the first work of art that comes to mind when one thinks of art. When the scene was described to him, Apollinaire began to laugh, but soon realized the predicament they were in and showered Piéret with insults. Piéret scraped off to Marseilles, and the poet was left with the statuettes, trying to find a way to make amends. On August 23, 1911, the Paris-Journal revealed that the Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre. A reward was offered for the painting's return. Shortly thereafter, the newspaper received a letter from a young man proposing to return, not the Mona Lisa, but the Phoenician statuettes he had stolen from the museum. Another headline read: "An edifying story—our museum as a loot storehouse for unscrupulous individuals." The thief was discovered to be Apollinaire's secretary. What's more, he had already stolen two other statuettes on a previous occasion. Apollinaire had received them and given them to Picasso, who still kept them. (And the fact is, if we look at Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , we'll see that the ears of the two central figures are inspired by those of these stolen statuettes.) Threatened with public exposure, Picasso and Apollinaire considered throwing them into the Seine, but ended up depositing them in the offices of the Paris-Journal. Apollinaire was arrested. Brought before the judge, he was unable to dispel the incriminating appearances, and was only later released following a written testimony by Piéret, clearing him of any responsibility, and a petition signed by a number of intellectuals, many of whom came to meet him and acclaim him as a hero upon his departure. The truth is that the whole episode weighed heavily on him—his photograph, handcuffed, had been published in the newspapers. Even worse was Picasso's betrayal. Summoned to the prison to confront him, Picasso denied knowing him. This time in prison would yield a series of six poems. Here is the first: “Before entering my cell/ I was forced to get naked/ And what a sinister voice howls/ Guillaume, what have you become?// Lazarus entering the tomb/ Instead of leaving as he did/ Goodbye, goodbye, singing round/ Oh my years, oh girls.”

According to some, it was his dubious origins that led him to make intermittent efforts to achieve a respectable profile. Born in Rome on August 26, 1880, Wilhelm Alexander Apollinarius de Kostrowitzky was registered by his mother as the son of an unknown father, as was his brother Albert, two years younger. They were the sons of an Italian officer, as Madame de Kostrowitzky later confessed to the examining magistrate during the famous Mona Lisa case. Bearing the respectable name of Francesco Luigi d'Aspromont, this lovestruck man reportedly traded Polish conquest for others, freeing himself from family obligations. Guillaume and his brother were enrolled at the College of Saint Charles in Monaco, where they were educated by nuns. There, he developed a taste for literature, his ambition at that time being to write a novel in the style of Jules Verne. In 1891, he won seven prizes and five honorable mentions at the awards ceremony presided over by the Bishop of Monaco. The school then closed, and they began commuting daily by train along the Côte d'Azur to the Stanislas school in Cannes. In February 1897, Guillaume transferred to the Nice lycée. By this time, he had begun reading poets like Henri de Régnier and Mallarmé, and the prose of Rémy de Gourmont. He amassed a repertoire of bizarre anecdotes and delved into obscure texts, cultivating an interest in esoteric matters, knowing episodes from Gothic mythology by heart, with which he impressed his classmates. He also began compiling a bestiary of fabulous creatures that would later populate his poems, in addition to collecting technical details about airplanes and submarines. After moving to Paris in 1899, his mother forced him to earn his living. He drifted for a time, passing through Stavelot, Belgium, and London before returning to Paris. He worked his way up the literary ladder, and under the pseudonym Guillaume Apollinaire, he debuted in the Grande Revue with two poems and a few articles. He frequented literary circles, contributed to the Revue Blanche, and even realized the dream of most young writers by creating his own literary magazine, Le Feast of Esope. In 1907, before he had even made his debut as a poet, he was encouraged to write two anonymous novels, one erotic, the other pornographic: The Adventures of a Young Don Juan and The Eleven Thousand Verges . If the first was described as "limpidly perverse, perfumed with adolescent effluvia," the second was described by Francis Steegmuller as a "witty parody of a holocaust in the style of the Marquis de Sade"... Picasso even proclaimed it Apollinaire's masterpiece. During these years, in addition to poetry and fiction, he maintained a regular work as an art critic, writing about exhibitions and painters in the journal L'Intransigeant . While he was far from an inspired critic, this led him to zigzag through the studios of Montmartre, introducing artists to one another, writing manifestos, and this at a time of intense cross-pollination between the arts, with painters insisting that it was painting that decisively influenced poetry, not the other way around. Thus, we are confronted with the verses “With ivy, virgin vines and rosebushes/ The Rhine wind shakes the vines on the bank/ And the speaking reeds and the bare flowers of the vines,” and the poet appears engulfed by night and sea, the eyes of sharks… “Until dawn we eagerly spied from afar/ Corpses of days corroded by the stars/ Amidst the noise of the waves and the final oaths.” In another poem, Apollinaire proclaims: “Light is my mother, oh bloody light/ The clouds flowed like a menstrual flow.” And thus we are met by the cry of that band that gathered in the bars in front of the Gare Saint-Lazare… “Do you remember the long orphanage of the stations/ We crossed cities that operated all day/ And at night vomited the sun of the days/ Oh sailors, oh somber women, and you, my companions/ Remember.” And in another poem: “We met in a cursed cellar/ In the days of our youth/ Both smoking and poorly dressed, waiting for the dawn/ In love, in love with the same words whose meaning will have to be altered/ Deluded, deluded, poor things, and not yet knowing how to laugh/ The table and the two glasses became a dying man who gave us Orpheus’s last look/ The glasses fell and shattered/ And we learned to laugh/ Then we set out, pilgrims of perdition/ Through the streets, through the regions, through reason.” And it was here that we saw the great water carriers pass, that we were bitten by “that chattering insect, oh barbarian poet,” born in these pages the impetus of those who left, who went away, in search of the Rose of the World. Here, this frantic existential balance emerged, this delicious and eager perception of the world and its diversity. Poetry opened itself to the complex and fascinating narrative network, allowing verses, as in a novel, to take shape, like a murmur, where the characters' voices converge, united and distinct, as in a chorus. It was a moment when, consumed by advances and retreats, in a mimesis of the fluctuation of life, encompassing a good dose of fabled parentheses, working from sudden sensations or the condensation of diverse times, giving strength to this opaque dimension, at times almost obscured and unreal, poetry allowed itself an intense, acute perception of reality, of its multiple layers, without being restricted. It was an unpredictable flow, which, rather than a sense of coherence, preferred to explore the sensuality of the absolute. And so, in a moment when he retreats and allows himself to be imbued with a melancholic conciseness, Apollinaire laments the loss of all that thrill, that rapturous charm, and asks himself “Where are those heads I had/ Where is the God of my youth”?