I hesitate to use the word 'translation' as I would not say I have a single second language. So the 'translations' I have made of poetry from writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire are more attempts to make new, closely related poems out of the evidence of enthusiastic knowledge, a good deal of dictionary trawling and reading round the subject, and the examination of as many existing translations as I can get hold of (if any). If a poem is rhymed in the original I try to rhyme it in my version and otherwise to find formal as well as subject analogies to the work in hand. And of course I try to make the new poem seem alive in itself, even if this means admitting some defeat and allowing occasional details to be lost.
Writing versions of their work has certainly meant that these poets are among the best known to me. That is one of the great benefits of trying to translate: it brings you as close to another poet from another culture as you are likely ever to get. And it brings that culture closer, too. Apollinaire, for instance, has been my introduction to the world of modernist visual art, since he was such an enthusiast for Cubism and other new groups and ideas.
I don't think it's a coincidence – although it wasn't a conscious decision – that all the poets I have inflicted my versions on, the Roman Catullus, Apollinaire, and the Peruvian modernist César Vallejo, were all brought up with a certain 'barbarian' distance from the metropolitan centre in which each would later live and work. After so many years in London, I can't help retaining a sense of the many foreignesses, good, bad, and simply very different, that the city and England itself offers this anomalous Scot every day and from which I take so much for my poems.
Guillaume Apollinaire was born in Rome in 1880. His mother was Polish and his father an absentee. He was educated in Nice and Monte Carlo but by his early twenties, he had moved to Paris. Native distrust, his reputation as a joker, and his close association with a cosmopolitan band of avant-garde artists, may have all contributed to his wrongful arrest in 1911, under suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa. For this he served several days on remand in the sarcastically named Santé prison (it means 'Health!' or, 'Cheers!'). After some bureaucratic to-ing and fro-ing he was acquitted without trial.
A friend of Picasso, Apollinaire was an early praiser of the Cubists and the Italian Futurists. He coined the term 'surrealism' and his drama Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917), celebrated by Blaise Cendrars as the mother or father of modernist poetry, prepares a good deal of ground for the Surrealists proper. From the word go his poetry was erotic and autumnal – in love with being in love and, perhaps, with having been in love. Formally, his poetry is open to 'free verse' and includes numerous examples of proto-concrete poetry. But it shows respect for the lyric, too – Apollinaire can be championed for 'l'Ordre', for the tradition-observing formal, as well as form-remoulding modernism, 'l'Aventure'.
Though Alcools (1913) has some poems which explicitly applaud the new century's modernity and, through collage, implicitly so, too, only in his last major book, Calligrammes (1918) does the change of mood seem wholehearted. Uncomfortably for those brought up on Wilfred Owen's vision of the First World War, Apollinaire, like Wyndham Lewis, seems at first childishly excited by the spectacle of violence. Perhaps these responses should be seen as an unflinching acceptance of the implications of Marinetti's ammo-amour; as the experience, too, of one aspect of war it would be foolish to deny: the exhilaration of witnessing destruction. There might also be a suggestion, which is there in his erotic novel Les Onze Mille Verges (1907), that Apollinaire is delineating a more subtle relationship between sexual exoticism, power relations and colonial ambition. It has been argued, too, that there is a change towards a greater complexity and 'humanity' in his poetry which dates from the time he left the Artillery and moved to the Infantry, at the front of the Front. In any case, some of the poems seem to have it both ways, evoking thrill, humour, menace and tenderness. Among this kind of work is the extravagant poetry enclosed within letters he sent to his lover Madeleine Pagès. Though not published in his lifetime they are contemporary with Calligrammes (he sent poems to another lover at the same time: some were the same poems!).
In 1916 Apollinaire received two things: French nationality and a near-fatal head injury from an exploding shell. He recovered well enough to work at, of all places, the Censor's Office. In 1918 he married 'La Jolie Rousse', Jacqueline Kolb, but only months later succumbed, like so many millions with him, to a rapacious form of influenza.
These poems originally appeared in a book of versions of various French modernists, by myself and fellow Scottish poet, Donny O'Rourke. Eftirs/Afters was published by the little press Donny and I set up for the purpose, Au Quai, but which has since published other writing with a deliberately international slant.
The heiress wore a gown
Of Turkish silk
Violet
And her gold-embroidered tunic
Fashioned fae two net panels
Was caught at the shoulder
Her eyes dancing like angels
She laughed she laughed
She had a face like the colours of France
Blue eyes white teeth and red red lips
She had a face like the colours of France
Her neckline was rounded cut low
Her hair très élégante
You could see her beautiful bare arms
Will we never hear midnight ring out
The heiress in the violet-coloured robe
And the gold-embroidered tunic
With the neckline rounded cut low
Paraded her ringlets
Her golden tiara
Trailing her wee buckled shoes
She was so gorgeous
You'd not dare love her
I used to fancy atrocious women fae the spacious districts
Where every day new lives are born
Iron was their blood flame their brains
I loved I loved the folk canny with machinery
Luxury and beauty are only its froth
That woman was so beautiful
She scared me
'1909' (Alcools, 1913), trans. Richard Price
La dame avait une robe
En ottoman violine
Et sa tunique brodée d'or
Etait composée de deux panneaux
S'attachant sur l'épaule
Les yeux dansants comme Des anges
Elle riait elle riait
Elle avait UN visage aux couleurs de France
Les yeux bleus les dents blanches et les lèvres très rouges
Elle avait UN visage aux couleurs de France
Elle était décolletée en rond
Et coiffée à la Récamier
Avec de beaux bras nus
N'entendra-t-on jamais sonner minuit
La dame en robe d'ottoman violine
Et en tunique brodée d'or
Décolletée en rond
Promenait ses boucles
Son bandeau d'or
Et traînait ses petits souliers à boucles
Elle était si belle
Que tu n'aurais pas osé l'aimer
J'aimais les femmes atroces dans les quartiers énormes
O¯ naissaient chaque jour quelques êtres nouveaux
Le fer était leur sang la flamme leur cerveau
J'aimais j'aimais le peuple habile Des machines
Le luxe et la beauté NE sont que son ˇcume
Cette femme était si belle
Qu'elle me faisait peur
He finds again in his memory
The lock of chestnut hair
Do you mind beyond fidelity
Our separate destinies there
On the boulevard de la Chapelle
Pretty Montmartre all that
I she murmured remember well
Your bell your welcome mat
And dropped there a summer ending
Your lock of hair my souvenir
And fate to you so heartrending
Joins the day closing here
'La Boucle Retrouvée', (Calligrammes, 1918) trans. Richard Price
Il retrouve dans sa mémoire
La boucle de cheveux châtains
T'en souvient-il à n'y point croire
De nos deux étranges destins
Du boulevard de la Chapelle
Du joli Montmartre et d'Auteuil
Je me souviens murmure-t-elle
Du jour où j'ai franchi ton seuil
Il y tomba comme UN automne
La boucle de mon souvenir
Et notre destin qui t'étonne
Se joint au jour qui va finir
Here I am before you all a man of some intelligence
Who knows life and of death what any living man can know
Having tried the sorrows and joys of love
Having known now and again how to impose my ideas
Fluent in several tongues
Travelled not a little
Having seen battle as a gunner as a foot soldier
Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform
Having lost my dearest friends in that serious wrestling match
I know the old and the new as much as one man can know
And without fussing today about that war
Between you and me and for you and me my friends
I stand judge of that long quarrel between tradition and modernity
Between Order and Adventure
You whose mouth is made in the image of God's
A mouth that is order itself
Be indulgent when comparing us
To those who were the perfection of order
We who go looking for adventure everywhere
We're not your enemies
We want to give you vast and strange territories
Where the flowering mystery offers itself to those who'd pluck it
There are there new fires colours never seen before
A thousand unimaginable phantasms
Which must be granted reality
We want to explore the generosity the vast country where all is hushed up
And there's time as well which can either be exiled or brought back
Pity us who are always fighting at the borders
Of infinity and the future
Pity our mistakes pity our sins
Now the summer's coming the violent season
And my childhood is dead the spring the same fate
Oh Sun it's the time of scorching Reason
And I wait
So I might always follow that noble and gentlest
Form she takes on to make me love her alone
She draws near and leads me like a magnet attracting iron
She has that enchanting look
Of a startling redhead
Her hair's golden you'll be saying
Stunning lightning staying
Or those flames that glow
In the fading tea-rose
Laugh at me laugh
Men from everywhere especially folk from here
Because there are so many things I can't risk telling you
So many things you'd ban me telling you
Have pity on me
'La Jolie Rousse' (Calligrammes, 1918)
trans. Richard Price
Me voici devant tous UN homme plein de sens
Connaissant la vie et de la mort CE qu'un vivant peut conna”tre
Ayant éprouvé les douleurs et les joies de l'amour
Ayant su quelquefois imposer ses idées
Connaissant plusieurs langages
Ayant pas mal voyagé
Ayant vu la guerre dans l'Artillerie et l'Infanterie
Blessé à la tête trépané sous le chloroforme
Ayant perdu ses meilleurs amis dans l'effroyable lutte
Je sais d'ancien et de nouveau autant qu'un homme seul pourrait Des deux savoir
Et sans m'inquiéter aujourd'hui de cette guerre
Entre nous et pur nous mes amis
Je juge cette longue querelle de la tradition et de l'invention
De l'Ordre et de l'Aventure
Vous dont la bouche est faite à l'image de celle de Dieu
Bouche qui est l'ordre même
Soyez indulgents quand vous nous comparez
A ceux qui furent la perfection de l'ordre
Nous qui quêtons partout l'aventure
Nous NE sommes pas vos ennemis
Nous voulons vous donner de vastes et d'étranges domaines
Où le mystère en fleurs s'offre à qui veut le cueillir
Il y a là Des feux nouveaux Des couleurs jamais vues
Mille phantasmes impondérables
Auxquels il faut donner de la réalité
Nous voulons explorer la bonté contrée énorme où
tout se tait
Il y a aussi le temps qu'on peut chasser ou faire revenir
Pitié pur nous qui combattons toujours aux frontières
De l'illimité et de l'avenir
Pitié pour nos erreurs pitié pour nos péchés
Voici que vient l'été la saison violente
Et ma jeunesse est morte ainsi que le printemps
O Soleil c'est le temps de la Raison ardente
Et j'attends
Pour la suivre toujours la forme noble et douce
Qu'elle prend afin que je l'aime seulement
Elle vient et m'attire ainsi qu'un fer l'aimant
Elle a l'aspect charmant
D'une adorable rousse
Ses cheveux sont d'or on dirait
UN bel éclair qui durerait
Ou ces flammes qui se pavanent
Dans les roses-thé qui se fanen
Mais riez riez de moi
Hommes de partout surtout gens d'ici
Car il y a tant de choses que je n'ose vous dire
Tant de choses que vous NE me laisseriez pas dire
Ayez pitié de moi