Volume 2, Number 7 · May 14, 1964
On Translating Apollinaire
By Roger Shattuck
Alcools: Poems 1898-1913
by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by William Meredith, Introduction and notes by Francis Steegmuller
Doubleday, 242 pp., $4.95
A spate of books about Apollinaire in recent years has almost nudged him alongside the other French heavy-weights since Baudelaire: Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Valéry. It has been no handicap that he can beat them all, except Rimbaud, when it comes to biographical glamor. He is probably best known as the bohemian writer imprisoned as a suspected accomplice in the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911, and as the poet whose published volumes eliminate punctuation and at the end include word drawings called calligrammes. Yet his poetry remains little known in English in spite of his growing reputation. The qualities of his work are not easily conveyed in translation or literary studies.
Review, 2366 words
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