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T H E A L C O O L S O F G U I L L A U M E A P O L L I N A I R E : W H Y A N D W H Y N O W Many translations, including my Alcools, begin in the unshakeable conviction that a writer, long-deceased, is nevertheless a contemporary, still speaking , still responding to the circumstances and occasions of the present. Translation does its best to draw attention to this miracle of immitigable presence and to become a medium of its wider acceptance. As Allen Ginsberg wrote in "At Apollinaire's Grave": Guillaume Guillaume how I envy your fame your accomplishment for American letters your Zone with its long crazy line of bullshit about death come out of the grave and talk thru the door of my mind The plain facts of Apollinaire's biography guarantee the continual, vocable resurrection upon which Ginsberg insists. Born in Rome to a Polish mother in August 1880, Apollinaire never knew his father or his father's name. Therefore he improvised a host of fathers throughout a lifetime of autobiographical improvisations, brilliantly re-inventing himself as the bastard of princes or prelates or, on one occasion, a pope. Schooled and raised within earshot of the Casino in Monte Carlo, he early learned the eminent operations of pure chance, operations which, on the grandest scale, have nearly completed the erasure of all ideologies in our new world order. In early manhood, in Paris, Apollinaire found a milieu that re-invented itself daily with every gesture and pronouncement of its now-lionized company . And in this company of emigres and outsiders, the improvised nature of Apollinaire found its natural habitat and necessary welcome. Inspired by company, the young poet responded with a welcome of his own. In prolific conversation with Picasso, Jarry, Max Jacob, Marie Laurencin, and many others, he introduced a city and a century to the revolutions already active in their midst. Along the way, he sometimes gave these revolutions their IX proper names (as in his coining of the word "Surrealism") and their proper dimensions (as in his many critical writings on the emergence of Cubism). Also along the way, as early as 1903 or 1904, he began the most durable improvisations of his imaginative life: the poems that would culminate in the composition of "Zone" in 1912 and in the publication of Alcools in 1913. As early as 1903 and 1904, in "The Song of the Poorly Loved" and "The Emigrant of Landor Road," Apollinaire introduced the poetry of his young century to collage, polyphony, and the animation of inanimate objects in human view. One could honestly say he introduced the century to its true self, right from the start. Apollinaire shared the absurdity and horror of the centuryin full measure with its glamor. In 1911 he was falsely arrested for the theft of the Mona Lisa and briefly imprisoned, an experience which produced the poem "At the Same." Reporting the incident, the New York Times described him as "a well-known Russian literary man living in Paris." For such a figure, how could identity be, as it is for we who twist in the accusations and selfreproach of late-century political correctness, anything but improvisation? And in March 1916, in the uniform of his adopted country,Apollinaire was wounded in the head by a shell fragment, aptly enough while reading a literary magazine in his trench. He underwent two skull operations, afterwards sporting his bandages like an avant-garde chapeau. As Wittgenstein wrote, "Courage is always original," i.e., always contemporary. In the terrible year 1918 Apollinaire married, quite spontaneously, Jacqueline Kolb, thus anticipating Breton's dictum that life ought to be lived as though always at the brink of falling in love. On the weekend of the Armistice, the poet died of Spanish influenza, departing into the internationalism that is his most urgent bequest and relevance to us now. He was reported to have struggled vehemently against death, exhorting his physician, "I want to live! I still have so many things to say!" At present, under the burden of canons and the burden of language's deep complicity with countless atrocities, the very making ofpoems requires audacity. And if the audacity is well-intended, it requires a certain awkwardness as proof of its unrehearsed refusal to comply with silence. I have attempted a new translation of Alcools because, as a poet and as a reader of...

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