Alcools

by Guillaume Apollinaire Narrated by Christian Olivier

Overview

Et tu bois cet alcool brûlant comme ta vie Ta vie que tu bois comme une eau de vie. Premier recueil de poèmes d'Apollinaire,* Alcools* est publié en 1913, alors que certains poèmes du recueil* ont été* écrits dès 1902. Apollinaire y mêle différents motifs comme la souffrance amoureuse, la mélancolie et le passage du temps, la ville moderne, ou encore le quotidien dans son exploration des paysages rhénans. Le vers libre ainsi que l'absence de toute trace de ponctuation sont autant de marqueurs d'une poésie de la modernité qui donnera l'inspiration poétique à tout le courant surréaliste.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Revell (Beautiful Shirt) buoyantly delivers into English the swift visions and odd, bright beauty of Alcools (originally published in 1913), arguably one of this century's most inventive and influential books of poetry. Apollinaire, writes Revell, ``introduced the century to its true self.'' He popularized the term ``surrealism'' and, in poems like the sparkling ``Zone'' and the more magisterial but no less energetic ``The Harvest Month,'' strove to bring a form of cubism to poetry through the use of verbal collage, polyphony and highly extracted urban imagery, all of which later had a profound effect on American Modernism and the Beats. In translations facing the original French, Revell has maintained the deliberate awkwardness of Apollinaire's free verse, his informal slant rhymes and assonance. Contoured and complex, Alcools has aged well, retaining its ability to illuminate the modern experience with rare force and whimsy: ``Listen to me I am the gullet of Paris/ If it pleases me I will swallow all of creation/ Listen to my songs of cosmic drunkenness...'' (Aug.)

French poetry does not come over very well in English, in what Henry James called 'our own less pensive tongue.' And this I feel is the signal excellence of what Revell does with Alcools as a whole: he translates into a lighter, quicker, more spontaneous tone than we are accustomed to. He parallels the dizzing velocity of Apollinaire's French while remaining legible in English. It is an unfussy version-personal yet not eccentric-that will give readers the chance to taste the source.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159672797
Publisher:	Editions Theleme from W. F. Howes
Publication date:	11/19/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged
Language:	French

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