The Best American Poetry

"Birthdays" [by Tony Towle]

Birthdays

                       

I wonder if Fernando Pessoa

when he wrote to W.B. Yeats for advice

about establishing a national poetry for Portugal

realized that they had the same birthday —

and if he had known, would that have

encouraged him to actually send the letter?

Forty-odd Junes ago I wonder about other things,

walking down West 18^th Street, about to pass

the Chelsea post office, through whose door

steps John Ashbery, directly in front of me.

After a mutual startled instant, he inquires mildly

in his celebrated nasal intonation:  “What

are you doing on my turf?” — a reasonable question

since he knew I lived many blocks to the south.

Embarrassed, I answer, “You may not believe this,

but I’m going to see an astrologer” (a visit that Jean

my girlfriend, had arranged as a birthday present).

Instead of acerbic admonishment on the imbecility

or worse of astrology, he inquires: “It wouldn’t be

Eleanor Bach, would it?” Stunned, I reply: “Yes,

as a matter of fact it would.” While I settle into

relief, John informs me: “She does a lot of poets,”

and he mentions several who were well-known

(though not by me personally), and then of course

he himself; and he relates how she really impressed him

by persisting in a feeling that there was something

 off in his chart, something that didn’t add up. Finally

he revealed a personal fact that had been withheld

and she said, “Oh, yes, it all makes sense now; why

didn’t you tell me before?!” So now I was assured

by an esteemed literary source that my personal incarnation

of the stellar and planetary intricacies would be rendered

with astute professional insight. Confidentially , though —

and I never told John — I thought that Ms. Bach

seemed much too concerned with my “rising” sign

to the neglect of my “sun” sign next door, regarding

which, and doubtless by the merest coincidence of genetic

and sociological meanders of fate, I am a first-rate example.

- Tony Towle  11/22—5/23

Tony Towle neglects to mention that June 13th is his birthday (as it is that of both Pessoa and Yeats). Ashbery's astrological profile has baffled many professional astrophels, because Leo is his rising sign but there's a lot of Virgo in his chart. -- David Lehman

"Like a White Blouse": Couplets from "The Two Davids" [by David Shapiro and David Lehman]

Happy birthday, David Shapiro  (born January 2, 1947)

These poems are from February 2003, when David Shapiro and I collaborated daily in couplets. - DL

Re: Like a white blouse, or like red crowds in a face 
Date:   2/17/2003 10:28:38 AM Eastern Standard Time       
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

The apparition of those snowflakes in a crowd:
Petals on a wet white black bough.

The apparition of some poison in a crowd:
Petals on a white black and blackened shroud.

The apparition of those crowds inside a crowd:
Crowds of petals on a wet white black snow‑plow.

The apparition of these apparitions in a wheelbarrow.
Yellow yellow yellow on a white black bough.

The apparition of these umbrellas meeting machines:
Faces on a white wet black blue‑green.

The apparition of our couplets in a crowd:
Metal on a wet white blue‑green black bough unbowed.

The chance encounter in a beautiful crowd:
Pages reduced to a white wet black blouse.  ‑‑ DS, 2 / 17 / 03

from: DCLEHMAN
to: DaJoShap

The apparition of these buds in the dark:
The eyes of a teenage American Jeanne d'Arc.

The petals of a crowd of strangers in the ground:
The buds in the blouse are pink on a white mound.

The apparition of snow as a black bird circles overhead:
The cars wait. The lights don't change from yellow to red.

The chance encounter of a mustache and a tear:
The accidental beauty of a desultory cheer.

Nothing's an accident, nothing's left to chance.
One girl sits in the corner while two others dance.

A blizzard of sparks from the sky and tomorrow
The white of the snow will blot out your sorrow.

Whatever you do, don't forget your gun.
And teach your son not to fly too close to the sun.   -- DL, 2 / 17 / 03

 

Re: Heroically incorrect, David Lehman receives the melancholy Couplet award  

Date:   2/19/2003 10:38:27 AM Eastern Standard Time       
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

The proper study of mankind is a crowd:
Duct tape on a white wet black shroud.

The chance encounter of convulsive love and chance:
Petals on David's first evening in Paris, France..

Says surgeon: I have stitched you and you're mine.
Umbrella squeaks. Sewing faints.  5 of 9.

Says Breton: I'm ship's doctor! What a chance!
Sewing Machine to Umbrella: Oh well, let's dance!

Says Artaud: You're cruel to pull wool over a crowd:
Says petal to petal: Let's come coming through aloud.

Says Edward Lear Umbrella: I'm not proud.
I've only stopped  rain falling on your shroud.

Says Umbrella to the Snark insider the park:
Spring's got nothing but Silence, and a Boojum's not a quark.   DS, 2 / 19 / 03

Fifteen Glorious Minutes (on Beethoven's Birthday)

Happy Birthday, Emily Dickinson

I am alive -- I guess --
The Branches on my Hand
Are full of Morning Glory --
And at my finger's end --

The Carmine -- tingles warm --
And if I hold a Glass
Across my Mouth -- it blurs it --
Physician's -- proof of Breath --

I am alive -- because
I am not in a Room --
The Parlor -- Commonly -- it is --
So Visitors may come --

And lean -- and view it sidewise --
And add "How cold -- it grew" --
And "Was it conscious -- when it stepped
In Immortality?"

I am alive -- because
I do not own a House --
Entitled to myself -- precise --
And fitting no one else --

And marked my Girlhood's name --
So Visitors may know
Which Door is mine -- and not

-- Emily Dickinson
(December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)

A tip of the fedora to Ira Gershwin, born December 6

There are still two hours left before the sixth
of December gives way to the day of infamy
enough time to mark the birth of Ira,
George's older brother, and what better
way to honor the lad who wrote the words
than to quote some whch should I choose
"Embraceable You" (you irreplaceable you)
or "Someone to Watch over Me" or maybe
"But Not for Me" one of the greatest (for me)
a brainy boy who outlived his genius brother
born the same year as Yip Harburg
and Howard Dietz a very good year for lyricists
was 1896
well, Ira, no use complainin', the odds were
a hundred to one against you,
a stranger in the city,  yet
you're with her who wanted
to add your initial to her monogram

-- DL (frem the archives; December 6, 2009)

"Terence on the Terrace" [by David Lehman]

Terence on the Terrace

Sipping a dry martini, with a garlic-stuffed olive,
I am thinking how happy I am to be 
clinking glasses with you, my friend,
in this virtual universe where virtue is rare
and you've got it. “The valiant never taste 
of death but once,” may not be true but is
magnificent rhetoric, defined broadly
as an argument with everyone, which
the valorous will inevitably lose, though,
as in a chess game, one can always resign
rather than face the music if checkmate.
is inevitable. Writing a happy hour sonnet,
you aim at levity, but the levitation
cannot defeat the earth's gravitational pull.

David Lehman 11 / 1 / 24   [Happy birthday, TPW]

from "The Complete History of the Boy" [for Joe Lehman on 7/24/24]

from "The Complete History of the Boy"

The boy was mad at his mother who didn’t hang up
the phone right away when he fell and hurt his head.
He was indignant. “Hurts are more important than inventions.”

He dreamed his father died. “Mama told me in the car.”
When he woke up he climbed into bed with his father, happy.

He wanted to discuss the floor plan of the house:
“Is my room over the dining room?”

He wanted to know which was more important,
the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building.
The former is a symbol of liberty, the latter a symbol
of industry, his mother explained. That clinched things
for the boy. He unhesitatingly chose liberty.

“Which is more important, religion or God?”

He was still five years old.
They found a special school for him.
He took classes in Magical Thinking and excelled
in the making of weird predictions and dire threats
that scared you even though you knew
they wouldn’t come true.

He also learned how to walk and talk in his sleep.

Two years later he saw Hans Hofmann’s “Mirage”
only this time on the cover of a book
with his father’s name on it.
“Awesome,” the boy said.

The world was still a dance not a duel, with invisible swords.
And at the museum the Hofmann hadn’t changed a bit.

Joy in the house, laughter in the halls, the boy in pajamas:
There were still a few good boyhood years left.

-- David Lehman

A Quick Meditation on Gustave Mahler (born July 7)

Wittgenstein dismissed Mahler’s music, but he conceded
that "very rare talents [were needed] to produce this bad music.”
Leonard Bernstein as conductor of the New York Philharmonic
sparked the Mahler boom of the 1960s. In Visconti's Death in Venice,
you can hear the slow fourth movement of Mahler's fifth in C Sharp minor,
which Mahler conducted in Cologne in 1904. In the movie,
a heavily made-up Dirk Bogarde played himself as a repressed homosexual
with a death wish. Visconti cast Bogarde for the role because he had done so well
as a Nazi in a black shirt with a smirk and an SS symbol on his collar
in The Damned. So I, on a day dominated by Mahler’s Fifth,
thought of the composer who spoke Yiddish as a boy,
"a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans,
and a Jew all over," on his birthday, July 7, 1860.

--  David Lehman

"Lana Turner has collapsed!" [by Frank O'Hara]

Poem

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

-- Frank O'Hara

In Praise of Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021)

Mysticism for Beginners

 

The day was mild, the light was generous.

The German on the café terrace

held a small book on his lap.

I caught sight of the title:

Mysticism for Beginners.

Suddenly I understood that the swallows

patrolling the streets of Montepulciano

with their shrill whistles,

and the hushed talk of timid travelers

from Eastern, so-called Central Europe,

and the white herons standing—yesterday? the day before?—

like nuns in fields of rice,

and the dusk, slow and systematic,

erasing the outlines of medieval houses,

and olive trees on little hills,

abandoned to the wind and heat,

and the head of the Unknown Princess

that I saw and admired in the Louvre,

and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings

sprinkled with pollen,

and the little nightingale practicing

its speech beside the highway,

and any journey, any kind of trip,

are only mysticism for beginners,

the elementary course, prelude

to a test that's been

postponed.

 

-- Adam Zagajewski (born June 21, 1945)

trans. CLARE CAVANAGH

photo by Star Black. Copyright (c) 2008 by Star Black.

Happy birthday, Ron Padgett

In 1968 I didn't really know you though
Dick Gallup, who sat next to me
in Kenneth Koch's "Modern Poetry"
class, invited me to a party and
there you were and I went to hear
you read and went through old
copies of Columbia Review to read
your poems (including the one
signed "the sloth sloth") and why
am I telling you this? Because it's
your day of the year, and you're a gem
as well as a Gemini twin, and I
would tip my fedora to you if
I were wearing one as men used
to say when men wore fedoras.

-- David Lehman (June 17, 2013)

Dean Martin on His Birthday: Volare, On an Evening in Roma

“I can't stand an actor or actress who tells me acting is hard work. It's easy work. Anyone who says it isn't never had to stand on his feet all day dealing blackjack.”

Volare o o
cantare o o o o,
nel blu dipinto di blu
felice di stare lassù,
e volavo volavo
felice più in alto del sole
ed ancora più sù,
mentre il mondo
pian piano spariva laggiù,
una musica dolce suonava
soltanto per me. . .

 

"In 1976, When She Was Born" [by Molly Arden]

In 1976, When She Was Born

Life was dull in 1976.
Dad had to read "Ivanhoe" and write a report.
Sex was not yet Mom’s favorite sport.
The only rhyme that came to mind was "dicks."

Mom was somewhere north
of the Mass / NH border.
She was just following an order,
not calculating its moral worth.

She was on vacation
feeling unclever
and not happily after ever.

He promised to wait
for her return to the state
of eternal temptation.

-- Molly Arden. Painting by Duncan Hannah ("Honey Trap").  Poem published in Coconut.

Happy birthday, Artie Shaw [May 23, 1910]

Born May 23, 1910. Band leader and clarinetist whose versions of "Stardust," "Frenesi," "Begin the Beguine" "Moonglow," "Can't Get Started," "A Foggy Day," and others are sublime. He was a Gemini with huge sex appeal and a host of wives including Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Jerome Kern's daughter Betty. He had chutzpah. “Presumption is the mother of all fuck-ups,” he explained. He was also a sharpshooter with a rifle. He and Benny Goodman disagreed, Goodman saying ""We both play clarinet." Shaw said, "You play clarinet. I play music." He also said, "Jazz was born out of the whiskey bottle, was raised on marijuana, and will expire on cocaine." He was a good looking stud but it was the music that enchanted the fillies. "“You have no idea of the women I didn’t marry,” he said. He lived to be ninety.

And here are Helen Forrest's songs with the Artie Shaw band:

Artie: “Somebody asked me once, ‘Do you think that swing will ever come back?’ And I said, ‘Do you think the 1938 Ford will ever come back?’"

"Come to Baby, Do": happy birthday, Doris Day (w/ Les Brown & "his band of renown")

Also born today (April 3): Marlon Brando.

So We'll Go No More a Roving [on Lord Byron's birthday, Jan. 22nd]

So, we'll go no more a roving
   So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
   And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
   And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
   And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
   And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
   By the light of the moon.

Brevity and simplicity contribute to this poem's power. It seems also somehow to summarize the Byronic state: Wanderlust and Weltschmertz in equal measures. The poem makes me think of this tuneful ballad. DL 

In Plymouth town there lived a maid
Bless you fair maidens
In Plymouth town there lived a maid
Mind what I say
In Plymouth town there lived a maid
And she was mistress of her trade
I’ll go no more a-rovin’ with you fair maid

A-rovin’, a-rovin’, since rovin’s been my ruin
I’ll go no more a-rovin’ with you fair maid.

"Last Song" [by Terence Winch]

Last Song

 

Mother! Where have you been? Your
children are drinking beer and playing
the piano. Every single thing you ever
owned has long ago disappeared. We’re
not even sure when exactly you were born
or what ship you came here on.

Sweet hope, show me the way
out of this mess. I keep talking to people
who can’t remember who they are.

And then there’s this feeling of every
thing being just out of reach or not quite
audible. I couldn’t remember John Prine’s
name this morning on the way to the Safeway
listening to him in the car singing
“Remember Me When the Candlelights 
Are Gleaming” with Kathy Mattea.

His last song, “I Remember Everything”—
so frail and beautiful, it moves you to tears.

I remember now where
all of you have gone.
Floating in the air
from song to song.

—Terence Winch

from Glimpse (#56, Spring 2023)

Drawing of Terence Winch by Joe Giordano in Baltimore, 20 Sept 2023.

Born Today: Keats -- as well as this master of light

Born today was he who painted this portrait of a young woman with a water jug.

The blue is rich, the geometry superb, and light flowing in from the window a miracle of air and sky.

The painting hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

As for the other fellow born on this day, consider this "Next Line, Please" prompt from 2017:

I would like readers to write a line—or a four-line stanza—in the manner of the Keats who gave us such touchstones as “With beaded bubble winking on the brim” (to describe wine) and “the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves” in “Ode to a Nightingale.”  The finale of “Ode on Melancholy” may be the finest single stanza in English poetry since “Lycidas”:

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

I know, I know: it would be madness to expect to be able to duplicate such sensual intelligence and mastery of sound, meter, and rhyme. But take lines 1-2, 3-4 or 7-8 and see what you can do in translating these observations about Beauty, Pleasure, and Melancholy into your own idiom.

Deadline: Saturday, April 29, 2017, midnight any time zone.
https://theamericanscholar.org/building-on-byron-and-keats/

"Flesh 78" [by Herbert Engelhardt, 1925-2021]

Brancusi hinted it
Giacometti stinted it

Miró laughed at it
Degas choreographed it

Bosch hated it
Bruegel skated it

Watteau crêpe de chine covered it
Manet gape to dine uncovered it

Botticelli virgin Spring emerged
Titian love-in fling resurged

Kandinsky ignored it
Gaugin adored it

Renoir bathed his coquette in pink
Bellows slathed hot sweat in stink

Ingres slipped in two vertebrae
Maillol worshipped her in clay

Seurat biked it to the park
Tintoretto liked it for St Mark

Gorky mangled it
Pollock tangled it

Picasso pranced in Avignon
Matisse danced in primary tone

Michelangelo mixed genders
Fragonard transfixed splendors

Cézanne preferred yellow lemons
Van Gogh preferred star-glow demons

Lachaise inflated it
Schiele conflated it

Beckmann painted bloody stumps
Hals sainted ruddy rumps

Warhol silk-screened it
Chagall flute-dreamed it

Giotto enrobed it in gesso
Géricault unrobed it al fresco

Daumier mocked it
Wood defrocked it

Rodin raptured eroticized it
Braque fractured analyzed it

De Chirico enigmatically stylized it
El Greco astigmatically exorcized it

Velásquez grew a mischievous chin
Da Vinci drew a mysterious grin

Rothko dazzled with colors bold
Klimt razzled with showers gold

Lautrec wrapped Braunt’s neck in red
Stieglitz snapped O’Keeffe’s pec in bed

Duchamp sighted it descending
Caravaggio whited it offending

Rubens sketched it out
Modigliani stretched it out

Artists obsess on flesh
From Marrakesh to Uttar Pradesh

Published in HARVARD REVIEW ONLINE on February 25, 2016 with this contributor's note:

Herbert Engelhardt was born in New Jersey in 1925. He served in the Pacific Theater of World War II from 1943 to 1946 and was awarded the Purple Heart in the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945. He received his BA and MBA from Harvard in 1949 and 1951, respectively. In his late seventies, he began to write poems. He has lived in New York City since the early 1950s.

Ed. note: Herb, whom I met twelve or thirteen years ago, had a passion for poetry and a zest for life that continually inspired me. We met sixteen years ago, when he was eighty, and worked together on his poems. His book, Ordinary Soldiers, which he published under the title World War II Poetry: Memories of an Ordinary Soldier, deserves to be far better known and celebrated. One reader commented that the book is "Intimate. Visceral. Honest. First rate. Fine poetry and also a valuable as a historic record of a soldier's life, much of it in Okinawa and the Philippines, during WW II."  Herb and I lunched together often and talked about all manner of thing -- his travels, his years in the service, his time at Harvard (where he housed with Henry Kissinger), and his own successful business career. For years he taught a course at NYU's Business School, with a reading list that included Julius Caesar and other works in which management made costly decisions to their detriment. Herb is quoted in my book One Hundred Autobiographies. We were comparing medical experiences and he said with his customary salty wit, “No matter what the longhaired Buddhist full of shit poets write about flowers and rocks and clouds, you don’t really understand life until you’ve had a Foley catheter stuck in you for six days." He was right about that and so much else. We miss you and honor you, Herb, and we mark your 98th birthday with this post! -- DL

On George Gershwin's Birthday [by David Lehman]

On George Gershwin’s birthday
I keep expecting them to play
Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris,
the Cuban Overture,  the Concerto in F,
Porgy and Bess as played by Miles Davis,
but no, all day it’s been Dvorak, Grieg,
Rimsky-Korsakov, and other worthies
not born today, Elgar for heaven’s sake;
at least they could give us some Debussy,
as didn’t "they" (such a useful pronoun)
criticize him for imitating Debussy,
or Ravel, who declined to give George lessons
saying, “Why become a second-rate Ravel
when you’re already a first-rate Gershwin?”

-- DL

Froim the archive; posted by The Best American Poetry on September 26, 2020 at 03:59 AM 

On George Gershwin’s birthday
I keep expecting them to play
Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris,
the Cuban Overture,  the Concerto in F,
Porgy and Bess as played by Miles Davis,
but no, all day it’s been Dvorak, Grieg,
Rimsky-Korsakov, and other worthies
not born today, Elgar for heaven’s sake;
at least they could give us some Debussy,
as didn’t "they" (such a useful pronoun)
criticize him for imitating Debussy,
or Ravel, who declined to give George lessons
saying, “Why become a second-rate Ravel
when you’re already a first-rate Gershwin?”

-- DL

On Apollinaire's Birthday [by David Lehman]

In the heady days leading up to and including the catastrophe of World War I, when Paris was the capital of modern art, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) stood at the vital center of a gang of writers and artists who embraced the future with such tremendous energy that avant-garde became an adjective of glamour and prestige. Apollinaire—whose circle included painters (Picasso, Derain, Vlaminck) and composers (Satie, Poulenc) as well as poets (Blaise Cendrars, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy)—was a superb activist and agitator. He championed Cubism and gave Surrealism its name. In 1917, his edition of Charles Baudelaire’s poems linked the two men as kindred spirits, city poets who doubled as art critics; Baudelaire prefigured Apollinaire as the latter prefigures Frank O’Hara. Also in 1917, Apollinaire issued his manifesto, “The New Spirit and the Poets,” making the case for innovation as a transcendent value. Poetry had to keep up with the technological advances of the day—the cinema, the radio, the motorcar, the flying machine. Driving with a friend from Deauville to Paris in “La Petite Auto,” Apollinaire writes that “the little car had driven us into a New epoch / and though both of us were grown men / it was as if we had just been born.”

Apollinaire experimented with audacious techniques for generating verse. On occasion he would sit in a café and weave overheard phrases into the composition. For his book Calligrammes, he made shaped poems—poems that looked like a mirror, a heart, the rainfall, a pocket-watch. In his most ambitious discursive poems, he wins over the reader by modifying his self-pity with his wit and ebullience. There is a rare combination of enthusiasm and melancholy in Apollinaire’s self-presentation. A line from his poem “Les Collines” (“The Hills”) is etched into his tombstone at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris: “Je peux mourir en souriant”—“I can die with a smile on my face.” 

“Zone,” the central poem in Apollinaire’s career, prefaces his collection Alcools, the title of which translates literally as “Spirits” in the alcoholic sense though I would argue for “Cocktails.” Alcools is in any case an apt title for one who likes to boast that he has “drunk the universe” and chanted “songs of universal drunkenness.” Published in 1913, the year Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring had its Paris premiere, “Zone” is chronologically the last poem in the collection to have been written. The poet was thirty-three years old, the age of Dante embarking on his tour of the afterlife. The poem doesn’t so much praise its objects of futurist desire—the Eiffel Tower, airplanes, a railway terminal—as treat them like pastoral motifs. The heart of the poem is not in the future at all but in a past recollected in anxiety and sadness.

“Zone” heralds a striking new direction in Apollinaire’s work. He discards punctuation to good effect. He refers to himself sometimes as I, sometimes as you (both tu and vous in French), a habit that held a special appeal for O’Hara and other New York poets. The poem’s title embraces (or blends) the meanings of neighborhood, frontier, slum (and slumming), and the female erogenous zone, all of which come into play. (“And I smoke ZONE tobacco,” Apollinaire wrote in a later poem.) Organized around a walk in Paris from one sunrise to another—and from one time zone to another—“Zone” is in loosely rhymed couplets, which presents a difficulty that translators tend to evade. A notable exception is Samuel Beckett in perhaps the most impressive parts of his translation. For example, Beckett renders “C’est le beau lys que tous nous cultivons / C’est la torch aux cheveux roux que n’eteint pas le vent” as “It is the fair lily that we all revere / It is the torch burning in the wind its auburn hair.” In addition to the near-rhyme, Beckett gives us the echo of “burn” in “auburn,” a move that Apollinaire would have appreciated. Kenneth Koch appropriates Apollinaire’s rambling couplets in a nostalgic poem whose title is itself a nod to his influence: “A Time Zone.”

“Zone” has been translated many times, a testament to how well-loved it is among Anglo-Saxon Francophiles. It begins, “A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien.” Roger Shattuck translates the line as “You are tired at last of this old world”; Ron Padgett improves on this with “You’re tired of this old world at last.” I cast my vote with Beckett, Charlotte Mandell, and William Meredith, in opting for “In the end” as the poem’s first words, not only because this is the literal sense of the French “A la fin,” but because it lays proper stress on Apollinaire’s audacity in starting with “the end.” It also gives a hint of the poem’s ultimate circularity. Given the iterations of ancien that immediately follow—antiquité, anciennes, and antique all appear in the next six lines—I felt that “the ancient world” came nearer to Apollinaire’s meaning than “this old world.”

A line about refugee families gathered at a train station can stand for many others in the challenge they present to the translator. For “Ils espèrent gagner de l’argent dans l’Argentine,” Oliver Bernard offers the prosaic “They hope to make money in the Argentine.” Anne Hyde Greet goes for the more idiomatic “Hoping to strike it rich in Argentina.” But I wanted to preserve the repeated sound of argent (the French word for money rooted in the word for silver), so I chose the alliterative “They’re hoping to gain some argent in the Argentine.”

The celebrated last line of “Zone,” “soleil cou coupé,” contains a brilliant piece of wordplay that resists the translator’s craft. It’s as if cou (meaning “neck”) is an abbreviated form of coupé (meaning “cut”). The relation between the two words can be said to suggest the action of the sun rising at dawn and appearing as if beheaded by the horizon. The verse has been variously translated as “Decapitated sun—” (William Meredith), “The sun a severed neck” (Roger Shattuck), “Sun corseless head” (Samuel Beckett), “Sun     slit throat” (Anne Hyde Greet), “Sun neck cut” (Charlotte Mandell). Ron Padgett’s “Sun cut throat” cleverly divides the word cutthroat in two. I have opted for “Let the sun beheaded be,” mainly because of the repetition of sounds in the last words. I felt that the relation of “be” to “beheaded” approximated the action in “côu coupé.” 

I discovered “Zone” in my junior year of college and studied it closely when, as a graduate student at Cambridge University, I attended Douglas Parmée’s lectures on French literature and spent a few seasons in Paris. This was in 1971 and 1972. In Paris I lived with this peripatetic poem on such intimate terms that I felt I could hear it in my own voice as I walked from Notre Dame to the Luxembourg Gardens and from there to the cafés of Montparnasse. I made a special trip to the Gare St. Lazare with Apollinaire’s stanza about “ces pauvres émigrants” in my brain. Nevertheless I did not type up a complete draft of my translation until January 1978 when I taught a course at Hamilton College that called for it. After presenting it at a public reading, I let it lie fallow. I worked on the poem often and carefully, if at long intervals, until three years ago when, as a professor at the New School’s graduate writing program, I supervised MFA candidate Ashleigh Allen’s thesis, which focused on Apollinaire and “Zone.” This happy task spurred me to revise my translation yet again. Encouraged by friends, I worked on it some more in summer 2011 and fall 2012. These things take time. The love of the work sustains the effort. 

Apollinaire had too little time. Within a few years of publishing “Zone,” he suffered head wounds at the front in World War I and died of Spanish flu on November 9, 1918, two days before the armistice that ended the war. 

Click here for David Lehman's translation of "Zone" in Virginia Quarterly Review.