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Alcools Poems Wesleyan Poetry Series Guillaume Apollinaire Donald Revell Books

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Alcools Poems Wesleyan Poetry Series Guillaume Apollinaire Donald Revell Books

Unfortunately, this book is seriously flawed. Despite the glowing testimonials on the back cover, the translations are quirky at best and erroneous at worst. The number of outright errors is simply astonishing. A far better translation exists by Anne Hyde Greet (University of California Press). Worst of all, the translator decided to omit three poems altogether because he didn't like them! As if he had the right to alter the original text! Wesleyan University Press ought to be ashamed. Simply unbelievable....


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Alcools Poems Wesleyan Poetry Series Guillaume Apollinaire Donald Revell Books Reviews

Guillaume Apollinaire was a poet of extraordinary talent. This book showcases some of his finest work. I highly recommend this product to anyone who enjoys reading French poetry.
A materpiece by the famous French poet.
The French poet Guillaume Apollinare published his first collection ALCOOLS in 1913. With this monumental volume, even the fresh Symbolism of Mallarme suddenly seemed stale, and the innovations of cubic painting found a place in verse. The "stream of consciousness" of the sequence "La Chanson du Mal Aime" ("The Song of the Poorly Loved") starts off with a vague complaint about betrayal, and ends up seguing totally naturally into a take on the Zaporogian Cossacks' profanity-filled reply to the Sultan, and then into fantasy swordcraft. In "Zone", Apollinaire is among the first to take stock of the massive social and technological changes at the beginning of the 20th century. Like in his poetry of World War I, Apollinaire shows the foundation of all that came to pass through that bitter hundred years. His ability to turn from the most universal themes to the most peculiar is a fascinating hint at Dadaism and Surrealism. And shortly before sending the poems to print, Apollinaire removed all punctuation, giving his poetry this crazy flow that must be read aloud to be believed.

But it's not all scary modernism, for Apollinaire writes some touching simpler verse, such as "Annie" with its cute punch line and the poignant "L'adieu" ("The Farewell"). "Lorelei" reinterprets the old German legend in a much more psychologically intense way.

The original French text of ALCOOLS is here (minus three early poems Revells didn't feel to mesh well with the general scheme), which makes it at least something worth looking at for those American readers who can read French but can't acquire a French edition of the work. However, the facing-page translation by James Revell, a professor of English at University of Utah, often distorts the work. Most often, it's by placing in the English texts word play nowhere in the original. In "La tzigane" ("The Gypsy") Apollinare writes "On sait tres bien que l'on se damne", but Revell expands this to the silly "A person knows damn well he's damned." Elsewhere, it is just transforming the original poem entirely. Take, for example, the one-liner "Chantre" (Singer). Apollinaire writes the elegant phrase "Et l'unique cordeau de trompettes marines", but Revell comes up with the psychadelic "And only one in the world chord ocean horns." I haven't seen such a wacky rendition of a straightforward poem since Brooks Haxton's New Age take on Heraclitus' fragments (published by Penguin)

Revell's introduction is less an explanation of the book's context in Apollinaire's life and work and more an apologia for his translation. It's fairly insubstantial, and any other introduction to ALCOOLS, even freely-available ones, would do just as well if not better.

If one wants to experience poetry truly, one must be prepared to read the text in the original languages. Translations can only serve as cribs on the way to such a pleasurable goal. It's a pity that Revell distorts Apollinaire's creation for his own wacky ends. ALCOOLS is a book that should be encounted.
Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools (translated by Donald Revell) (Wesleyan, 1995)

What is there to review about Alcools itself? It's Guillaume Apollinaire. It was published ninety years ago. It's one of the documents Tristan Tzara was reading obsessively while forming the dada movement, and thus was also a heavy influence on surrealism, and between the two was an influence on most modern writing. It contains some of Apollinaire's best-known poems. If you haven't read it yet, what are you waiting for? It's a literary classic, and one that should be in every home.

What I'm reviewing here is Donald Revell's new translation of Alcools. I hadn't got the book out thinking that; I was planning to use this as a platform to mouth the same old words about the greatness of Apollinaire and how you should have all read him already, in high school if not before, and how horrible it is that our educational system doesn't teach the man. But then I read Revell's (thankfully brief; I hate fifty-page introductions to books of poetry in translation) intro to this, and I realized that at least writing, if not reading, this review would be more interesting than usual. For Revell talks about the poetic license he took with the original text in order to preserve the spirit of Guillaume Apollinaire, rather than be slavish to the original words.

For the most part, it works pretty well. Revell, after all, is a fantastic poet in his own right, and you can trust his judgment as to what sounds good and what doesn't. Those who know French (or even a smattering of French, or those capable of easily recognizing cognates) will be able to check the original text, on the facing page, and see differences pretty readily. One wonders whether the perceived strengths and weaknesses in this translation (as one must wonder with all translations) have more to do with the original translations of these poems a reader has read than with the original (because it's very rare to find a poem that translates literally and still sounds poetic in the new language). I cut my teeth on Apollinaire with the translations in The Poetry of Surrealism (mostly by Michael Hamburger, with a few contributions by other translators), and I've always thought of those as the definitive translations of the Apollinaire poems included in both volumes. "Zone," for example, sounds completely different in the two books; it keeps the same spirit, of course, but other things (the pace, specifically) come off completely differently.

In the end, it most likely comes down to the reader. For the newcomer to Apollinaire, you may get more enjoyment out of this book than the seasoned reader. Yet the seasoned reader will find a good deal of enjoyment here as well, and possibly much food for thought on the nature of translation, as well. *** ½
Quick arrival and good read. Very interesting individual and his poems are amazing. Loses nothing in translation. Highly recommend it.
Very happy!
The poetry of Apollinaire is magnificent.
Too bad that his work has fallen in the hands of a bad translator.
Did anyone at the editorial speak both languages?
Some of the poem translations are so far away from the original text and meaning that it is difficult to understand how the translator got away with it.
Unfortunately, this book is seriously flawed. Despite the glowing testimonials on the back cover, the translations are quirky at best and erroneous at worst. The number of outright errors is simply astonishing. A far better translation exists by Anne Hyde Greet (University of California Press). Worst of all, the translator decided to omit three poems altogether because he didn't like them! As if he had the right to alter the original text! Wesleyan University Press ought to be ashamed. Simply unbelievable....