Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) – The Sign

I am bound to the King of the Sign of Autumn
Parting I love the fruits I detest the flowers
I regret every one of the kisses that I’ve given
Such a bitter walnut tells his grief to the showers
 

My Autumn eternal O my spiritual season
The hands of lost lovers juggle with your sun
A spouse follows me it’s my fatal shadow
The doves take flight this evening their last one

 

Translated by A. S. Kline

 

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) by Henri Rousseau

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) – Twilight

Brushed by the shadows of the dead
On the grass where day expires
Columbine strips bare admires
her body in the pond instead

A charlatan of twilight formed
Boasts of the tricks to be performed
The sky without a stain unmarred
Is studded with the milk-white stars 

From the boards pale Harlequin
First salutes the spectators
Sorcerers from Bohemia
Fairies sundry enchanters

Having unhooked a star
He proffers it with outstretched hand
While with his feet a hanging man
Sounds the cymbals bar by bar 

The blind man rocks a pretty child
The doe with all her fauns slips by
The dwarf observes with saddened pose
How Harlequin magically grows

Translated by A. S. Kline

 

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) in 1914

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) – One Evening

An eagle descends from this sky white with archangels
          And you sustain me
Let them tremble a long while all these lamps
          Pray pray for me

The city’s metallic and it’s the only star
          Drowned in your blue eyes
When the tramways run spurting pale fire
          Over the twittering birds

And all that trembles in your eyes of my dreams
          That a lonely man drinks
Under flames of gas red like a false dawn
          O clothed your arm is lifted

See the speaker stick his tongue out at the listeners
          A phantom has committed suicide
The apostle of the fig-tree hangs and slowly rots
          Let us play this love out then to the end
 
Bells with clear chimes announce your birth
                              See
The streets are garlanded and the palms advance
                              Towards thee

 

Translated by A. S. Kline

 

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) in 1914

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) – Clotilde

The anemone and flower that weeps
have grown in the garden plain
where Melancholy sleeps
between Amor and Disdain

There our shadows linger too
that the midnight will disperse
the sun that makes them dark to view
will with them in dark immerse

The deities of living dew
Let their hair flow down entire
It must be that you pursue
That lovely shadow you desire

Translated by A. S. Kline

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) by Henri Rousseau

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) – The Mirabeau Bridge

Under the Mirabeau flows the Seine
          And our amours
     Shall I remember it again
Joy always followed after Pain 

          Comes the night sounds the hour
          The days go by I endure 

Hand in hand rest face to face
          While underneath
     The bridge of our arms there races
So weary a wave of eternal gazes 

Comes the night sounds the hour
          The days go by I endure 

Love vanishes like the water’s flow
Love vanishes
      How life is slow
And how Hope lives blow by blow 

Comes the night sounds the hour
          The days go by I endure 

Let the hour pass the day the same
          Time past returns
      Nor love again
Under the Mirabeau flows the Seine 

Comes the night sounds the hour
          The days go by I endure

 

Translated by A. S. Kline

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) by Henri Rousseau

Zone by Guillaume Apollinaire

You are weary at last of this ancient world
Shepherdess O Eiffel tower whose flock of bridges bleats at the morning

You have lived long enough with Greek and Roman antiquity

Here even automobiles look old
Only religion stays news religion
As simple as hangars at the airfield

Alone in Europe you Christianity are not antique
The one modern European is you Pope Pius X
And you whom windows watch what shame keeps you
From entering a church and confessing your sins this morning
Handbills catalogues advertisements that sing overhead
Furnish your morning’s poetry for prose there are newspapers
Dime detective novels packed with adventure
Biographies of great men a thousand and one titles

This morning I saw a fine street whose name slips my mind
New and bright the sun’s clarion
Where executives and workers sweet stenographers
Hurry every weekday dawn and dusk
Three times a morning sirens groan
A choleric bell barks at noon
Billboards posters and
Doorplates twitter like parakeets
There is charm to this Paris factory street
Between rue Aumont-Thiéville and the avenue des Ternes

Here is the young street and you still a baby
Dressed by your mother only in blue and white
A pious child with your oldest friend René Dalize
You like nothing so much as church ceremonies
Nine o’clock the gas turns blue you slip out of bed
To pray all night in the school chapel
While an eternal adorable amethyst depth
Christ’s flaming halo revolves forever
He is the lovely lily we all worship
He is the red-haired torch no wind may blow out
Pale and scarlet son of the sorrowful mother
Tree hung with prayer
Twofold gallows of honor and eternity
Six-pointed star
God who dies Friday and rises on Sunday
Christ who flies higher than the aviators
And holds the world’s record

Christ pupil of the eye
Twentieth pupil of the centuries he knows his business
And changed to a bird this century ascends like Jesus
Devils in hell raise their heads to stare
They say it imitates Simon Magus in Judea
They say if it lifts to call it a lifter
Angels soar past the young trapeze artist
Icarus Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana
Hover near the original airplane
Or give place to those whom the Eucharist elevates
Priests rising continuously as they raise the Host
At last the plane lands with wings outspread
Through heaven come flying a million swallows
At full speed crows owls falcons
Ibises flamingoes storks from Africa
Roc so celebrated in song and story
Clutching Adam’s skull the original head
Eagle from the horizon pounces screaming
Hummingbird arrives from America
From China long supple phis
Who have only one wing and fly in couples
Here comes the dove immaculate spirit
Escorted by lyrebird and ocellated peacock
That funeral pyre the phoenix engendering himself
Momentarily veils all with his ardent ash
Sirens quit their perilous perches
And arrive each singing beautifully
Everyone eagle phoenix phis
Fraternizes with the flying machine

Now you stride alone through the Paris crowds
Busses in bellowing herds roll by
Anguish clutches your throat
As if you would never again be loved
In the old days you would have turned monk
With shame you catch yourself praying
And jeer your laughter crackles like hellfire
Its sparks gild the depths of your life
Which like a painting in a dark museum
You approach sometimes to peer at closely

Today in Paris the women are bloodstained
It was as I would rather forget it was during beauty’s decline

From fervent flames Our Lady gazed down on me in Chartres
Your Sacred Heart’s blood drowned me in Montmartre
I am sick of hearing blessed words
My love is a shameful disease
You are sleepless anguished but possessed by an image
Which hovers never distant

By the Mediterranean
Under lemon trees that flower the year long
You take ship with friends
One from Nice one from Menton two from La Turbie
Terrified we see in the depths giant squid
And fish the Savior’s symbols gliding through seaweed

In a tavern garden near Prague
You are content instead of writing your stories
To watch a rose on the table and
A rosebug asleep in the rose’s heart

Agahst you trace your likeness in the mosaics at Saint Vitus
And that day almost died of grief to see yourself portrayed
As Lazarus distracted by daylight
The hands of the ghetto clock run backward
You also creep slowly backward through life
Climbing to the hradchen listening at twilight
To Czech songs from the taverns

You in Marseilles among piles of watermelons

You in Coblenz at the Giant’s hotel

In Rome sitting under a Japanese medlar tree

In Amsterdam with a girl you find pretty but who is ugly
And engaged to a student from Leyden
One can rent rooms there in Latin Cubicula locanda
I remember three days there and three at Gouda

You are in Paris arrainged before the judge
Arrested like a criminal

You went on sad and merry journeys
Before growing aware of lies and old age
Love made you unhappy at twenty again at thirty
I have lived like a fool and wasted my youth
You no longer dare examine your hands and at any moment I could weep
Over you over her whom I love over all that has frightened you

With tears in your eyes you see the shabby refugees
Who have faith in God and pray the mothers nurse their children
Their smell fills the waiting room at the gare St. Lazare
Like the three kings they believe in a star
Hoping to strike it rich in Argentina
And return home wealthy
One family carries a crimson quilt as you your heart
Quilt and our dreams are equally unreal
Some of these refugees stay on and lodge
In slums on the rue des Rosiers or the rue des Écouffes
They keep close to home like chessmen
And are mostly Jewish their wives wear wigs
Pallid they sit at the back of little shops

You stand at the counter of a dirty bar
Taking a café for two sous among the wretched

You are in a huge restaurant at night
These women are not evil only careworn
Each has tortured her lover even the ugliest

Who is the daughter of a Jersey policeman

Her hands which I had not noticed are calloused and cracked

Pity fills me for the scars on her belly

Now I humble my mouth to a poor creature with a horrible laugh

You are alone morning comes
Milkmen clink bottles along the street

Night leaves like a lovely Métive
Ferdine the false or watchful Lea

You sip a liquor as burning as your life
Your life you drain like an eau-de-vie

And stride home to Auteil
To sleep among your fetish from Oceania or Guinea
Other forms of Christ and other faiths
Lesser Christs of dim aspirations

Farewell Farewell

Sun slit throat

Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire by Giorgio de Chirico, 1914