To anthropomorphise a bit, literature has always been a little embarrassed that its defining moments of modernity, or Modernism, if you prefer – The Waste Land and Ulysses – appeared so long after the similar moments in art (Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, 1907) and music (The Rite of Spring, 1913).
Ah, but no. You could stretch a point and say that Alfred Jarry kicked things off when Père Ubu first stepped on to the stage and shouted "merdre!" at the audience, and that was in 1896. But that's not quite right. In his 1986 book, The Innocent Eye, the late Professor Roger Shattuck made a compelling case for saying that literature actually got in on the game respectably early, in 1913, when Guillaume Apollinaire, a charming and gifted poet already moving in the milieu of the various -isms that were knocking around Paris at the time, took out all the punctuation from the proofs of his poetry collection Alcools, partly out of exasperation at various printer's errors, and partly out of an inspired realisation that it was unnecessary. (Incidentally, Shattuck also pointed out that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was only visible in Picasso's study for a decade or so.)
The result was an eye-opener, and the first poem, a six-page work called "Zone", set the tone unambiguously and firmly: a mixture of startling imagery, audacious yet grounded prosody, and a close and delighted scrutiny of the everyday; the familiar made new. "A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien," it begins – "In the end you are tired of this ancient world" (and we can make an approving note of the way the poem and the book begin with the words "in the end"). It then goes on to describe, startlingly, the Eiffel Tower as a shepherdess, with bridges of the Seine imagined as her bleating flock. The cars look old, everything looks old, says the poem; everything except Christianity, and the most modern person in Europe is Pope Pius X.
So it's a world of paradox we've stumbled into – and one wonders how Beckett felt about that stuff about religion when he translated it in 1949, around the time he was finishing En Attendant Godot. ("There are some admirable passages," he says in a letter.) It is also a world of charm, and if there are any among you who are thinking along the lines of "modernism – French – Beckett – no punctuation – er, not for me, thanks" I would urge you to reconsider, for Apollinaire's is actually a poetry which invites you, and the world, in, instead of rejecting it in fastidious disdain. I think the world of TS Eliot's poetry, for instance, but there is no gainsaying the fact that he did not like his clerks and typists; but Apollinaire looks at them with a kind of innocent wonder, a come-one-come-all spirit which is full of generosity. There is no elitism in his poetry; and as for the lack of punctuation, you don't even notice it after a few lines.
He did war service, and was wounded, dying in the 1918 flu pandemic; but his war poems are also full of almost artless generosity and tenderness for his fellow soldiers. He does not glorify war like that charlatan Marinetti; he sees it at 90 degrees, in a way, again with something like childlike innocence. (He was popular with everyone he met, and his army comrades changed his real name, Kostrowicki – pronounced "kostrovitski" – to "Cointreau-whisky", which attests to his conviviality.) I suppose this is what Beverley Bie Brahic is trying to capture for us when she uses words such as "tootles" when the French has "sonner", or "clop" for the "pas" of horses' hooves. The French text is given, and his language is easily understood even if your command of French is rudimentary. I could have gone into some detail on my misgivings about the translation, and I have many annotations in my copy which consist simply of the symbol "?", but then he is in a way deceptively easy, and after a while I stopped thinking "I could do better than this". The important thing is that this beautifully produced yet cheap book is a way of reminding us about this genius, and showing us that high, ground-breaking art does not have to be intimidating or forbidding.
