The Self-Dismembered Man - (Wesleyan Poetry) by Guillaume Apollinaire (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

First substantial translation of Apollinaire's later works by an award-winning poet.

Guillaume Apollinaire's final years exactly coincided with the clamorous advent of European Modernism and with the cataclysms of WWI. In The Self-Dismembered Man, poet Donald Revell offers new English translations of the most powerful poems Apollinaire wrote during those years: poems of nascent surrealism, of combat and of war-weariness. Here, too, is Apollinaire's last testament, "The Pretty Redhead," a farewell to the epoch that he--as poet, convict, art-critic, artilleryman and boulevardier--did so much to conjure and sustain until his death on Armistice Day in 1918. Readers of Apollinaire's more familiar early work, Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995), will find here a darker and yet more tender poet, a poet of the broken world who shares entirely the world's catastrophe even as he praises to the end its glamour and its strange innocence. This English translation, facing the original French, illuminates Apollinaire's crucial and continuing influence on the European and American avant-garde. The volume includes a short translator's preface.

Review Quotes

"Here is a work that is devoted, fresh, tender and full of care, both in its selection and in the translation. It succinctly sketches a bridge between Apollinaire, poet of the early 20th century and poetry at present."--Norma Cole, author of Cross-Cut Universe: Writing on Writing From France

"Here is a work that is devoted, fresh, tender and full of care, both in its selection and in the translation. It succinctly sketches a bridge between Apollinaire, poet of the early 20th century and poetry at present."--Norma Cole, author of Cross-Cut Universe: Writing on Writing From France

"This is an outstanding translation. Revell renders the French in just the right idiomatic language."--Marjorie Perloff, author of Wittgenstein's Ladder

About the Author

GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE (1880-1918) was a central figure in the Modernist movement in Europe where, with Matisse, he gave Cubism its name. His books include Calligrammes (1918) and Alcools (1913). DONALD REVELL is a poet and translator. His most recent Wesleyan book is Arcady (2002), which won the 2003 PEN Center USA Poetry Award.