“On the Moor”
translated by Robert Firmage

Wanderer in the black wind; the gaunt reed whispers softly
In the silence of the moors. Against the gray sky
Soars a flight of wild birds,
Crosswise over dark waters.

Uproar. In a ruined hut
Decay flaps upward on black wings;
Stunted birches sigh in the wind.

Evening in an abandoned inn. The gentle melancholy
Of grazing herds envelopes the way home.
Apparition of the night: toads emerge from silver waters.

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Compare Tapscott:

Evening in an empty inn. The placid sadness
of grazing herds enwraps the long way home.
Night’s epiphany: toads bubble up from silver waters.

And Alexander Stillmark from 2001:

Evening in deserted tavern. The homeward path is shrouded
By gentle melancholy of grazing herds,
Appearance of night: toads surface from silver waters.

Firmage and Stillmark’s editions are bilingual, and the introductions are essential for Trakl’s astounding biography.

More translations by Robert Bly and James Wright here, in PDF.

Hear settings of Trakl by Anton Webern here; “Sebastian im Traum,” an orchestral work based on Trakl poem by Hans Werner Henze, here

Read Heidegger’s “Language in the Poem,” in On the Way to Language

Robert Walser wrote a poem about Trakl and let’s hope it shows up in the new volume of his poems coming from New Directions. Meanwhile here’s a very faint recording of a reading of it by Christian Hawkey at a program on Trakl at Poets House last spring.

Now I know what I didn’t then,
when I hoarded my noblest powers
for the final, the decisive act.
Which was an act that had no end,
almost the auto sacramental,
of the baseborn in the hide
of an unrealized quadruped.

From Poetic Diary: 1972

Eugenio Montale, translated by William Arrowsmith
Arrowsmith‘s translations of Montale’s last works are newly collected and will shortly be posthumously published alongside his classic renditions in an edition edited by Rosanna Warren

Read from her introduction here

From The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale: 1925-1977, translated by William Arrowsmith and edited by Rosanna Warren.  Translation copyright © 2012 by Beth Arrowsmith, Nancy Arrowsmith, and Rosanna Warren.

I have never seen
the piranha’s native waters where swimmers
wash back ashore, bones picked clean.

And yet
other waters work with us,
for us, and on us, with an indifferent
monstrous effort of recuperation.
What once they gave,
the waters take back, aided by Time, their unseen
double. And the laving of this feeble, tumid tide
has preyed on us since we abandoned fins
to sprout these limbs of ours—a malformation,
a sad joke which saddled us
with responsibility and bad conscience.

The seething junk my window overlooks—
trash, crates, cars heaped
in the courtyard below,
the slow, smoky flow that streams away
on its own account, ignoring our existence—
all this seemed final proof
that we’re here for something, a trap, a goal.
Seemed, not seems . . . Once upon a time
chestnuts burst in the hot coals, tapers glowed
on the Christmas presents. Now the demon
of the waters no longer bothers apprising us
that we, his spectators and accomplices,
are still only ourselves.

From Poetic Diary: 1972

Eugenio Montale, translated by William Arrowsmith
Arrowsmith‘s translations of Montale’s last works are newly collected and will shortly be posthumously published alongside his classic renditions in an edition edited by Rosanna Warren

Read from her introduction here

From The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale: 1925-1977, translated by William Arrowsmith and edited by Rosanna Warren.  Translation copyright © 2012 by Beth Arrowsmith, Nancy Arrowsmith, and Rosanna Warren.

Writes Warren:

By the time Montale reached his fruitful old age, he was widely recognized as a poet who had revolutionized the art in his native Italy and whose voice reverberated among the great international moderns: Eliot, Pound, and Valéry, along with Yeats and Cavafy. With his first book, Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones) in 1925, Montale both extended the lyric tradition he had inherited from Dante, Petrarch, and Leopardi, and roughened the more recent, nineteenth-century conventions of Italian magniloquence. Each new collection revised the poet’s earlier practice, sometimes savagely, the most dramatic revision occurring with his fourth book, Satura, published in 1971 when he was seventy-five. In each phase, he invented new ways of putting poetic language under stress and of realigning poetry with prose. Montale had also established himself as a voice of conscience, keeping steady vigil throughout the horrors of Fascism and the Nazi Occupation, and the disappointments of postwar corruption and cultural decadence in Italy.

Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa in 1896, the fifth and last child of a well-to-do business family. His father helped to run G. G. Montale & C., a firm that imported turpentine, resins, marine paint, and other chemical products, in 1905 building a villa for family vacations on the Ligurian coast in Monterosso, one of the “Cinque Terre,” five fishing villages all but inaccessible by road. It was a landscape of cliffs, ravines, pelting mountain streams, and the fig trees, cactuses, and small vineyards that wrenched a living from poor soil. Until he was thirty, Montale spent almost every summer here, and this elemental land of rock, sun, and gnashing sea gave him his primary mythology and the imagery of his first book, Ossi di seppia: “To gaze at the cracked earth, the leaves / of vetch, to spy the red ants filing past, / breaking, then twining, massing / at the tips of tiny sheaves” (from “Meriggiare pallido e assorto,” “To laze at noon, pale and thoughtful”).

Montale recreated the harsh Ligurian scenes in a correspondingly harsh language. In his Imaginary Interview from 1946, he links his discovery of poetic voice to his imaginative possession of the landscape in his first fully realized poem, “Meriggiare.” He also associates the discovery of voice with an assault on poetic diction. Alluding to Verlaine’s famous poem “Art poétique”—“Prends l’Éloquence et tords-lui son cou,” “Take eloquence and wring its neck”—Montale asserted, “I wanted to wring the neck of eloquence of our old aulic language, even at the risk of a counter-eloquence.”^[1] “I limoni” (“The Lemon Trees”), the poem that opens the main body of Ossi, starts by declaring war on “the laureled poets,” the hyper-literary, classicizing bards (D’Annunzio most of all): “Listen: the laureled poets / stroll only among shrubs / with learned names: ligustrum, acanthus, box. / What I like are streets that end in grassy / ditches where boys snatch / a few famished eels from drying puddles. . . .” Montale’s verbal textures reproduce these famished scenes: his rhymes are dissonant, his metrics irregular, and he goes against the grain of Italian lyricism by clotting his lines with rough, doubled consonants: “mezzo seccate agguantano i ragazzi. . . .” One has to go back to Dante to find such choking sounds in Italian poetry.

 “Naturally, the great seedbed of any poetic renewal is in the field of prose,” Montale wrote in the Imaginary Interview. Despite ruptures of style from book to book, the poet remained faithful to this insight throughout his life, and a major challenge in appreciating his last five collections (Satura through Diario postumo) lies in having to discern in each new volume the artistic rationale in poems that seem more and more radically conceived as prose. But he had grafted prose elements into verse right from the beginning.

Another feature of the earliest poems that persists throughout the oeuvre is the sense of metaphysical entrapment. Unlike the other Ligurian poets of the period—Ceccardo Roccatagliata-Ceccardi, Giovanni Boine, and Montale’s friend Camillo Sbarbaro—Montale was never only a regional poet. His Liguria gave him not only gods of sun and sea, but a feeling of imprisonment, of isolation, of being separated from others by a “glass bell,” as he said in the Imaginary Interview, of being deprived of transcendental meanings that the Catholic faith, or any other faith, might have afforded. “Meriggiare” concludes:

And then, walking out, dazed with light,
to sense with sad wonder
how all of life and its hard travail
is in this trudging along a wall spiked
with jagged shards of broken bottles.

Through the poems reflecting the suffocation of Fascism and war, and the later poems haunted by images of birds trapped in nets and of human prisoners, Montale tests the prison walls of consciousness with his only instruments, poetic language and a rigorous skepticism.

The classicist William Arrowsmith spent the fiercest energy of his late years translating the poetry of Montale. His translations of Montale are poetric re-creations of a high order, reflecting Arrowsmith’s lifelong devotion to the art and his particular devotion to the art of Montale.  The last two books of Montale that Arrowsmith translated, Diario del ’71 e del ’72 (1973) and Quaderno di quattro anni (1977), published now for the first time, pursue his poetics of reduction ever more grimly. More and more, the poet meditates on the very conditions of his art, as in “Poor Art,” evoking (yet again) bird traps, and the poet’s makeshift paintings composed with “wine, coffee, and flecks / of toothpaste.” Or “My Muse,” in which the Muse has become a scarecrow: “She still has / one sleeve, with which she conducts her scrannel / straw quartet. It’s the only music I can stand.”

Language itself, both private and public, is seen in these late poems as madness, darkness, delusion. Reputation is a latrine. The Muse in Quaderno, in “Fire and Darkness,” can’t even click a flame out of a pocket lighter:

She’s lied too often, now let darkness,
void, nothingness fall on her page.
Rely on this, my scribbling friend:
trust the darkness when the light lies.

And yet, Beckett-like, in these palinodes and snarls, Montale attains time and again a contrarian grandeur, and by a via negativa renews faith in the art he punishes, the logos he outrages and from which he demands so much. Language and art appear in late Montale as broken promises. But they are still promises. Once again, as in “The Eel” of La bufera, out of death springs life, and out of darkness leaps light:

. . . the green soul seeking
life where there’s nothing but stinging
drought, desolation;
spark that says
everything begins when everything seems
dead ashes, buried stump. . .

We’ll have a few of Arrowsmith’s last translations for you as the week goes by.

Order The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale: 1925-1977 here.

For comparison readers might like to consider Jonathan Galassi’s translation of Montale’s three major works, Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, and The Storm and Other Things, recently released in a revised paperback edition.

And, read Rosanna Warren on Max Jacob and the poetry of Picasso’s circle in the Bateau lavoir here in Little Star!

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Montale’s Imaginary Interview appears in Marco Forti, Per conoscere Montale (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), translation by Rosanna Warren.

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This essay is adapted from Rosanna Warren’s capacious introduction to The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale: 1925-1977, translated by William Arrowsmith and edited by Rosanna Warren.  Translation copyright © 2012 by Beth Arrowsmith, Nancy Arrowsmith, and Rosanna Warren. Diario del ’71 e del ’72 copyright © 1973 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A. , Milano. With permission from the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

He said, “Bombay blues.”

A taste from Jeet Thayil’s delerious new novel, Narcopolis, to be published this spring by Penguin Press.  Order now!

Thayil is a poet and musician based in Bombay.

Hear his own music here.

From NARCOPOLIS, by Jeet Thayil. Published by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Jeet Thayil, 2012

Their affinity made the heavens slate
the desert for a miracle. There, they chose to light
a fire and camp, the cave in a vortex of snow.
Not divining his role, the Infant drowsed
in a halo of curls that would quickly become
accustomed to radiance. Its glow would climb—
beyond that dark-skinned enclave—to rise
like the light of a star that endures
as long as the earth exists: everywhere.

December 25, 1988

БЕГСТВО В ЕГИПЕТ

…погонщик возник неизвестно откуда.

В пустыне, подобранной небом для чуда,
по принципу сходства, случившись ночлегом,
они жгли костер. В заметаемой снегом
пещере, своей не предчувствуя роли,
младенец дремал в золотом ореоле
волос, обретавших стремительно навык
свеченья — не только в державе чернявых,
сейчас, но и вправду подобно звезде,
покуда земля существует: везде.

25 декабря 1988

From

Nine new poems by Melissa Green based on the anonymous call-and-response poems, perhaps of the sixteenth century, “Tom O’Bedlam” and “Mad Maud’s Song,” appear in the newly issued Little Star #3.

well boss i saw mehitabel
last evening
she was out in the alley
dancing on the cold cobbles
while the wild december wind
blew through her frozen whiskers
and as she danced
she wailed and sang to herself
uttering the fragments
that rattled in her cold brain
in part as follows

whirl mehitabel whirl
spin mehitabel spin
thank god you re a lady still
if you have got frozen skin

blow wind out of the north
to hell with being a pet
my left front foot is brittle
but there’s life in the old dame yet

dance mehitable dance
caper and shake a leg
what little blood is left
will fizz like wine in a keg

wind come out of the north
and pierce to the guts within
but some day mehitabel’s guts
will string a violin

Further Christmas presents for people who already have Little Star #3, Everyman Library’s new anthology of Don Marquis‘s Archy and Mehitabel, reset, apparently, for the first time in half a century, with E. B. White’s introduction of 1950. (Though one would miss one’s 1930 edition, with pages as thick as slices of bread.) It was a far different newspaper reader that found these tales of a free-verse poet transubstantiated as a cockroach typing out his woes and those of his friend Mehitabel the cat in the Evening Sun of 1916. Type on, old friend, type on.

moon you re as cold as a frozen
skin of a yellow banan
that sticks in the frost and ice
on top of a garbage can

and you throw a shadow so chilly
that it can scarcely leap
dance shadow dance
you ve got no place to sleep…

eight of my lives are gone
it s years since my fur was slicked
but blow north wind blow
i m damned if i am licked

girls we was all of us ladies
we was o what the hell
and once a lady always game
by crikey blood will tell

i might be somebody s pet
asleep by the fire on a rug
but me i was always romantic
i had the adventurous bug

caper mehitabel caper
leap shadow leap
you gotto dance till the sun comes up
for you got no place to sleep

i might have been many a tom cat s wife
but i got no regret
i lived my life as i liked my life
there s pep in the old dame yet…

dance mehitabel dance
till your old bones fly apart
i ain t got any regrets
for i gave my life to my art

whirl mehitabel whirl
caper my girl and grin
and pick at your guts with your frosty feet
they re the strings of a violin

girls we was all of us ladies
until we went and fell
and oncet a thoroughbred always game
i ask you whotthehell…

On April 13, 1904, Pablo Picasso and his friend the Catalan painter Sebastià Junyer Vidal travelled from Barcelona to Paris and installed themselves in Montmartre in the studio just vacated by the Basque ceramicist and sculptor Paco Durrio. Junyer Vidal paid the rent. Called “La Maison du Trappeur” (The Trapper’s House), later renamed Le Bateau Lavoir by its denizens, this ex-piano factory and ex-locksmith shop converted to a congeries of studios in 1889 could be entered on the first floor from the rue Ravignan, but plunged in the rear down three storeys to the rue Garreau. Various Spanish artists had preceded Picasso in the building, including his older friends Ricard Canals and Joaquim Sunyer. In the 1880s it had been a popular haunt for anarchists, Gauguin had visited often, and the poet-dramatic Paul Fort had lived there while directing his Symbolist Théâtre de l’Art across the square. Poet Max Jacob, who visited every day and later lived there for a while, evoked it often. In a lecture in 1937 he remembered: “Picasso returned with what the dealers have called the Blue Period paintings, vaguely imitative of El Greco. He led me to the crown of the Butte Montmartre. We scorned all previous art and all the schools, and in the evenings, to amuse ourselves, we improvised plays, without spectators, which we never wrote down and which concluded in wild bursts of laughter. He lived at 13 rue Ravignan, today called the Place Emile Goudeau, a sort of hangar made of ill-fitting boards, at once cellar and attic, poised on a kind of cliff Montmartre still hardly conceals with its huge new apartment houses. Our neighbors were quasi-laundresses (de vagues blanchisseuses) and a fruit and vegetable vendor, and those poor people complained of the noise Picasso’s bitch Frika made at night with her chain.”In a memoir from 1933, Jacob gave even more detail: “A real barn, that studio of Picasso’s, with exposed beams, walls made of ill-fitting boards, an unbelievable floor on which one couldn’t walk without waking the neighbors…The admirable Mme. Coudray, the concierge, knew how to be kind when the rent was due, and how to put up with noise. Ah! Those dear old days of poverty, work, friendship, and joy. Many of the studios were cellars, and the stairs were never swept. Everything was made of wood.”

Junyer Vidal returned soon to Barcelona, so during Picasso’s first six weeks at the Bateau Lavoir the crowd was reduced to Jacob, a theatrical thief named Manolo, and a Gypsy guitarist, Fabián de Castro, who slept on the floor. Jacob visited every day. The complex tone of their friendship, tinged with Jacob’s adoration, irony, and self-abasement, can be gleaned from this memoir the poet composed in 1931:

It’s 1904, Picasso is already strong but his visitors are still only the picturesque Manolo and a poor little Jew (that’s what Vollard called him) who doesn’t believe he’s a poet. I lived at Barbès. I arrived at 13 rue Ravignan early in the morning. To my own bare bed, and my dark little work table, I preferred this doorway that had pretensions to grandeur a hundred years earlier, and Picasso’s narrow door decorated with bits of practical advice. It was at the end of a catwalk corridor, above the invisible cliffs of Montmartre geology, at the end of a cliff of stairs.

I called out his name. Hardly awake, Picasso opened the door. I had arrived across all the stone steps of Montmartre and oceanic Paris seen from on high.

Yet Jacob was far from craven in his relations with Picasso. Salmon remembers Jacob in the role of elder friend, initiator, and magus, calling the young painter mon petit.  The friendship between Picasso and Jacob in this period left many relics in the drawings they did of themselves and of each other. An ink drawing of Picasso in profile by Jacob is annotated in Picasso’s hand, “Retrato hecho por Max Jacob” (Portrait made by Max Jacob). It shows an exaggeratedly large head of dark hair—yet another homage to genius?—an intensely focused eye and thin mustache, a mustache that would soon disappear. Picasso’s portrait of Jacob, on café note paper, shows the writer, also in profile, with a high, bald forehead; scruffy hair still adorning the back of his skull; a dark, intelligent gaze further darkened by a pince-nez; a firm, compressed mouth; and strong chin. This is a portrait of power, not of pathos, and reminds us that the bond between the two men was not simply a matter of subservience on the part of one and dominance by the other. “I was no longer a store clerk,” Jacob remembers. “I wrote verses because Picasso thought I had talent and I believed in him more than in myself. As for my prose poems that would be published and appreciated later, I was far from suspecting they would succeed. I also wrote children’s stories; I lived in frightful poverty, but I didn’t want any more jobs.” Picasso plays the role, in this narrative, of liberating genius. Jacob told the memoirist Robert Guiette, “Picasso had come back from Spain and found Max desperate over the loss of his job. ‘What kind of life is that?’ Picasso asked. ‘Live like the poets!’ ” The liberation, the imperative to follow a life of art, extended even to physical appearance. Jacob told Maurice Martin du Gard in 1920, “It’s Picasso who changed my life…It was he who told me, ‘Shave off your beard.’ He who told me, ‘Take off your pince-nez, wear a monocle. Don’t be time-puncher. Live like a poet.’ ”

Jacob not only “lived like” a poet in 1904. He was writing groundbreaking poems. When he wrote Tristan Tzara in 1916 that it was only in 1905 that he had “become” a poet, he must have been referring to his first serious publication, the five poems in Les Lettres modernes in May 1905. But by now Jacob had been writing for years. “Écrit en 1904,” which would appear in print for the first time only in 1921 in Le Laboratoire central, shows him already in command of sophisticated maneuvers which we recognize in hindsight as Modernist: a mobile geography, mobile and plural pronouns and centers of consciousness, discontinuities in tone and register, non-sequiturs, abrupt juxtapositions of reference and address, a dissonant prosody. “Écrit en 1904” is a fine example of an art of controlled discontinuity.

If I recall, the place of Pilate’s tomb
Was in Vienna, or else in Draguignan
Abd-el-Kader’s sons snapped photos there
To hang up as ex-votos in fresh air
Goddesses spun their silk from ocean foam
And fished for golden coinage in the ponds
Washerwomen beat the hours to pass the time
And the Loire revealed its soul at every bend…

…The sky contracts two atmospheres to one stair
…So patriarchs could prophesy from there

White sailors dressed in Oceanic blue
Offered Pilate’s glove to lordly Baal
And telepathy in telegrams seeping through
Inspired in all the cult of Pilate’s soul
The politicians and the men of Theodose
Had also taken of Pilate a mighty dose
Pantheons paralyzed for a hundred years
Are stirred by lightning and by blood besmeared.

“Écrit en in 1904” not only veers wildly in time and space, from Draguignan to Vienna, from Biblical Jerusalem to the chic new American cocktails in Paris; it imagines the city of Paris itself in motion, like a barge moving up the river. Male and female identities blend: “Moi j’ai les plus beaux bras, toi les plus beaux tétons/A nous deux nous ferions une femme parfaite” (I have the handsomest arms, you the handsomest tits/Together we’d make a perfect woman). What keeps this centrifugal poem coherent is the abstraction of poetic form: the kitsch alexandrines and rhyming couplets of the opening and closing passages provide the grid that allows the poem’s psychic vagrancies. “Écrit en 1904” comments comically on its own deformation of inherited form. On the one hand, “Double-six! À moi la pause!” (Double sixes! My turn to pause!) refers to a throw of the dice, an image taken from Mallarmé’s radical work Un coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice) which Jacob would recall in the title of his collection of prose poems in 1917, Le Cornet à dés (The Dice Cup). But it also describes, saucily, the classical, twelve-syllable alexandrine, complete with the central caesura: “À moi la pause!” In “Écrit en 1904,” the dismantling of a single center of consciousness, the social satire, the jangling of high diction with slang, the hallucinatory geographies, the puns (“Amer” means both “bitter” and “American”), all set the stage for an interpenetration of natural and supernatural realms, and the liberation of the soul from the social self. The poem maintains a comic relation to Christianity—it depicts, after all, a world devoted to Pilate—but Jesus does appear as an opening between realities, a force which compels a change of route (“Jésus barre la route entre les boulingrins”; Jesus obstructs the path between the bowling greens), and the poem concludes in a vision of sacrifice, worldly glory exploding in lightning and blood. Whether or not that blood might redeem is a question this poem leaves open.

A definition of modernity in poetry that Jacob gave to Marcel Béalu in 1939 describes the principles at work in his poems from 1904: “complexity in form; dominance of interior harmony over meaning; speed in the association of images, ideas, and words; love of words; surprises, willed or not; the appearance of dream or dream itself; invisible rhythms.” The disjunctive method permitted exploration of his perpetual themes, humour/amour (humor and love, a generative pun in French, with humor correcting and protecting love), and his descent into the unconscious where, he came to feel, he led the way for other poets.

* * *

Cooking was difficult in the studios, so the gang would often rollick down the Butte to eat at the grubby little restaurant run by le Père Vernin on rue Cavalotti, near the Place de Clichy. Vernin sometimes charitably forgot the bills his artist clients ran up, and they could usually count on a coarse but robust meal there. Actors as well as painters and writers turned up, and Fernande Olivier remembered the young Christiane Mancini memorizing her lines from the play propped up against her carafe of rouge. Gallivanting down the hill for yet another greasy meal at Vernin’s, the companions would chant Jacob’s ditty:

I’m tired of eating at Vernin’s
But that’s where everybody goes
Because they serve wine in thimblefuls
And helpings of cream cheese…

When they weren’t eating at Vernin’s, they stayed closer to the Sacré Coeur and went to Azon, who ran a little bistro called Les Enfants de la Butte. A meal there cost only 90 centimes, and Azon, susceptible to the idea of literary glory, often extended credit to writers, trusting he’d be paid back when their books appeared. He broke with André Salmon, however, when he discovered his client really hadn’t written the articles signed Paul Adam, Maurice Maeterlinck, and René Maizery, as he had claimed. Some nights—not often, because Picasso usually painted from 10 p.m. until dawn—the gang turned up at Le Lapin Agile, where Frédé’s wife Berthe served a hearty meal which cost two francs, but which Picasso and his friends could sometimes wangle for less. Dancing, at least, was provided by Jacob, famous for his jigs on the tabletop. Nobody needed to pay admission to a nightclub when Max Jacob could fly into his impersonation of a barefoot female entertainer, his trousers rolled up to expose his hairy legs; his vest tossed aside; his shirtsleeves flapping and his shirt unbuttoned over his thick, crinkly, dark chest hair; his bald head and his pince-nez gleaming as he wriggled, dipped, sashayed, and pointed his toes. Or he would snatch a woman’s hat and place it on his head, wrap himself in a shawl, and warble lyrics of sentimental ballads and comic opera, most memorably Hervé’s “Langouste atmosphérique” until the room collapsed in laughter.

Frédé kept a guest book. On one of its pages, one can chart the progress of the evening in Jacob’s improvised verses:

9 p.m.
Finding the rhyme for Frédéric
There’s the “hic”!
I prefer to wait to be drunk
Before I write aboard your book.

2 a.m.

On board! Piano A. Bord.
Ship’s register, bored,
Paris, the pensive sea will bring
Right to your door this evening
O innkeeper of the Misty Quai
Your sheaf of spray.

By this time, Jacob had initiated his walking discipline: in rambles throughout the city, he forced himself, in each interval between lamp posts, to come up with a new image or poetic idea or “relationship to a subject, whether a person, an object, a poster, a billboard, a postcard.” If no idea appeared, he halted at the lamp post until something occurred to him and he jotted it down (sometimes on telegraph blanks filched from a post office). These exercises contributed to the concentrated form of the poems. “Poème simultané avec superposition simple” (called simply “Poème” in Le Cornet) already has full control of pace and tone. It also has Jacob’s characteristic disorientation of narrative line, speaker, and personae; his teasing game between truth and falsehood; his ironic relationship to a classical past; and the geometric abstraction imposed by the title.

Simultaneous Poem with Simple Superposition

“What do you want of me?” says Mercury.
“Your smile and your teeth,” says Venus.
“They’re false. What do you really want of me?”
“That rod of yours.”
“I can’t be parted from it.”
“So bring it over here, heavenly postman.”

You should read this in the original Greek: it’s called Idyll. At school a friend of mine, who was always failing his exams, told me, “If you translated one of Daudet’s novels into Greek, you’d be pretty clued up when it came to the exam! But I can’t work at night. It makes my mother cry!” You should read that in the original Greek as well, gentlemen; it’s an idyll too, eidullos, a moving little scene. (translation by Christopher Pilling and David Kennedy)

“For me,” argues Jacob in a letter of the period, “a work of art must be estranged from its author. I do not mean by the word ‘estranged’ a synonym for the word ‘exteriorized,’ as that goes without saying, nor a synonym for the word ‘impersonal’; a work estranged from its author is a work which, since it does not reflect him, cannot be substituted for him, if I may say so, as a core of force, but which truly adds to the cosmic patrimony. I don’t claim that my prose poems fulfill this ideal, but they lean in that direction, and their author expects soon to succeed in stepping outside himself. From a purely artistic standpoint, works estranged from their author gain in ‘perspective,’ in ‘mystery,’ and in ‘aerial arabesque.’ ” Though there have been objections to the idea of Cubist poetics, the poems’ disturbances do present a literary analogy to the disruptions Picasso and Braque would introduce in the depiction of objects in space—three years later—disruptions and discontinuities that may have shared a birthplace in the jagged passageways of the Bateau Lavoir.

Read more in Little Star #3! (Documentation for this article here)

Rosanna Warren teaches English and Comparative Literature at Boston University. Her most recent book of poems is Ghost in a Red Hat. She is currently at work on a biography of Max Jacob, from which “Live Like a Poet” is drawn. More of her translations of Max Jacob appear in her book Stained Glass

More on the Bateau Lavoir years:

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The new agoras here are shockingly familiar: the leather-clad club smoking room; the market square traversed by disgruntled, string-bag-toting women;  the gleaming conference table of the network talk show; the anodyne vistas of the televized town hall; the buzzing aisles of parliament; the impeccable bourgeois living room with its doom-filled television.  We are not trading a set of contemporary conventions for a set of antique ones: we are plunged into our lived reality, a particularly precise European reality.  And here we find, spattered with blood or wearing a tie on news at 11, utterly natural characters, in extremis, speaking in flawlessly inflected iambic pentameter as though there were no other way to communicate.   And we are recalled, after long absence, to a great sonic tradition in which our language elevates and expands to embrace a dramatically heightened existential situation.

In the beginning, like Feinnes’s stiffened and unweildily powerful body, the formality of verse underlines the gravity of the stately roles the characters are driven into by convention. But after the cathartic break, in which an enraged Coriolanus howls at his betrayers as they expel him from power and morphs into a sleek, pantherlike predator, verse becomes the medium of passions and compulsions too huge to convey in ordinary language. (The testosterone-soaked world of the rebel camp is more Fight Club than I, Claudius.) In the pivotal moments in which Coriolanus’s resolve to turn on his own people coalesces, Fiennes slows his delivery down from a howl to a crawl, and the expectation of the end of the pentameter line draws us forward, like the world slowly turning, into the horrible inevitability of his intention.

The notions of honor turned in the light here, which make Coriolanus such a chill and unlovable play, are mercilessly exposed by the contemporary setting. We would not speak of our deeds in this way now, but we continue to act this way. Hearing shapely pentameter spoken by a soldier in camouflage fatigues forcing his way through a warren of apartments and blowing away civilians invites us to reinhabit the whole history of violence and its ritual justifications, some of which occupy some of our most exalted cultural peaks.  One almost feels that the generations of those who watched such plays within the relatively tame confines of the theater were protected from their most harrowing implications.  Coriolanus is driven by honor’s script, a script at the heart of his author’s métier and embedded in the inevitabilities of his heroic language, to horrors one can scarcely imagine.

In Fiennes’s Coriolanus, the action is framed for history by the television, which both authorizes and prompts the mob. When Coriolanus refuses to satisfy the mob by displaying his wounds and juicing his victories, he comes closest to tempting us to admire him, and he also seems most nearly to ventriloquize the poet, more dependent perhaps than he wishes on the penny-paying audience at the footlights.  In this way the play seems not only to comment on the self-consuming ethics of power but an analogous aesthetic peril—a peril apparently close to the heart of the director and star, who has spent a career refusing to beguile his audience. It is the transformations of verse that make the playwright, like the victorious general, a potential liberator or a potential monster. Fiennes uses the ancient power of verbal song and the modern power of film together as no one has before to register the depths of these terrible truths. He, and his master Shakespeare, leave in the wings for the nonce the wonders and consolations that art can bring.

Showtimes here.

Your editor is troubled that she has not been able to find an authoritative guide to styling poetry typographically. For some reason the usual sources are silent on this point. Plunging bravely into the breach, we attempt one here, inviting comment. The world will little note, nor long remember, etc., but for some of us such matters are tender.

Two main issues present themselves: how to handle run-on lines and how to break stanzas at the bottom of the page.

We consulted Edward Mendelson, fortuitously expert in both poetry and typography, who confirmed that Auden, for one, followed many poets in favoring setting run-on lines to the right.  Mendelson’s formulation:

“The ‘turnovers’ should be set on the right, indented so that the first words of the turnover is somewhat to the left of the end of the last word of the first part of the line.

This is a line that is going to be turned over
.                                                                like this.”

He identified a potential exception, when “the next line is very short, not long enough to overlap with the turnover from the preceding line. This creates a ‘river’ of white space that falsely suggests to the eye that a break is present when there shouldn’t be, like this:

This is is a line that is going to be turned over
.                                                                  like this
And this line looks like a new stanza.

To solve this, you need to move the turnover part back to the left to block the ‘river’ like this:

This is is a line that is going to be turned over
.                                                            like this
And this line is clearly not a new stanza.”

When such fine-tuning is not available Mendelson indents turnovers at least twice a far as an indented line. (Another point: Would the consensus be that the standard indent should be the depth of a paragraph indent, unless the poet indicates otherwise?)

We have followed this model for Little Star, but we have identified a few problems and questions.

When a poem has many long lines that require turnovers, and they are set to the right, creating a sequence of double spaces on the left, it becomes difficult to see the shape of the stanza.  This led us to reflect on the fact that the reader first of all experiences a stanza visually—an expectation that is, or can be, confirmed by meter or rhyme or other formal devices. There seems an argument, in a poem with many run-on lines, for indenting them regularly toward the left in order to preserve the visual block of the stanza.

Another question: Should more than one turnover be set flush to the right, or to a constant right vertical, or should they be variable with the length of the first half of the line? Variable turnovers may make them look more like a natural continuation of the line, but the effect on the right can be very ragged.

In Little Star we went to great lengths to preserve a long line, creating customized margins and shrinking fonts for individual poems. We worried a bit that the effect of this might be jarring to the eye.

On the second point, Auden, Mendelson, and our own informal polling definitely show a preference keeping stanzas together at the bottom of the page, which we also did in Little Star, but it can create an ambiguity.  We had two groups of poems that were untitled parts of series’. In such cases it can be ambiguous whether the next page begins a new poem or is a continuation of the previous one when the bottoms of the pages are various. If readers see a regular horizon at the bottom of the page, they tend not to notice divided stanzas and to recognize the ends of poems and the presence of extra space between stanzas more easily.

Where stanzas are or must be broken, they should be broken between rhymed sections or leaving an even number of lines, unless rhymes are in odd-numbered groupings. Mendelson never breaks a stanza of four lines or less and always leaves at least two lines on either side. He recommends leaving extra space to indicate a break between stanzas at the bottom of the page, if necessary introducing a figure.

We most humbly beg deeper minds to weigh in on these urgent matters.