From Apollinaire to the Present

Just started reading The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poety, edited by Mary Ann Caws. I bought it primarily to get at a few French poets very hard to find "by themselves" in translation (e.g., Paul Claudel).

It begins with Guillaume Apollinaire (Guillaume Apollinaris de Kostrowitsky) and ends with Andre Velter. Though I've skipped around a bit (how could I not jump to Picasso's "Her Great Thighs"), I'm trying to pretty much read it straight through. Currently I've just finished up Max Jacob (interesting little fabulous prose poems) and am starting on Pierre-Jean Jouve (Caws throws us an interesting quote from Jouve, psychoanalysis-inspired, in his brief bio: the impulse of eros and death, knotted together).

Though a few lines or so have delighted me (here and there) thus far there's nothing I would call "essential" that I could latch on to (patience, I have many pages and poets to go).

Here is something of that delight. An interesting excerpt from Blaise Cendrars' "The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France":

The Kremlin was like an immense Tartar cake
Iced with gold
With big blanched-almond cathedrals
And the honey gold of the bells . . .
An old monk was reading me the legend of Novgorod
I was thirsty
And I was deciphering cuneiform characters
Then all at once the pigeons of the Holy Ghost flew up over the square
And my hands flew up too, sounding like an albatross taking off
And, well, that's the last I remember of the last day
Of the very last trip
And of the sea.


[Translated by Ron Padgett]