translated by Timothy Mathews, Shearsman Books, 2022
https://www.shearsman.com/store/Guillaume-Apollinaire-Seated-Woman-p460651840
Soon, after the war, I’ll wager wishing for it that Montparnasse will have its own nightclubs, its own singers and troubadours just as it has its painters and poets now. When Bruant starts to sign about all the many corners of this area so full of fantasy and fun, the dairies, the barracks-turned-studios on rue Campagne-Première, the extraordinary Diary-Grill on boulevard Montparnasse, the Chinese restaurant just now departed, the Tuesday salons at the Closerie des Lilas, gone since war – that very day, Montparnasse will have lived its time. …
And as a ‘seated woman’ in a time of ‘standing men’, Elvira Swig’s thoughts turned to the pleasures of weakness and the benefits of artifice.
And someone whispers in our ear how the need for a better life is made a mockery of in the endless flow of consumerism; but that fakery involves artifice and artifice has the power to transform; and whether in quaint-female colours or not, with imagination the despair of the phallus can be undermined, and its murderous me-and-not-you self-regard; that an interaction between a text, its translation and its reader might re-kindle a desire for open society; and that artifice, insecurity, and the loosening of fixation might finally erode the killing fields of fear, and the fantasies of righteousness and of absolute power.
To my hope I give the whole future which trembles like a glimmer deep in the forest.
Guillaume Apollinaire,
translated and read by Timothy Mathews in this book
translated and read by Timothy Mathews in this book
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) was at the forefront of the aesthetic revolution that is the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century. In the accompanying memoir to his English translation of Seated Woman, Timothy Mathews gives a wide-ranging account of the ways Apollinaire interacted in his life and art with Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism and Orphism, and the subjective as well as social experiences involved in urban modernism. In its scattered but controlled composition and the multiplicity of its tones, Seated Woman, published posthumously in 1920, is a powerful counterpoint to the multi-faceted poetry for which Apollinaire is often better known. In playing the music of violence as well as the generosity that characterised the Great War, it is a story of its time, for our time and any time. Apollinaire’s writing as a whole is a living testament to the extraordinary creative energy he both witnessed and produced, but also his understanding of its vulnerability to exploitation and decay. This book in turn seeks to honour that understanding, its persistent calls to the imagination, and the wit, vision and honesty that await readers of Apollinaire’s unique voice.
The book includes a memoir by Timothy Mathews in which he discusses Seated Woman and his translation, as well as Apollinaire’s aesthetic generally and its crucial part in the development of European modernism. The book contains more texts in which Timothy Mathews responds to Apollinaire’s writing through translation, as well as critically and creatively combined.
Mary Ann Caws,
City University of New York
Timothy Mathews’ exuberant and hugely inventive translation of the Décaudin edition of Apollinaire’s La Femme assise has, among its many riches, two particular ground-breaking virtues. It offers us a translator’s memoir which is not “autotheory”, but a patient exploration of the ever-shifting existential position of the translator, looking to situate a non-coincident subjecthood in the heart of the text. It also allows us to imagine what that hitherto neglected species might look like – a creative-critical edition of a translated work: a studied, carefully argued incorporation of a text into an intricate meshwork of creative responses, and the extension of these responses into close-lying or related texts. All within a general approach to readers of showing rather than telling.
Clive Scott,
University of East Anglia
University of East Anglia
Here is something I was invited to write when I was translating Seated Woman, where I tried to say what was happening to me and what I was trying to convey:
Imagine a gashing wound. Imagine a wound suffered by a dashing though rather portly lieutenant in the artillery. Imagine him wounded in the head and calling it the arm, in salutation to another damaged poet whose generosity he faulted. Imagine him befriending a painter with blue hands launching himself into painting on the winds of the blue. Imagine an art devoted to understanding the meaning of study and blown apart by World War I. Imagine fearless living lost in deathly confusion. Imagine the confusion of rips and tears and voices shattered like shrapnel shattering. Imagine shards of voice without the magic of breaking to make, and instead a hundred deafnesses and blindnesses each lost in their own hearing and seeing. Imagine living when so many have died and been killed. Imagine joy confused in complacency or the other way around. Imagine inventing the ease and the freedom to shape and fashion, to give birth to all things, and still being stuck in an image of invention. Imagine war giving birth to despair, and then imagine a study of despair in the language of glee. Imagine the protection of an inner world as the only gift people are willing to accept. Imagine inventing utopias for the sake and the beauty of others but enclosing others still further. Imagine the joy of study confused with the joy of cages, all in the name of study. Imagine the volatility of eyes and ears and vocal chords fluttering over the crests of confusion. Imagine rust and poison mixing the colours of living. Imagine the currencies of delusion and poetry confused.
Provoked by Translation, in Provocations Toward Creative-Critical Editing, Textual Cultures, 2022,
edited by Christopher Ohge and Mathelinda Nabugodi
https://www.jstor.org/stable/48687508
edited by Christopher Ohge and Mathelinda Nabugodi
https://www.jstor.org/stable/48687508