The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire / Le Style Apollinaire (1934)

Commentary

Gavronsky, Serge. “Guillaume Apollinaire Subsumed Under Louis Zukofsky’s Gaze: ‘…listening receptively….’” Introduction to The Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire/Le Style Apollinaire (with René Taupin). Wesleyan UP, 2003. xiii-l.

LZ appears to have worked on this book during the latter part of 1931 and finished it on 16 April 1932. This work was originally published in René Taupin’s French translation as Le Style Apollinaire (Paris: Les Presses Modernes, 1934), but soon after almost all the copies were destroyed in a warehouse fire. There was a previous publication of the “English” version of the work, excluding Part II—Le Poète Ressuscité, which consists entirely of quotations from throughout Apollinaire’s work, in The Westminster Magazine 22.4 (Winter 1933) and 23.1 (Spring 1934).

The work was commissioned by LZ’s close friend Taupin (1905-1981), apparently because the latter needed scholarly publications for his academic career. Originally from France, at the time Taupin was teaching at Columbia University, and he would remain primarily in the U.S. throughout the rest of his life, particularly at Hunter College, NYC. LZ would claim that “This ‘collaboration’ was written entirely by L. Z. and the French quotations are also his arrangement. It was consequently translated by R. T. into French, and the French version was published by Les Presses Modernes, Paris, France, 1934” (Booth 187; also photo reproduction of this cover note at 176). So far it has not been possible to verify the precise nature of the “collaboration,” but it is reasonable to assume that Taupin at least contributed significantly through conversations on the project, although the aggressively non-academic presentation of the work seems most likely Zukofsky’s idea. The work might be seen as an early experiment in presentation through extensive quotation that will be pursued by LZ in other critical books, such as A Test of Poetry and Bottom: on Shakespeare.

The notes to the texts, besides referencing the numerous quotations from Apollinaire, provide some intriguing indications of LZ’s additional reading, but, as in “Poem beginning ‘The,’” they are not necessarily always reliable. Most of the references to Dante are in fact quotations, although not indicated as such, from LZ’s Temple Classics edition of Dante’s Latin Works; the De vulgari eloquentia is translated by A.G. Ferrers Howell.

Bits of the Apollinaire project resurface in other LZ works. A translation “The Gathering” (La cueillette), which was not used in The Writings of Apollinaire, appears as part of the Son’s dialogue in Arise, Arise (14, 18), which also includes fragments of other poems that did appear in Writings (23, 25, 26). These latter were included in an arrangement of brief translated quotations from Apollinaire that appeared as the final selection of A Workers Anthology (1934-1935), and an expanded and reordered arrangement was published as “Sequence from ‘The Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire’” published in the Columbia Review 15.4 (May 1934).