No flowers left but strange signs
gesturing down the blue nights
in my prolonged adoration Lou
my whole being bows down
with the low clouds of July
before your memory
It is a white plaster head buried
helplessly next a golden ring
and our promises are remoter echoes
they sound sometimes strangely
There is a permanent white noise
my caustic solitude is lit up only
by the great searchlight my love
I can hear the bass voice of Big Bertha
And down by the trenches
in front of me a cemetery
has been sown
with forty-six-thousand soldiers
after such sowings we must
wait with serenity for harvest
If ever there were desolation
it is here where I write my letter
leaning on a slab of asbestos
I keep looking at your portrait
the one with the wide hat
Some of my comrades have seen your photo
and assuming that I know you
they ask who is she
and I can’t quite think what to say
seeing as even now I hardly know you
Which pierces me
and deep inside the photograph
you are smiling still like light
Original poem
Plus de fleurs mais d’étranges signes
Gesticulant dans les nuits bleues
Dans une adoration suprême mon beau ptit Lou que
tout mon être pareil aux nuages bas de juillet
s’incline devant ton souvenir
Il est là comme une tête de plâtre blanche,
éperdument auprès d’un anneau d’or
Dans le fond s’éloignent les voeux qui se retournent quelquefois
Entends jouer cette musique toujours pareille tout le jour
Ma solitude splénétique qu’éclaire seul le lointain
Et puissant projecteur de mon Amour
J’entends la grave voix de la grosse artillerie boche
Devant moi dans la direction des boyaux
Il y a un cimetière où l’on a semé quarante-six mille soldats
Quelles semailles dont il faut sans peur attendre la moisson !
C’est devant ce site désolé s’il en fut
Que tandis que j’écris ma lettre appuyant mon
papier sur une plaque de fibro ciment
Je regarde aussi un portrait en grand chapeau
Et quelques-uns de mes compagnons
ont vu ton portrait
Et pensant bien que je te connaissais
Ils ont demandé :
« Qui donc est-elle ? »
Et je n’ai pas su que leur répondr
Car je me suis aperçu brusquement
Qu’encore aujourd’hui je ne te connais pas bien
Et toi dans ta photo profonde comme la lumière
tu souris toujours.
Notes on this poem
Of the translations, or transpositions, that appear in MPT 3/7 ‘Love and War’, the first four are taken from Apollinaire’s collection Poèmes à Lou, which was published posthumously in 1947, almost thirty years after the poet’s death. The delay was due in part to the fact that the correspondence in which these poems are inserted had to be discovered, and in part due to the explicit nature of some of the material, all the more startling in its conflation of erotic conceit and martial imagery, the latter drawn spontaneously from Apollinaire’s daily life as an artilleryman on the Champagne front. He served there from 1915 until he was wounded in the head on 17 March 1916, just a week after he was awarded French nationality. Apollinaire enlisted, and in April 1915 entrained North from Nîmes, bathed in the afterglow of a week of what appears to have been sweet and wild sexual ecstasy in the company of Louise de Coligny-Châtillon – “Lou” – a young aristocratic beauty he had just met in Nice, and whose every aspect seemed to correspond point for point with the poet’s ideal. The erotic pressure, a mixture of memory and desire, is unrelenting in the torrential letters and poems that he fired off to Lou in the weeks and months after their encounter. At their best, the poems draw into the vortex of longing the extraordinary sights and sounds of the Western Front; they are a wholly original mixture of French classicism in the style of the blasons du corps feminin, and modernist inclusiveness and invention. The Poèmes à Lou stand alongside the more famous Calligrammes in their “celebration” – which is still startling to those accustomed to the poetry of protest of the British War Poets – of the “matériel” of war. Not that Apollinaire was in any way duped, as the poem “Cornflower” (written later, in 1917) makes clear. As for Lou, she replied more and more evasively to her lover’s declarations; and after two brief leaves of absence early on in 1915, Apollinaire never saw her again, though the letters and poems continued until January 1916.
