Book Description
APOLLINAIRE (1880-1919) was among the great, difficult European moderns -- an early critical champion of cubism and a seminal figure in Surrealist poetry. But in this little book of epigrammatic verse he is wholly accessible, writing in a voice by turns vernacular, lyrical, and bawdy (after all, this is a poet who, after a pious adolescence, supported himself by writing pornography). Our bi-lingual edition of Le Bestiare reprints Apollinaire’s rhymed French quatrains together with free-verse English renderings by Pepe Karmel that capture the young poet in all his irony, humor, and sometimes bitter insight. The thirty striking, original, and delightful woodcuts by the great Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) are reproduced from the book’s first edition, published privately in Paris in 1911.
Back Cover copy
This fascinating mixture of irony, elegance, and sometimes bitter insight is essential to a more complete understanding of Appollinaire's philosophy.
By no means a sober series of poems, the collection sparkles with wit and the Dufy woodcuts, created especially for Bestiary, transform the sequence into an enlightening and amusing work of art. Pepe Karmel's lively, modern translation, rendered in free verse, captures the spirit of the original.
