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Apollinaire
Translation: Les Colchiques
- Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 - 1918)
Crocuses
This pasture is poisonous but pretty in autumn
Cows graze there
Slowly poisoning themselves
The crocus color of ashes and of lilac
Flowers there your eyes are like that flower
Violet like their rim and like this autumn
And for your eyes my life is slowly poisoned
The children from the school come with fracas
Dressed in hiccups and playing harmonicas
They gather the crocuses which are like mothers
Daughters of their daughters and the color of your eyes
Which bat as flowers bat in a demented wind.
The cowherd sings so softly
All the while slowly the mooing cows abandon
Forever this wide pasture that autumn has ill-flowered.
--translated by Maryke Cramerus
Les colchiques
Le pré est vénéneux mais joli en automne
Les vaches y paissant
Lentement s’empoisonnent
Le colchique couleur de cerne et de lilas
Y fleurit tes yeux sont comme cette fleur-la
Violatres comme leur cerne et comme cet automne
Et ma vie pour tes yeux lentement s’empoisonne
Les enfants de l’école viennent avec fracas
Vêtus de hoquetons et jouant de l’harmonica
Ils cueillent les colchiques qui sont comme des mères
Filles de leurs filles et sont couleur de tes paupières
Qui battent comme les fleurs battent au vent dément
Le gardien du troupeau chante tout doucement
Tandis que lentes et meuglant les vaches abandonnent
Pour toujours ce grand pré mal fleuri par l’automne
Analyse de texte: Les colchiques
Browsing the internet, I found that the traditional French analyse de texte is still very much alive. I thought I would try my hand at doing such an analysis, roughly equivalent to a close reading, of Les Colchiques. I did not attempt to address the "sonorities," "extended alexandrins" and other points which are lost in a translation. For those who would like more analyses in this vein, including such points, I highly recommend browsing
http://www.litterales.com/litterature2.php
Apollinaire chose to place this poem, first drafted in 1901 and published in 1907, in a rustic environment of autumnal melancholy and hardship, struggle, and deprivation. In "Les Colchiques" a woman the poet loves is associated with a flower, the crocus, which is poisonous and maleficent--an inversion of the myth of the flower-woman. The central idea is that love poisons in a slow, insidious, and imperceptible way, but that love's hunger pushes us to consume the poisonous and seductive-looking flower.
The ever-present background of the poem is autumn's association with approaching winter/death--dramatically heightened by the presence of the autumn-flowering crocus as it poisons the oblivious cows. The crocus simultaneously evokes the destructiveness and even lethality of love, concealed by its seductive and deceptively washed-out colors. These themes of death, waning, and gradual destruction are skillfully interwoven with the traditional trope of the gaze which kills. Apollinaire focuses on the dark-rimmed lowered eyelid and how it hides the woman's gaze, rather than the traditional focus on the gaze itself, often idealized as starry or brilliant in traditional poetry, whereas Apollinaire emphasizes the eyelid's muted, even ashy colors.
The repeated insistence on the slowness of the poisoning of both cows and poet in the first stanza gives these lines an almost hypnotic quality. This contrasts with the staccato jumpiness, quick movements, and giddiness of the second stanza, which uses staccato rhythms and moves rapidly, achieving a kind of tapping effect through rhythmic repetition and repeated use of consonants, along with insistent end rhymes. The vitality of the children breaks the calm of the peaceful landscape, in sharp contrast to the lethargy of the cows.
The poem shifts abruptly again to the languorous phrases of the third stanza. The exaggerated slowness of the lines of this final stanza give it an almost mocking tone. Nonetheless, the cows' failure to comprehend what is happening to them lends a note of pathos, juxtaposed with the poet's unsparing self awareness and acute consciousness that he is being poisoned. Despite this, he seems almost as helpless as the cattle to resist his fate.
There is no real dialog between the poet and the woman he loves, as would be common in traditional love laments. The poet addresses her directly in the first stanza, but she is given no opportunity to respond. Apollinaire suggests that the woman and the crocuses suffer what amounts to a whipping by the demented wind--the poisoners, too, undergo torment, wild disarray, and damage. There is even a suggestion that the woman and the flowers suffer a kind of delirium as the wind batters them.
The use of music in the poem presents an additional element, whose meaning is not made clear. The music of the children playing harmonicas is giddy and heedless, a fracas rather than harmony, but even this discordant and carelessly produced music adds a note of gaiety, undaunted liveliness and exuberance to a scene of hardship, poverty, loss, and impending death. Once again, Apollinaire sets up a contrast: the next music we hear is the cowherd singing softly (possibly evoking Orpheus) as the cows abandon forever the poisonous pasture--suggesting that his subdued song is a lament or even a dirge for the death by poisoning of the poet, hapless creatures, and nature itself as winter approaches.
--Maryke Cramerus
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