Apollinaire's particular off-kilter, deliciously modern genius is evident throughout this bilingual volume, making a native English reader like myself envious that the French, for their poetic modernity, had this while we had those reactionary anti-Semite hand-wringers Pound and Eliot. I became curious about Apollinaire when I began to read Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, who knew him in Paris, and then coincidentally I saw a brilliant little poem of his on the Paris Metro on a brief visit, which in that beautiful city was one of the highlights of my visit. It's a shame he's not better known in English. I studied French in high school and am married to a native French speaker, so a bilingual edition is ideal for me: I can mostly read the French, and when I stumble, my eye flits across to the English to fill in the blank.
However. Oliver Bernard's translation, both to my American eye and my husband's French eye, is a flatfooted fudge that takes unnecessary and damaging liberties with the text. Furthermore, it's bad poetry. The music is wrong. Apollinaire's excitingly compressed syntax has been expanded with helper words and repetitions which only add useless syllables. "Ils ont foi dans leur étoile comme les rois-mages" is translated as "They trust in their stars as the three wise men did in their star," when it could have been "They trust in their star like the wise men" or "They have faith in their star as the wise men did" or something else more compressed with just the same meaning and without the repetition. Worse, the translation itself is not always true: "les poissons images du Saveur" does not mean "Christ's fishes."
For an example of an unforgivable liberty, let's look at the next stanza of the same poem ("Zone"). Apollinaire writes, "Et tu observes au lieu d'écrire ton conte en prose / La cétoine qui dort dans le coeur de la rose." Bernard chooses to translate it thus: "And instead of writing your prose story you look at the metallic / Sheen of the beetle asleep in the heart of the rose." Leave aside for now the appalling clunkiness of the English lines. That "metallic sheen" is not in Apollinaire. If translated more directly, word for word, Apollinaire is saying, "And you observe instead of writing your story in prose / The beetle who sleeps in the heart of the rose." Bernard's clumsy addition discards both the rhyme and the meaning, since the prose of the story is contrasted with an implied poetry in the beetle. Why has he screwed with this? To insert his own personal image of insect iridescence? Perhaps he meant to explain that the "cétoine" is a particular species of pretty beetle, not any old roach? But he lost everything else.
I could go on, but in general, I recommend this translation solely for readers who, like myself, have a basically good reading level in French but need some help with vocabulary and don't want the experience interrupted by constant excursions to the dictionary. I would not read Bernard's English translation on its own paltry merits.
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