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The Modernist Bestiary – Translating Animals and the Arts through Guillaume Apollinaire, Raoul Dufy and Graham Sutherland

Edited by Sarah Kay and Timothy Mathews

THE MODERNIST BESTIARY

Apollinaire’s Octosyllabic Quatrain,

Translation and Zoopoetics

Clive Scott

The cumulative preoccupations of this chapter are essentially threefold: to ask what kind of verse metabolism the octosyllable – and particularly the octosyllable of Apollinaire’s Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d’Orphée – is or has, and to propose that it is a metabolism closely related to the translational act; to suggest that this complicity between octosyllable and translation naturally promotes, in a translation of Le Bestiaire, a metamorphic zoopoetics; and to ask in what specific ways the translator of Apollinaire’s octosyllables might further develop this mooted zoopoetics, taking into account the visual languages of Dufy and Sutherland, and the distinction between synaesthesia and intersemiosis.

The opening three poems of Le Bestiaire seem to set an agenda: the poet as Orpheus, polymath, syncretist, the harbinger of Christianity – and the voices of these personae henceforward are not easy to be put apart – praises Dufy’s engravings as the expressive line, as the voice of illumination that emerges from the shadows, possibly the shadows of writing, rather as the two octosyllables (3 > 3 > 2 / 4 > 4) have disengaged themselves from the two trimetric alexandrines (4 > 4 > 4 / 3 > 5 > 4).1

The second poem, ‘La Tortue’ is in octosyllables: Orpheus’s lyre, a gift from Mercury, has a tortoiseshell as soundbox; the animal, even from beyond the grave, is integrated into, is a collaborator in, is the broadcaster of, Orphic music and song, the music and song to which animals are peculiarly attuned.

The third poem, addressed to Pegasus, is accompanied by this commentary: ‘Le premier qui monta Pégase fut Bellérophon quand il alla attaquer la Chimère. Il existe aujourd’hui bien des chimères, et avant de combattre l’une d’elles, la plus ennemie de la poésie, il convient de brider Pégase et même de l’atteler. On sait bien ce

THE MODERNIST BESTIARY