Product Description
Guillaume Apollinaire's final years exactly coincided with the clamorous advent of European Modernism and with the cataclysms of WWI. In The Self-Dismembered Man, poet Donald Revell offers new English translations of the most powerful poems Apollinaire wrote during those years: poems of nascent surrealism, of combat and of war-weariness. Here, too, is Apollinaire's last testament, "The Pretty Redhead," a farewell to the epoch that he--as poet, convict, art-critic, artilleryman and boulevardier--did so much to conjure and sustain until his death on Armistice Day in 1918. Readers of Apollinaire's more familiar early work, Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995), will find here a darker and yet more tender poet, a poet of the broken world who shares entirely the world's catastrophe even as he praises to the end its glamour and its strange innocence. This English translation, facing the original French, illuminates Apollinaire's crucial and continuing influence on the European and American avant-garde. The volume includes a short translator's preface. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Very good collection.
Guillaume Apollinaire, The Self-Dismembered Man (Wesleyan, 2004)

This selection of Apollinaire's war poems, translated by Donald Revell, is not the "first substantial translation" the jacket claims (both the Selected Poems and Michael Benedikt's must-have collection The Poetry of Surrealism contain extensive selections from the same time-period), but it certainly is a substantial work, and one that everyone who claims to be a fan of surrealism needs to read, and pronto. Revell's translations have an almost singular ability to keep Apollinaire's subtle wit intact, and his word choices often allow a number of different interpretations to come through. Not to say that some of Revell's word choices emphasize certain interpretations; there's no way to avoid this when translating poetry. Still, he seems to have made a conscious effort to be as ambiguous as Apollinaire wherever possible, which is a wonderful thing.

The only slipping point is the final poem, "La Jolie Rousse," but then I've had problems with every translation of "La Jolie Rousse" since Hamburger's a quarter of a century ago, so my thoughts aren't to be trusted on that one.

Very good stuff, well worth picking up. **** ... Read more

Product Description
Flesh Unlimited is a compendium edition of three classic erotic/ surrealist novellas: Les Onze Mille Verges and Les Mémoires d'un Jeune Don Juan by Guillaume Appollinaire and Le Con d'Irène by Louis Aragon.

Dadaist poet Guillaume Apollinaire fine-tuned his uniquely poetic and surreal vision to produce these two materpieces of the explicit erotic imagination at the turn of the century, works which compare with the best of the Marquis de Sade. In Les Onze Milles Verges, debauched aristocrat Mony Vibescu and a circle of fellow sybarites blaze a trail of uncontrollable lust, bloody cruelty and depravity across the streets of Europe. Whilst in Les Mémoires d'un Jeune Don Juan, a young man reminisces his sexual awakening at the hands of his aunt, his sister and their friends as he is utterly corrupted in a season of carnal excess.

Louis Aragon's Le Con d'Irène is the intense story of a man's torment when he becomes fixated upon the genitalia of an imaginary woman and is reduced to voyeuristically scoping her erotic encounters in-between describing various events in brothels and other sexual adventures.

Translated from the original, complete and unexpurgated versions by Alexis Lykiard (translator of Lautréamonts Maldoror), Flesh Unlimited has a general introduction and notes section. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Intimidated?
I've got something of a selective taste.For instance, I can read a book of depravity should the style resonate something within myself.Bataille's Story of the Eye did not reach me in a positive way, I found its grotesqueries too vivid and realistic to enjoy...and since reading it I have been wary of this sort of "Surrealist Erotica."

Meanwhile, Flesh Unlimited has continued to pop up on my reccomended page, so after a bit of hesitation, I ordered and read the thing.I must say I find it more enjoyable than Story of the Eye due to the manner in which it was written.

Apollinaire's first story (The Eleven Thousand Rods) is absolutely hilarious.The "action" in it is so over the top, cartoonishly scatological...expulsions of all sorts from the body descibed in almost campy detail.The characters in the story have no repercussions in mind regarding their actions, and the text feels as though Apollinaire felt the same in the way in which he wrote it.The story is essentially that of an unfulfilled promise (made in the throes of passion) and follows a man's quest across Eurasia and his various sexual conquests (featuring loads of "buggering," incest, sexual violence...even pedophelia and necrophelia).This may all sound shocking, but I assure you, it is written is such a manner that makes you snicker with an "O god" as opposed to shuddering.

Apollinaire's second story, the infamous Confessions of a Young Don Juan, is written with less brevity.It is about a young man's early sexual awakening.While the boy's age is about 17 at the time of the story, the narration and content make him seem very, very, very young - around 12.This can add all sorts of disturbing overtones to the story if that sort of thing bothers you.I found this selection less enjoyable than the first.

Finally the book closes with Louis Aragon's classic story Le C** d'Irene, which, as mentioned in an earlier review, is written in more of a "classic" surrealist style than anything else.If, at the very least, you are familiar with the chaotic "cut-up" style of William S. Burroughs, you should be more than able to handle and enjoy it.

Overall the collection is entertaining and sometimes (albiet, for me, less frequently) titillating.If you're apprehensive as to whether or not this will offend you after this review, maybe you should hold off until you're more confident.However, I was not put off by Flesh Unlimited in the slightest, much to my surprise.

Each Book is different
First thing to note about this book is that it is not one book. Its actually three different stories written by different french erotic authors. That being said, Let me explain that the authors are vastly different in style and mood. For Example, The story "memiors of a young don juan" is written very much like how you would expect a normal erotic novel to be written that panders more towards hedonism: "My sister, then, had tumbled to the foot of the stairs. She lay there with her skirt dissarranged, making no effort to get up again"
While the story "Le C** D'Irene"is much more surrealistic then erotic. Mostly just rambling in foul language: "Don't wake me, for gods sake, you bastards, don't wake me, watch out I bite I see red."
I don't care for the surrealistic rambling bit because I don't find it terribly creative and more foul then anything. Although I did enjoy the other stories quite a bit which read more like books. the writing is well done, which doesn't surprise me since I believe the translator of this book also did a good translation of marldoror I believe. Although, this is not extremely artistic or extremely elegent. It is very good if you are interested in reading some very hedonistic erotica that is extremely well written with a bit of artist in it.

So when am I supposed to be offended?
I read these reviews of these supposed risqué novels and every time I buy the book I'm disappointed.I keep waiting for that moment where the novel leaps out of my hands and inappropriately exposes itself in a dark alley to my fragile mind.Perhaps my expectations were to high, with a name like `flesh unlimited, surrealist erotica' one would expect sexual acts from the deepest parts of the mind, unhindered by social-taboo or even personal-unconscious-censorship, things that perhaps aren't even physically possible but are some sort of `conceptual-art-sex-act.'I've read more titillating sexual accounts and fantasies in `seventeen magazine' - which by the way I highly recommend.

If your looking for something `new' don't get this, or `the Torture Garden' by Octave Mirbeau - that's a pretty over hyped one too, it would have done well to STAY out of print.Try J.G. Ballard, Carlton Mellick III, Georges Bataille, Marquis De Sade, or even William S. Burroughs.

Flesh Unlimited
With all my due respect to Guillaume Apollinaire The Poet, this is the first book in my life that I threw away.
This is something... it is hard to find a proper name for it. To begin with, this is not erotica. For those who is looking for erotica, this book will be a sheer disappointment. Erotica induces desire. This book provokes disgust.

This is a crude pornography written by a talented person without gag reflex. Yes, talented. This is why it is so pictorially repulsive. And without a gag reflex - because normal person cannot read it without nausea. I can only surmise that this repugnant masterpiece was written for diversion.

If you like reading about animalistic sex in odorous slimy excrements, this book is for you.

Unrestrained, Vulgar, and Artful
Apollinaire delivers some of the most explicit erotica ever committed to the printed page, managing to do so with wit and a refreshing matter-of-fact bluntness that never degenerates into a mere exhibition of so-called perversion. This is not for the squeamish, or those easily put off by marginal sexual practices.These two works act as a fantastic clean sweep of the residual psychological Victorianism that still permeates our society, even after the sexual revolution. Like Bataille's "Story of the Eye" without that author's harrowing social vivisections, this book has caused more than one ostensibly jaded friend to recoil in disgust. That Apollinaire manages this with style is a testament to his twisted genius. ... Read more

Product Description
A new translation of this complex and beautiful poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A unreliable translation of one of modern literature's wildest rides
The French poet Guillaume Apollinare published his first collection ALCOOLS in 1913. With this monumental volume, even the fresh Symbolism of Mallarme suddenly seemed stale, and the innovations of cubic painting found a place in verse. The "stream of consciousness" of the sequence "La Chanson du Mal Aime" ("The Song of the Poorly Loved") starts off with a vague complaint about betrayal, and ends up seguing totally naturally into a take on the Zaporogian Cossacks' profanity-filled reply to the Sultan, and then into fantasy swordcraft. In "Zone", Apollinaire is among the first to take stock of the massive social and technological changes at the beginning of the 20th century. Like in his poetry of World War I, Apollinaire shows the foundation of all that came to pass through that bitter hundred years. His ability to turn from the most universal themes to the most peculiar is a fascinating hint at Dadaism and Surrealism. And shortly before sending the poems to print, Apollinaire removed all punctuation, giving his poetry this crazy flow that must be read aloud to be believed.

But it's not all scary modernism, for Apollinaire writes some touching simpler verse, such as "Annie" with its cute punch line and the poignant "L'adieu" ("The Farewell"). "Lorelei" reinterprets the old German legend in a much more psychologically intense way.

The original French text of ALCOOLS is here (minus three early poems Revells didn't feel to mesh well with the general scheme), which makes it at least something worth looking at for those American readers who can read French but can't acquire a French edition of the work. However, the facing-page translation by James Revell, a professor of English at University of Utah, often distorts the work. Most often, it's by placing in the English texts word play nowhere in the original. In "La tzigane" ("The Gypsy") Apollinare writes "On sait tres bien que l'on se damne", but Revell expands this to the silly "A person knows damn well he's damned." Elsewhere, it is just transforming the original poem entirely. Take, for example, the one-liner "Chantre" (Singer). Apollinaire writes the elegant phrase "Et l'unique cordeau de trompettes marines", but Revell comes up with the psychadelic "And only one in the world chord ocean horns." I haven't seen such a wacky rendition of a straightforward poem since Brooks Haxton's New Age take on Heraclitus' fragments (published by Penguin)

Revell's introduction is less an explanation of the book's context in Apollinaire's life and work and more an apologia for his translation. It's fairly insubstantial, and any other introduction to ALCOOLS, even freely-available ones, would do just as well if not better.

If one wants to experience poetry truly, one must be prepared to read the text in the original languages. Translations can only serve as cribs on the way to such a pleasurable goal. It's a pity that Revell distorts Apollinaire's creation for his own wacky ends.ALCOOLS is a book that should be encounted.

Good, risky new translation.
Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools (translated by Donald Revell)(Wesleyan, 1995)

What is there to review about Alcools itself? It's Guillaume Apollinaire. It was published ninety years ago. It's one of the documents Tristan Tzara was reading obsessively while forming the dada movement, and thus was also a heavy influence on surrealism, and between the two was an influence on most modern writing. It contains some of Apollinaire's best-known poems. If you haven't read it yet, what are you waiting for? It's a literary classic, and one that should be in every home.

What I'm reviewing here is Donald Revell's new translation of Alcools. I hadn't got the book out thinking that; I was planning to use this as a platform to mouth the same old words about the greatness of Apollinaire and how you should have all read him already, in high school if not before, and how horrible it is that our educational system doesn't teach the man. But then I read Revell's (thankfully brief; I hate fifty-page introductions to books of poetry in translation) intro to this, and I realized that at least writing, if not reading, this review would be more interesting than usual. For Revell talks about the poetic license he took with the original text in order to preserve the spirit of Guillaume Apollinaire, rather than be slavish to the original words.

For the most part, it works pretty well. Revell, after all, is a fantastic poet in his own right, and you can trust his judgment as to what sounds good and what doesn't. Those who know French (or even a smattering of French, or those capable of easily recognizing cognates) will be able to check the original text, on the facing page, and see differences pretty readily. One wonders whether the perceived strengths and weaknesses in this translation (as one must wonder with all translations) have more to do with the original translations of these poems a reader has read than with the original (because it's very rare to find a poem that translates literally and still sounds poetic in the new language). I cut my teeth on Apollinaire with the translations in The Poetry of Surrealism (mostly by Michael Hamburger, with a few contributions by other translators), and I've always thought of those as the definitive translations of the Apollinaire poems included in both volumes. "Zone," for example, sounds completely different in the two books; it keeps the same spirit, of course, but other things (the pace, specifically) come off completely differently.

In the end, it most likely comes down to the reader. For the newcomer to Apollinaire, you may get more enjoyment out of this book than the seasoned reader. Yet the seasoned reader will find a good deal of enjoyment here as well, and possibly much food for thought on the nature of translation, as well. *** ½ ... Read more