Bestiary, or, The parade of Orpheus

by Guillaume Apollinaire

An early and influential champion of cubism, the friend of Braque, Picasso, Dufy, Rousseau and Marie Laurencin (who became his mistress), Apollinaire was a seminal figure in the revolutionary art style known as "Surrealism," a term that he coined some seven years before Breton formally founded the movement. In this charming book, published in 1910 and embellished with the graphically sophisticated and totally appropriate woodcuts of Dufy, we find the poet at his most accessible. His quatrains, printed in Dante italic and felicitously translated by Pepe Karmel, present a voice that ranges from the colloquial to the impassioned, a brisk combination of lyric imagery and bawdy humor (not surprising for a poet who, after a pious adolescence, supported himself by writing pornography). This is a small bijou of a livre de peintre, a lovely and lively ensemble of accessible poetry and striking woodcut art.