Flashes of the Guns – The English Inscription, Poem by Guillaume Apollinaire

Poem by Guillaume Apollinaire Collection CalligrammesThemes WarPeriod 20th century

It is something so tenuous so distant
That thinking of it one ends up materializing it too much
Form bounded by the blue sea
By the murmur of a moving train
By the scent of eucalyptus mimosas
And maritime pines

But the contact and the savor

And that little alert traveler suddenly tilted her head on the
platform of the station in Marseille
And went away
Without knowing
That her memory would hover
Over a small wood in Champagne where a soldier strives
Before the fire of a bivouac to evoke this apparition
Through the smoke of birch bark
That smells of Minaean incense
While the bluish spirals rising
From a cigar write the tenderest of names
But the knots of snakes untying
Also write the moving name
Whose every letter coils in fair English
And the soldier does not dare finish
The bilingual pun that cannot fail to be prompted
By this woodland and vernal calligraphy

Guillaume Apollinaire

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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