Little Auto

Guillaume Apollinaire, born in Rome in 1880, travelled widely in Europe before settling in Paris in 1899 and becoming a champion of Picasso, Braque, Duchamp and many other artists. He enlisted in the French army in 1914; he suffered a shrapnel head wound in 1916, and died in Paris two years later.

‘Apollinaire’s is a poetry which invites you, and the world, in, instead of rejecting it in fastidious disdain … This beautifully produced yet cheap book is a way of reminding us about [his] genius, and showing us that high, ground-breaking art does not have to be intimidating or forbidding.’ – Nicholas Lezard, Guardian‘In The Little Auto, Beverley Bie Brahic has concentrated mainly on later Apollinaire. The title poem describes a car journey from Deauville to Paris in August 1914 in which ‘we bid farewell to a whole era’. Sniffing political change in the wind, the dogs are howling over the borders … Apollinaire was fairly in the thick of it in what followed (having requested a transfer from Nîmes to the front), but makes an instructive contrast with the Anglophone lot. There is no straight opposition between the horrors of war and the pleasures of innocence and vainglory indulged in at a safe distance … The Little Auto is an entirely delightful production, and we should humble ourselves anew before the little ‘thunder’s palaces’ to which Apollinaire compared his wonderful poems.’ – David Wheatley, The Yellow Nib‘Poet and pornographer, heretic and decorated war hero, Apollinaire was Cubism in action: eliding time and space in a single image, rhyming the profane with the profound ... Writing as an infantryman during WW1, he seemed to humbly declare war on the very imagery of war … juxtaposing the surreal and the all-too-real to give fresh sense of a senseless time, and find grace where there was only disgrace. Beverley Bie Brahic’s chiming new translations deliver these dispatches from the front line and the avant-garde, still vivid as a first kiss, livid as a raw wound.’ – Poetry Book Society Bulletin