Translator’s Note: Three Poems by Max Jacob
Max Jacob’s verse poems are dissonant and hybrid, mingling traditional metrics and free verse, with irregular punctuation, clashing registers of diction, and cockeyed allusions, puns, and cliches. By playing with and against conventions, Jacob made convention itself a theme. Though he’s known as a pioneer of poetic modernism, Jacob’s work is perhaps even more at home in our postmodern day. These poems were written and published during WWI. “Atlantide” looks forward to a new, postwar Eden, religious and erotic; it first appeared in Francis Picabia’s journal 391 in Barcelona in 1917, and then in Jacob’s collection Le Laboratoire central (1921). “Périgal-Nohor” was printed in the program for Apollinaire’s surrealist play Les Mamelles de Tirésias in June 1917, appearing then in Pierre Reverdy’s journal Nord-Sud and in Le Laboratoire central. The Catholic printer for Nord-Sud refused to set “The Demoniac’s Mass” in 1917; Jacob published it in his volume La Défense de Tartufe in 1919. The epigraph for “The Demoniac’s Mass” deforms the Latin hymn for the service of All Saints.
Rosanna Warren was born in Fairfield, Connecticut, to a pair of writers: Robert Penn Warren, a major poet and novelist, and Eleanor Clark, a prize-winning author of criticism, fiction, and travel books. She earned her BA in painting from Yale University and an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Warren is the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee...