Goodbye

Dear All, 

one hundred years ago, on the 9th of October 1918, Hanns Braun, a German athlete, was killed in an airplane crash near Saint-Quentin (Aisne, France).

And today only a few verses taken from Chants du désespéré (1914-1920) by Charles Vildrac to say goodbye: this is the last post of "World War I Bridges". Many thanks to all of you for your kind attention during these years.

All the best,
World War I Bridges

March 28, 2012 - October 9, 2018


*For inquiries related to the contents featured in this web site, please use the contact form beside (from desktop version).

The poets and the world war: "The Glory of Women" by Siegfried Sassoon

One of the international themes of First World War Centenary is the role of women during the warfare. This is logical if we consider the fact that the "Centenary mood" has to promote dialogue among different parts, countries and stakeholders through neutral topics or cross-cultural topics (like the role of women and children, the different and new technologies of war, the role of music in the different armies etc.). One of the limits of this approach is the guilty removal of all possible political arguments and discussions about that huge carnage. Anyway, the role of women remains a crucial aspect to take into consideration while studying the five years of the conflict. What we cannot allow is that the umbrella of political correctness hides the reality of testimony, even the one of literature and poetry. Take Siegfried Sassoon, for example. There’s no need to introduce him, he is for sure the most remembered and celebrated British “war poet”. Sassoon once wrote the sonnet “The Glory of Women” that you can read here below. And the image of women that we find there is in contrast with the image and role of women we are used to detect in the radars of Centenary speeches. This is just a foreword to the short poem and, moreover, an invitation to consider all the sides of our complex prism. Here Sassoon simply tells us that some women do not (or can not) understand the mental and materialistic condition of the modern war. Let's put it in this way: we do not know if Sassoon was right or wrong, but we can investigate considering also his standpoint.

THE GLORY OF WOMEN

You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,


Or wounded in a mentionable place.


You worship decorations; you believe


That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.


You make us shells. You listen with delight,


By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.


You crown our distant ardours while we fight,


And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.


You can't believe that British troops “retire”


When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,


Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.


O German mother dreaming by the fire,


While you are knitting socks to send your son


His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

From Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918).

The poets and the world war: "Si je mourais là-bas" by Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 - 1918)

A new English translation of the poems by Guillaume Apollinaire was published at the end of 2015 by Oxford University Press. The title of the book is Selected Poems, (with parallel French text) translated with an Introduction and Notes by Martin Sorrell (you see the cover below, in the middle of this post). Among these poems, a relevant group of compositions belongs to the war time and is about the love story with Louise deColigny-Châtillon. It's the second time we choose a poem by Apollinaire. The first one dates back to this old post. Particularly meaningful, also in the study of the war months, is the correspondance between Apollinaire and Lou.

 

[IF I DIED UP THERE...]

If I died up there at the front

One day Lou my love you'd weep

And my memory would fizzle out

The way a shell-burst dies at the front

A lovely shell like mimosa in flower

And then that memory that bursts in space

Would cover the globe in my blood

The sea the hills the valleys and the flying star

The marvellous suns that ripen in space

Like golden fruit round Baratier*

Forgotten memory alive in all things

I'd redden the nipples of your pretty pink breasts

I'd redden your mouth and your blood-soaked hair

You'd not age a jot all these beautiful things

Would forever grow younger ready for gallant destinies

My fatal blood splashing the world

Would give the sun more brilliance

Flowers greater colour waves more speed

A rare love would fall on the world

The lover would be stronger in your body pushed away

Lou if I die up there memory that gets forgotten

—Remember me in those mad moments

Of youth and love and bursting ardour—

My blood's the ardent fountain of happiness

And because you're the prettiest be the happiest

O my unique love and my grand folly

                                             30th January 1915 Nimes 

[From Guillaume Apollinaire, Selected Poems, with parallel French text, translated with an Introduction and Notes by Martin Sorrell, Oxford University Press] 

[SI JE MOURAIS LÀ-BAS...]

Si je mourais là-bas sur le front de l’armée

Tu pleurerais un jour ô Lou ma bien-aimée

Et puis mon souvenir s’éteindrait comme meurt

Un obus éclatant sur le front de l’armée

Un bel obus semblable aux mimosas en fleur

Et puis ce souvenir éclaté dans l’espace

Couvrirait de mon sang le monde tout entier

La mer les monts les vals et l’étoile qui passe

Les soleils merveilleux mûrissant dans l’espace

Comme font les fruits d’or autour de Baratier

Souvenir oublié vivant dans toutes choses

Je rougirais le bout de tes jolis seins roses

Je rougirais ta bouche et tes cheveux sanglants

Tu ne vieillirais point toutes ces belles choses

Rajeuniraient toujours pour leurs destins galants

Le fatal giclement de mon sang sur le monde

Donnerait au soleil plus de vive clarté

Aux fleurs plus de couleur plus de vitesse à l’onde

Un amour inouï descendrait sur le monde

L’amant serait plus fort dans ton corps écarté

Lou si je meurs là-bas souvenir qu’on oublie

– Souviens-t’en quelquefois aux instants de folie

De jeunesse et d’amour et d’éclatante ardeur –

Mon sang c’est la fontaine ardente du bonheur

Et sois la plus heureuse étant la plus jolie

Ô mon unique amour et ma grande folie

                                               30 janv. 1915, Nîmes

The poets and the world war: "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" by Alan Seeger

Alan Seeger

This American poet, a class mate of  T.S. Eliot, was killed in action in France almost one hundred years ago, precisely on July 4, 1916 in Belloy-en-Santerre. He was 28 (he was born in New York in 1888) and he had started serving in the French Foreign Legion in 1914. The accounts we have say that he was smiling before dying. The splendid and lively literary commonplace of the "appointment with the Death" gives the title of the following poem. "I have a rendezvous with Death" is for sure his most popular poem, appreciated by the president of United States J.F. Kennedy who was used to ask his wife Jaqueline to recite it.
About his experience of war in France we would like to remind you the Letters and Diary of Alan Seeger you can find here in several formats. In one of the latest letters, addressed to a friend and dated June 28, 1916, Alan Seeger wrote: "We go up to the attack tomorrow. This will probably be the biggest thing yet. We are to have the honor of marching in the first wave. No sacks, but two musettes, toile de tente slung over shoulder, plenty of cartridges, grenades, and baïonnette au canon. I will write you soon if I get through all right. If not, my only earthly care is for my poems. Add the ode I sent you and the three sonnets to my last volume and you will have opera omnia quæ existant.  I am glad to be going in first wave. If you are in this thing at all it is best to be in to the limit. And this is the supreme experience."

I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH


I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air-
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath-
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

The poets and the world war: "In Memoriam, July 19, 1914" by Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova, 1889–1966

Both in Anna Akhmatova and in Osip Mandel'štam’s poems dedicated to the Great War we find a kind of an obsession for the “century” and for the “age” they were living in. And this obsession is clearly developed in the famous Akhmatova’s poem proposed today in the translation by Stephen Edgar. In Memoriam, July 19, 1914 is included in the book “White Flock” (Belaya Staya) of 1917 and was written exactly one hundred years ago as a recollection of memories and sensations brought by the beginning of the war in July 1914. It is therefore a poem of memories, of "recollection", two years after the war outbreak. It is one of the great poems in the heritage of First World War literature: it's about time, compression of time, psychological percetion of time, duration, war, God and the role of the poet. "A book of portents terrible to read" is at the end the heritage of the World War I itself. One of the reasons why we consider comparation (and comparative literature as well?) useful is the huge difference from this recollected memories of the beginning of war and, for example, the way other poets welcomed the war in other countries. The feeling of acceleration, that was one of the distinctive marks of the Twentieth century lies there, in the first two verses of this poem composed one hundred years ago.

IN MEMORIAM, JULY 19, 1914

We aged a hundred years and this descended

In just one hour, as at a stroke.

The summer had been brief and now was ended;

The body of the ploughed plains lay in smoke.

The hushed road burst in colors then, a soaring

Lament rose, ringing silver like a bell.

And so I covered up my face, imploring

God to destroy me before battle fell.

And from my memory the shadows vanished

Of songs and passions—burdens I'd not need.

The Almighty bade it be—with all else banished—
A book of portents terrible to read.


(Translation by Stephen Edgar)

ПАМЯТИ 19 ИЮЛЯ 1914

Мы на сто лет состарились, и это

Тогда случилось в час один:

Короткое уже кончалось лето,

Дымилось тело вспаханных равнин.

Вдруг запестрела тихая дорога,

Плач полетел, серебряно звеня.

Закрыв лицо, я умоляла Бога

До первой битвы умертвить меня.

Из памяти, как груз отныне лишний,

Исчезли тени песен и страстей.

Ей – опустевшей – приказал Всевышний

Стать страшной книгой грозовых вестей.

The poet and the world war: "I Looked Up From My Writing" by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy (Upper Bockhampton, 2 June 1840 – Dorchester, 11 January 1928) was of course too old to take part to the war. Nevertheless he wrote a relevant number of war poems and poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke (he wrote about the Boer War, too). The poem we choose today, taken from Poems of War and Patriotism (1917), seems to reply to two fundamental questions: how is writing poetry in war time? And what does writing poetry mean under the bombs? The action of writing is a blinkered gesture. The beginning in the first stanza looks like a typical full moon scenery and a dialogue between the soldier and the satellite begins. The turning point is perhaps the fifth stanza and the crucial moon's words ("And now I am curious to look / Into the blinkered mind / Of one who wants to write a book / In a world of such a kind”.)


I LOOKED UP FROM MY WRITING


I looked up from my writing,
And gave a start to see,
As if rapt in my inditing,
The moon’s full gaze on me.

Her meditative misty head
Was spectral in its air,
And I involuntarily said,
“What are you doing there?”

“Oh, I’ve been scanning pond and hole
And waterway hereabout
For the body of one with a sunken soul
Who has put his life-light out.

Did you hear his frenzied tattle?
It was sorrow for his son
Who is slain in brutish battle,
Though he has injured none.

And now I am curious to look
Into the blinkered mind
Of one who wants to write a book
In a world of such a kind”.

Her temper overwrought me,
And I edged to shun her view,
For I felt assured she thought me
One who should drown him too.

The poets and the world war: "Dreamers" by Siegfried Sassoon

Sigfried Sassoon (1886 - 1967)

For the second time we choose a poem by Sigfried Sassoon. Last time it was Sick Leave. Today poem, always from The War Poems, is probably not so popular but it represents a way to introduce and to launch a promising and unexplored topic, that could be developed into many directions (new books and studies, researches both in the literature side but also the scientific and medical side of the story, etc.): the dreams of the First World War soldiers and their dreamlike activities. And the title itself is unquestionable: Dreamers. The turning line of the poem is the eleventh, where it says they are "Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats", before leaving you with the normality of the final images, so normal and gray like the images taken from everyday life in the trenches. Two normalities overlapping, war time and peace time, creating a shocking and racking sense of disbelief welded by a clockwork rhyme scheme.


DREAMERS


Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land,
  Drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
  Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
  Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
  They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
  And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
  And mocked by hopeless longing to regain    
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,    
  And going to the office in the train.



(Published in the hospital paper, the Hydra, 1 September 1917.)

The poets and the world war: "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries" by Alfred Edward Housman

A. E. Housman (1859 - 1936)

In The Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry the editor Tim Kendall remembers Kipling's letter addressed to James Barry dated 21 Dec. 1935 in which he describes the below poem by Alfred Edward Housman as "the high-water mark of all War verse. […] Only eight lines but absolutely perfect”. This poem first appeared in "The Times" on the 31 October 1917 to accompany an article about the anniversary of the Battle of Ypres. What is particularly interesting is the theme of this poem: not the usual heroism, not great values moving and livening the lines of the poem but simply the fact of being mercenaries and, in other words, it's all about money. But at the same time this is not about money. At the end, this is not a poem about the motivation coming from the money and from the desire of glorification: "What God abandoned, these defended, / And saved the sum of things for pay." Speaking about Tim Kendall we would like to remind you also about the interesting interview that he kindly released to us still available at this link.


EPITAPH ON AN ARMY OF MERCENARIES


These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

The poets and the world war: "Vanity" by Giuseppe Ungaretti

VANITY

Out of the blue
high
on the ruins
the clear
wonder
of immensity

The man
has bended
on the water
taken unaware
by the sun
and a shadow
revives
rocked
and slowly broken
into recessing trembling
reflections
of sky

Vallone, August 19, 1917

VANITÀ

D’improvviso

è alto

sulle macerie

il limpido

stupore

dell’immensità

L’uomo

s'è curvato

sull’acqua

sorpresa

dal sole

e si rinviene

un’ombra

cullata 

e piano franta

in riflessi insenati

tremanti 

di cielo

Vallone il 19 agosto 1917

* "La Riviera Ligure", ottobre-novembre 1917. The Italian version we publish is the one you can read in Giuseppe Ungaretti, Allegria di Naufragi, Vallecchi, Firenze 1919.

The poets and the world war: "Dooleysprudence" by James Joyce

Joyce in 1915

Between celebration and parody. This is the main hybrid trait of Joyce's Dooleysprudence, a poem that the Irish novelist wrote in 1916 and first published in The Critical Writings of James Joyce (ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann) only forty-three years later, in 1959. In James Joyce A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings by A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie we read that this poem is "Joyce's short satiric piece mocking the combatants of World War I. It was written in 1916 while Joyce was living in neutral Switzerland and depicts the uninvolved Mr Dooley, whose tranquil life is juxtaposed with the war. The character of Mr Dooley is derived from the philosophical tavernkeeper created by the Irish-American humorist Finley Peter Dunne, who was also the subject of a popular song with which Joyce was familiar, "Mr. Dooley," by Billy Jerome (1901). It's really something different from all the World War I poems we have published so far.


DOOLEYSPRUDENCE


Who is the man when all the gallant nations run to war
Goes home to have his dinner by the very first cablecar
And as he eats his cantelope contorts himself in mirth
To read the blatant bulletins of the rulers of the earth?

It’s Mr Dooley,
Mr Dooley,
The coolest chap our country ever knew
‘They are out to collar
The dime and dollar’
Says Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.
Who is the funny fellow who declines to go to church
Since pope and priest and parson left the poor man in the lurch
And taught their flocks the only way to save all human souls
Was piercing human bodies through with dumdum bulletholes?

It’s Mr Dooley,
Mr Dooley,
The mildest man our country ever knew
‘Who will release us
From jingo Jesus’
Prays Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.
Who is the meek philosopher who doesn’t care a damn
About the yellow peril or problem of Siam
And disbelieves that British Tar is water from life’s fount
And will not gulp the gospel of the German on the Mount?

It’s Mr Dooley,
Mr Dooley,
The broadest brain our country ever knew
‘The curse of Moses
On both your houses’
Cries Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.
Who is the cheerful imbecile who lights his long chibouk
With pages of the pandect, penal code and Doomsday Book
And wonders why bald justices are bound by law to wear
A toga and a wig made out of someone else’s hair?

It’s Mr Dooley,
Mr Dooley,
The finest fool our country ever knew
‘They took that toilette
From Pontius Pilate’
Thinks Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.
Who is the man who says he’ll go the whole and perfect hog
Before he pays the income tax or license for a dog
And when he licks a postage stamp regards with smiling scorn
The face of king or emperor or snout of unicorn?

It’s Mr Dooley,
Mr Dooley,
The wildest wag our country ever knew
‘O my poor tummy
His backside gummy!’
Moans Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.
Who is the tranquil gentleman who won’t salute the State
Or serve Nebuchadnezzar or proletariat
But thinks that every son of man has quite enough to do
To paddle down the stream of life his personal canoe?

It’s Mr Dooley,
Mr Dooley,
The wisest wight our country ever knew
‘Poor Europe ambles
Like sheep to shambles’
Sighs Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.

"The Darkness and the Thunder and the Rain". Bath Poetry Café remembers the victims of the global conflict 1914-1918

When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other's truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm,
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

These lines from a poem by Charles Hamilton Sorley, who was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915, provided the title for the Bath Poetry Café’s annual evening of readings to commemorate the Great War last Tuesday 10th November 2015. As well as well-known poems by Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Laurence Binyon and Rudyard Kipling, they presented works by Guillaume Apollinaire, Anna Achmatova and Giuseppe Ungaretti.  

The programme on 10th November was accompanied by a presentation of archival photographs which conveyed poignantly how fragile men and horses were in the face of the new industrial weaponry of war, and how terrible it was to send cavalry and infantry to their inevitable massacre as they advanced under shellfire against the guns. The choice of materials also tried to show that the tragedy of the Great War was the same whatever a soldier’s nationality. 

The next programme, in November 2016, will emphasise this international theme by concentrating in turn on the Battle of the Somme as seen by the Allies; the same battlefront as seen through the eyes of the young soldiers in Erich Maria Remarque’s harrowing novel All Quiet on the Western Front; the war on the Eastern Front; and the battles of the Isonzo in Italy. Wherever possible the readings will be presented by native speakers in the language of the original, alongside English translations read by poets from the Café. Bath Poetry Café has already secured Giulio Passarelli to read Ungaretti’s I fiumi which the poet described as one of the fundamental texts of his collection Il Porto Sepolto. This was written on scraps of miscellaneous paper in the trenches of the Karst and published in Udine in December 1916.

The poets and the world war: "On the Eastern Front" by Georg Trakl

On the 3rd of November 1914 Georg Trakl died in the hospital of Kraków. He was 27. The last three months of his life overlap with his experience of the First World War. This starts at the end of August 1914 with a long train journey from his hometown, Innsbruck, to Galicia, the far eastern boundary of the Empire. In this area of the front he took his place as pharmacist. The baptism of fire was short yet extremely cruel and ferocious: the Battle of Grodek, one of the stages of the Battle of Galicia. After that he was assigned to assist ninety wounded and almost hopeless soldiers in a barn. It is the beginning of the end: these were probably the moments when he started thinking about suicide. He tried to kill himself during the retreat, but was disarmed. As the Kraków's medical file states, what was not possible during the retreat was possible with cocaine intoxication.

It's the second time we host one of the poems he wrote during his short war time. After "Grodek", the poem that inaugurated this section of World War I Bridges, we would like to host today Im Osten.


ON THE EASTERN FRONT


The winter storm's mad organ playing
is like the Volk's dark fury,
the black-red tidal wave of onslaught,
defoliated stars.

Her features smashed, her arms silver,
night calls to the dying men,
beneath shadows of November's ash,
ghost casualties heave.

A spiky no-man's-land encloses the town.
The moon hunts petrified women
from their blood-spattered doorsteps.
Grey wolves have forced the gates.


(Translation by John Greening)


IM OSTEN


Den wilden Orgeln des Wintersturms
Gleicht des Volkes finstrer Zorn,
Die purpurne Woge der Schlacht,
Entlaubter Sterne.

Mit zerbochnen Brauen, silbernen Armen
Winkt sterbenden Soldaten die Nacht.
Im Schatten der herbstlichen Esche
Seufzen die Geister der Erschlagenen.

Dornige Wildnis umgürtet die Stadt.
Von blutenden Stufen jagt der Mond
Die erschrockenen Frauen.
Wilde Wölfe brachen durchs Tor.

The poets and the world war: "Sumatra" by Miloš Crnjanski

Crnjanski in 1914

Miloš Crnjanski was born in Csongrád (Hungary) in 1893. He moved soon with his family to Timisoara (Romania) and grew up in a Serbian patriotic atmosphere. We can easily figure out that he is under special observation immediately after the Archduke's assassination in Sarajevo. In fact he was initially persecuted but lately sent by the government of Wien to the Galician front, in the summer of 1915. He was forced to leave the comrades for pneumonia and spent quite a long recovery period in the military hospital of Wien. After this time he took his place in the second lines, as telephone operator in a railway station. He published his first anti-war poems in the middle of the European havoc and carnage. In 1917 he attended the school for reservists and was assigned to the supreme command of the Austro-Hungarian army in the Friuli region, precisely in San Vito al Tagliamento (Northeast Italy). He wrote more than one poem dedicated to the experience of war and he also kept diaries (we remember The Diary of Čarnojević). The poem we propose today is not far from resembling the missing manifesto of "Sumatraism" and was written after the war. It's an interesting example of the poetry that was conceived after the disaster, a frequent situation we may find everywhere, with different tones and expressions, in the aftermath. Crnjanski's most renowned and translated work is Migrations ("Seobe"), which is also considered his masterpiece. He died in Belgrade in 1977.


SUMATRA


Now we are carefree, tender and airy.
Let us think: how quiet are, the snowy
peaks of the Urals.

If we get sad over a pale figure,
whom we have lost on some evening,
we know that, somewhere, a rivulet,
instead of it, all in red, is flowing!

One love, morning in foreign land,
envelops our soul, gets tighter,
in endless peace of blue seas,
from which the crimson corals glitter,
like, from my distant homeland, cherries.

We wake up at night, smiling dearly,
to the Moon with its bow bent,
caressing the distant hills, tenderly,
and icy mountains, with our hand.

Belgrade, 1920

(Translation by Lazar Pašćanović, see also here for a French translation)


SUMATRA


Sad smo bezbrižni, laki i nežni.
Pomislimo: kako su tihi, snežni
vrhovi Urala.

Rastuži li nas kakav bledi lik,
što ga izgubismo jedno veče,
znamo da, negde, neki potok
mesto njega teče!

Po jedna ljubav, jutro, u tuđini,
dušu nam uvija, sve tešnje,
beskrajnim mirom plavih mora,
iz kojih crvene zrna korala,
kao, iz zavičaja, trešnje.

Probudimo se noću i smešimo, drago,
na Mesec sa zapetim lukom.
I milujemo daleka brda
i ledenegore, blago, rukom.

Beograd, 1920

The poets and the world war: "Lust" by Massimo Bontempelli

Massimo Bontempelli (1878 - 1960)

Here and there the following poem could remind us James Hillman's A Terrible Love of War. Probably no one would read and propose these verses in today Centenary atmosphere. It's better to anticipate one thing that the reader will discover in this translation of Lust by Massimo Bontempelli: this is not "politically correct poetry", since it shows hate, disgust, contempt, even gratification after the enemy's death (the title itself is quite strange for a war poem). The magnifying glass is of course on the word "porci" (swines) used to describe the Germans in the trenches. Nevertheless, if we read carefully all the poem, we can notice how the description of the war life that the poet gives us from his side is exactly similar to the typical swines' life and behaviour, under an ethology standpoint (see the mud, the smell, the shit, the mud in the mouth). Perhaps the question is not if are allowed to apply the "politically correct" category to poetry in general. Anyway, as for World War One poetry, we have to admit that today we tend to clean up our memory and prefer the pacifistic poems or at least the brutally realistic ones. Sometimes we probably read the famous Futurist praise of the war as "only hygiene of the world" (and Bontempelli was connected with Futurism) with an unresolved smile on our faces: after all - we might conclude one hundred years later - it was Futurism with its weird guys. We agree that they made a necessary cultural operation, a kind of "global update" of arts, but at the end of the day, to our eyes, they probably remain "those funny futurist guys". It's a joke of destiny and time but isn't it like this? All avant-gardes have a matter to settle with time and they always wage war on time.

But what if we go beyond that praise of war and we imagine the deepest shock that the conflict, together with alcohol, violence and degeneration of humanity can produce on a soldier? Once the necessary distinctions have been made, we could say that like the Second World War had its Céline, the Italian poetry of the First World War found in Massimo Bontempelli a testimony of an ambiguous, contradictory and masochist "sentiment of war". There is no heroism, no salvation for the mankind in this love declaration poetically addressed to war and death. It's like wallowing in the mud of forgetfulness, running over self and time to erase self and time simoultaneously in a sort of cruel sex act (even if this is also a poem of memories, see the beginning where the violent part is probably impersonated by a woman). The poem belongs to the book entitled Il purosangue. L'ubriaco ("The Thoroughbred. The Drunk", 1919), a title that casts light on the well-known scenario of use of alcohol among soldiers, especially before the attacks. It was the only poetry book by Bontempelli, whose legacy is more on the fiction and drama sides. In 1933 Massimo Bontempelli released a second edition of his poems: the new title was shortened to "The Thoroughbred" (Il purosangue, Milano, Edizioni La Prora, 1933) and the poem "Lust" was eliminated. Titles - as well as "director's cuts" - speak to us.


LUST


Smell of trench
  smell
  smell
  of used corpse shit mud
  memories
  do you remember
  when coming in
  you wrapped my neck with your arms
  and I bent under the hug
  wallowing on the latticework
  fighting with force
  before loving you?
 
The nausea enters from the mouth
  and goes down to the heart
  squeezing crushing fermenting
  now, while I go on the hit latticeworks
  under the yelping trajectories
  with bowed head.

But the nausea becomes must and wine
  in the emptiness of the heart.

And that gets drunk by the smell
  smell
  smell of trench.
  It provokes joy.
  Joy of walking
  walking
  walking in this rot
  of being pelted with stones
  by the noise of shells
  of getting lost
  on the right and left
  fifty times
  and standing up with mud in mouth

to get there and see
  the German flesh fall,
  collapsing with head down
  swines bagged
  in the guts of the blue coats.


LUSSURIA


Odore del camminamento
  odore
  odore
  di cadavere usato merda fango
  ricordi
  ricordi
  quando all’entrare
  tu mi buttavi le braccia al collo
  io sguazzando sul graticcio
  mi piegavo sotto l’abbraccio
  lottavo di forza con te
  prima di amarti?

Entra la nausea per la bocca
  scende al cuore
  si pigia si pesta fermenta
  mentre vo sui graticci sbattuti
  sotto le traiettorie che guaiscono
  a capo chino.

Ma la nausea si fa mosto e vino
  nel vuoto del cuore.

Lo ubriaca l’odore
  odore
  odore del camminamento.
  Vi aizza la gioia.
  Gioia di camminare
  camminare
  camminare nel putridume
  d’esser presi a sassate
  dal rumore delle granate
  di perdersi
  a destra e sinistra
  cinquanta volte
  e inciampare abbracciati all’odore
  cinquanta volte
  e rialzarsi col fango in bocca

per arrivare a vedere
  la carne tedesca cadere
  afflosciati testa in giú
  porci insaccati
  nel budellame dei cappotti blu.


(from Massimo Bontempelli, Il purosangue. L'ubriaco, Milano, Facchi, 1919)

An interview with Tim Kendall about the poetry of the First World War

With great and real pleasure we introduce today interview dedicated once again to the poetry of World War One. This time we tried to enlarge our view, to other literatures and to novelists as well. This was possible thanks to the kindness and competence of Tim Kendall, poet, editor and professor at University of Exeter. Among his publications, we would like to remind Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (Oxford, 2013), The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2007), Modern English War Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006). The so called "war poetry" is probably the biggest part of his researches, but it's opportune to recall also his studies on Paul Muldoon (Paul Muldoon, Liverpool University Press, 2004 and Paul Muldoon, Seren Books/Poetry Wales Pr Ltd, 1996) and Sylvia Plath (Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study, Faber and Faber, 2001).

Wilfred Owen

Q: Let's start with the definition of "War poetry". As far as I know the English literature is only literature that "isolated" and grouped some texts under a similar strong "label", even if all countries developed their own war literature and poetry. Do you have a similar opinion and, if so, why do you think this happened? Was there at that time a kind of awareness of being a "war poet"?
A: The term ‘war poetry’ is an oxymoron: destruction and creation, ugliness and beauty. But, of course, war has been the subject of poetry as far back as we can trace. What made England different, in 1914, was the sense that poetry spoke urgently to our national identity. We were the nation of Shakespeare, of Henry V at Agincourt, and our civilisation was bound up with our literature: the greater the literature, the greater the civilisation. After all, we weren’t going to beat the Germans at music or fine art. So, to write a poem was, in some small way, to assert the very values which were under attack. Wilfred Owen told his mother that the only thing which would hold him together on a battlefield was the thought that he was defending the language in which Keats wrote.

Q: A conspicuous part of your studies and research is dedicated to First World World poetry. What brought you to these researches and could you illustrate your last book on this theme?
A: I was tutored by Jon Stallworthy at university. Jon was an immensely generous as well as a brilliant man, and he taught me to love war poetry. My latest book, Poetry of the First World War, is dedicated to Jon, who was the inspiration for so much of my work. 

Siegfried Sassoon

Q: Is there a particular initiative about war poetry (book, conference, event, other) that you want to point out in this "centenary mood"?
A: A great deal of energy was expended in the run-up to the centenary, to ensure that the familiar myths of the war’s futility, of lions led by donkeys, etc., were challenged. But the national curriculum is a rough beast to resist, and Blackadder and Oh! What a Lovely War et al. have ensured that the simple narratives are firmly entrenched. What I’ve most appreciated about the recent treatment of war poetry is an acceptance and appreciation of poets who speak truths to this new kind of power: sometimes, they dare to say, war is enjoyable, enriching, exuberant, as well as dreadful, wasteful, unimaginably brutal. More than that, most of the British poets of 1914-18 believed that the War was necessary. This can come as a surprise to those readers who only knew Owen and Sassoon.

Q: Let's now move to First World World English novelists for a moment. Which are still today the most popular novels and which are the novels that according to your standpoint would deserve a deeper attention (or perhaps a rediscovery)?
A: I’m a Kipling obsessive, and I think that his stories in Debits and Credits and elsewhere stand above any other war fiction that I’ve read. But they’re not novels. Jacob’s Room is the book by Virginia Woolf to which I return. I’m not sure, though, that Kipling or Woolf qualifies as a neglected genius. I would make a special mention of Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes, published half a century after the Armistice. That does get overlooked, for no better reason than that it’s commonly classed as a children’s novel. Let me also say that some of the finest prose about the War came from the novelist Mary Borden, who served as a nurse at the Front. The Forbidden Zone is a hybrid masterpiece: memoir, prose poetry, a collection of fragments.

Q:The First World War was paradoxically the last war with a large number of poets, then something has changed in the relation between war and poetry. Do you agree with such statement or do you think it is only an exaggeration?
A: War breeds poets. Every recent conflict provides a cue for the poetasters to wring their hands and indulge their sensitivities. They always want to tell us what we already know --- that war is bad --- but also that they feel this particular truth more acutely than the rest of us. I think of Anthony Hecht’s ‘fierce Strephon’, whose poetry denouncing the Vietnam War brought not only fame but considerable profit: ‘a fate he shared---it bears much thinking on--- / with certain persons at the Pentagon’.

Q: Generally speaking and according to your experiences, what do English students know and study about Italian, French, German, American (etc.) war poets?
A: Generally speaking, absolutely nothing. My own small attempt to improve the situation is to promote the work of the entirely unknown American poet John Allan Wyeth, whose sonnet sequence This Man’s Army is the great forgotten book of the War.

Keith Douglas

Q: I would love to end this interview with your personal choice, namely a poem you would like to suggest to our readers. What do you propose us? And why? Thank you.
A The war poem which hurts me every time is Keith Douglas’s ‘Vergissmeinnicht’: a painfully candid account of the mixed emotions (love, pity, hatred, curiosity, pride, shame, even sexual satisfaction) provoked by viewing a dead and decaying enemy. If you want a First World War poem, I’ll return to Wyeth, and his poem ‘Picnic’. Sassoon wrote that ‘The rank stench of their bodies haunts me still’, but that’s mere mood music compared with Wyeth’s account of what the dead smell like: ‘We drove through Bayonvillers---and as we ate / men long since dead reached out and left a smirch / and taste in our throats like gas and rotten jam’. And the nonchalant payoff of his sandwich-munching companion as Wyeth remarks that the corpses ‘smell pretty strong’: ‘I’ll say they do, / but I’m too hungry sir to care a damn.’

The poets and the World War: "The Cenotaph" by Charlotte Mew

Charlotte Mew (1869 - 1928)

The dilemmas of commemoration and memory of grief are not new and you might only think about epic poems to detect their early expressions in poetry. But staying away from poetry for a while and embracing architecture in our speeches, still today we show sometimes a puzzled face in front of the pieces of architecture built to preserve the memory, symbols of a waste of life that is as much colossal as the lost they try to represent. All countries showed in the aftermath different ways to express the worship of war casualties and this fact is somehow visible in a different architecture, that is the most "public" among the arts or at least the one with a highest "pedagogical" impact and effect on population. A cenotaph for example is a structure built to remind of dead people that are buried elsewhere, basically it's an "empty tomb" (the original Greek word stands exactly for this). We could think about cenotaphs as tombs that evoke the presence of unburied soldiers. In Italy, after World War I, the government led by Mussolini started the construction of several ossari, that are enormous cubical blocks of concrete, often built in panoramic (almost spectacular) areas of a given landscape formerly battlefield. The ossari were erected to preserve the bones ("osso" is the Italian word for "bone") of thousands of soldiers and therefore they are not actually "cenotaphs". When reading today's poem proposal by Charlotte Mary Mew, one of the thoughts that comes to mind is that Italy was not a fervid proponent of World War I cenotaphs in the postwar times. While travelling around Italy, you won't find lots of cenotaphs but more often memorials, monuments, many commemorative plaques and the already mentioned ossari, especially in the northeastern regions. Anyway, this is only collateral thinking coming from reading the poem, even if it's once again the proof of the multiple resources coming from poetry. 

The poem below was first issued in 1919. There is a kind of turning point in the verse that says "It is all young life: it must break some women's hearts to see". The strength of the last part is even surprising. The poem offers the real opportunity to read some lines that put our tranquil beliefs about memory, myths and commemoration under a hard test. Once more, here is the chance to return on this "uncomfortable" poet that committed suicide in 1928 by drinking disinfectant during a treatment for her neurasthenia. Her "thorny" literary legacy probably suffers from being a hinge really in between the Victorian age and the new "modern" era. Even after reading "The Cenotaph", we're almost forced to admit that there is no redemption and no regeneration in spring.


THE CENOTAPH


Not yet will those measureless fields be green again
Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed;
There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain,
Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread.
But here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the 
   thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled,
We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with 
   Peace, winged too, at the column's head.
And over the stairway, at the foot - oh! here, leave 
   desolate, passionate hands to spread
Violets, roses, and laurel with the small sweet twinkling country things
Speaking so wistfully of other Springs
From the little gardens of little places where son or 
   sweetheart was born and bred.
In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers
                                  To lovers - to mothers
                                  Here, too, lies he:
Under the purple, the green, the red,
It is all young life: it must break some women's hearts to see
Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed!
Only, when all is done and said,
God is not mocked and neither are the dead.
For this will stand in our Market-place -
                                   Who'll sell, who'll buy
                                   (Will you or I
Lie each to each with the better grace)?
While looking into every busy whore's and huckster's face
As they drive their bargains, is the Face
Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face.