The Pretty Redhead

Behold me before all a man of good sense
Knowing life and death what a living man can know
Having experienced the griefs and the joys of love
Having been able to assert his ideas on occasion
Knowing several languages
Having travelled a good bit
Having seen the war in the Artillery and Infantry
Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform
Having lost his best friends in that frightful struggle
I know of the old and of the new as much as one man alone can know of them
And without being uneasy today about this war
Between us and for us my friends
I pronounce judgment on this long quarrel of tradition and innovation
Of Order and Adventure

You whose mouths are made in the image of God's
Mouths which are order itself
Be indulgent when you compare us
To those who have been the perfection of order
We who seek everywhere for adventure
We are not your enemies
We wish to appropriate vast and strange domains
Where flowering mystery offers itself to whoever wishes to pick it
There are new fires there and colors never yet seen
A thousand imponderable phantasms
To which reality must be given
We would explore goodness a vast country where everything is silent
There is also time which one can banish or call back
Pity us who fight always in the front lines
Of the limitless and of the future
Pity our errors pity our sins

Behold the return of summer season of violence
And my youth died like the spring
O Sun it is the time for flaming Judgement

And I wait

To follow forever the sweet noble form
It assumes in order that I may love it alone
It comes and it attracts me as a magnet does the needle

It looks for all the world like
My redhead darling my beloved

Her hair is really gold you'd say
A flash of lightning which endures
Or flames which dance a proud pavane
In roses as they slowly fade

But laugh laugh long at me
Men from everywhere above all men of this place
For there are so many things I dare not tell you
So many things you will not let me say
Have pity on me


--Guillaume Apollinaire (translated by Michael Benedikt)