Translated from French by Timothy Mathews
Published 2023. Paperback, 180pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $21
ISBN 9781848618381 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) was at the forefront of the aesthetic revolution that is the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century. In the accompanying memoir to his English translation of Seated Woman , Timothy Mathews gives a wide-ranging account of the ways Apollinaire interacted in his life and art with Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism and Orphism, and the subjective as well as social experiences involved in urban modernism. In its scattered but controlled composition and the multiplicity of its tones, Seated Woman , published posthumously in 1920, is a powerful counterpoint to the multi-faceted poetry for which Apollinaire is often better known. In playing the music of violence as well as the generosity that characterised the Great War, it is a story of its time, for our time and any time. Apollinaire’s writing as a whole is a living testament to the extraordinary creative energy he both witnessed and produced, but also his understanding of its vulnerability to exploitation and decay. This book in turn seeks to honour that understanding, its persistent calls to the imagination, and the wit, vision and honesty that await readers of Apollinaire’s unique voice.

The book includes a memoir by Timothy Mathews in which he discusses Seated Woman and his translation, as well as Apollinaire’s aesthetic generally and its crucial part in the development of European modernism. The book contains further texts in which Timothy Mathews responds to Apollinaire’s writing through translation, as well as critically and creatively.

'A remarkable testimony to the "on-the-go-ness" of Apollinaire. Having plunged into his poems for years untold, I discovered this Seated Woman (My God, she is that and more) through Timothy Mathews’s rendering, I won’t just say "translation" – this is a kind of miracle of wit, facetious wording, and over-the-top, beyond the pale Beingness. Think upon this, Picasso!' —Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.

'Timothy Mathews’s exuberant and hugely inventive translation of the Décaudin edition of Apollinaire’s La Femme assise has, among its many riches, two particular ground-breaking virtues. It offers us a translator’s memoir which is not "autotheory", but a patient exploration of the ever-shifting existential position of the translator, looking to situate a non-coincident subjecthood in the heart of the text. It also allows us to imagine what that hitherto neglected species might look like – a creative-critical edition of a translated work: a studied, carefully argued incorporation of a text into an intricate meshwork of creative responses, and the extension of these responses into close-lying or related texts, all within a general approach to readers of showing rather than telling.' —Clive Scott, Professor Emeritus of European Literature, University of East Anglia

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