The Poet Assassinated

A Rabelaisian mock-epic full of typographic play and careening prose Apollinaire was Modernisms first champion and after his early death in 1918 he became its first saint. Lying in a hospital bed in 1915 recovering from combat wounds suffered in World War I Apollinaire assembled the fragments of a tragicomic mock-epic and occasionally obscene autobiography--clef: The Poet Assassinated. This novella recounts the life and death of Croniamantal whose birth is saluted by the Eiffel Towers beautiful erection who rises through the Parisian literary world to proclaim himself the greatest of living poets and who is then torn to pieces by a mob. A statue built out of nothing like poetry and glory is constructed in his honor. This translation is by Matthew Josephson an American editor who arrived in Paris just after the war and entered the circle of avant-garde artists and poets that had been galvanized by Apollinaires life and death. Josephson was among the first to introduce these Dadaists and Surrealists to the US via his small magazine Broom and among his most ambitious projects was this translation published by Broom as a limited-edition book in 1923 and never since reprinted.