Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.
Start by marking “Alcoholes” as Want to Read:
Alcoholes
by
Alcools, first published in 1913 and one of the few indispensable books of twentieth- century poetry, provides a key to the century's history and consciousness. Champion of "cubism," Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) fashions in verse the sonic equivalent of what Picasso accomplishes in his cubist works: simultaneity. Apollinaire has been so influential that without him th
...more
Paperback, Clásicos para hoy, 135 pages
Published
September 1st 2014
by Conaculta
(first published 1913)
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
Reader Q&A
To ask other readers questions about
Alcoholes,
please sign up.
Be the first to ask a question about Alcoholes
This book is not yet featured on Listopia.
Add this book to your favorite list »
Community Reviews
Showing 1-30
Start your review of Alcoholes
I'd say this is the best book of French poetry I've read since Paul Éluard's 'Capitale de la douleur'.
It's very much a collection that should be seen as a landmark in the history of not just French poetry but 20th century poetry in general.
The book features many sublime longer poems like 'Song of the Poorly Loved', The House of the Dead', 'The Betrothal', and 'Vendemiaire', but to keep things brief, I picked three of my favourite shorter poems below.
CLOTILDE
Anemone and columbine
Have sprung up i ...more
It's very much a collection that should be seen as a landmark in the history of not just French poetry but 20th century poetry in general.
The book features many sublime longer poems like 'Song of the Poorly Loved', The House of the Dead', 'The Betrothal', and 'Vendemiaire', but to keep things brief, I picked three of my favourite shorter poems below.
CLOTILDE
Anemone and columbine
Have sprung up i ...more
Feb 01, 2015
Mariel
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
one night it was the sea
Recommended to Mariel by:
painted bird falling
I've lived like a fool and I've wasted my timeZone
You dare not look at your hands I want to weep all the time
Everyone is old but you. They were here first and are still here in their stale after life. But here on this new street they are young and you are their young. Their bed time piety, your staying up late to old, Jesus is the walking away beauty of parents pedestal. He's the cool older girl with the who you want to be. Pray into everybody's age. Out of their mouths the breath to ascend. Me ...more
If she ever returns to me
I'll say to her I'll say I'm happy
I void my heart and head
Into barrels of Hades
I shit the entire sky
I'd rather be happy
I'd rather be a child
I wish never to forget her
----
O my love your florentine copulations
Left a bitter taste
Repulsive to fate
The movement of her eyes
Drew stars across the evening sky
In her look swam sirens
We fucked until we bled
----
You laugh at yourself and the laughter crackles like hellfire
The sparks gild the ground and background of your life Your lif ...more
I'll say to her I'll say I'm happy
I void my heart and head
Into barrels of Hades
I shit the entire sky
I'd rather be happy
I'd rather be a child
I wish never to forget her
----
O my love your florentine copulations
Left a bitter taste
Repulsive to fate
The movement of her eyes
Drew stars across the evening sky
In her look swam sirens
We fucked until we bled
----
You laugh at yourself and the laughter crackles like hellfire
The sparks gild the ground and background of your life Your lif ...more
Nov 25, 2007
Jenna
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
poetry-in-translation,
poetry-in-french
If you were never quite sure what the word "lyricism" meant, read this book. Apollinaire pays his due to formal constraints such as meter and rhyme, yet never gets bogged down by them. Like wily Hermes with his winged sandals, Apollinaire leaps athletically from image to image as though following the directives of some wild angelic muse, rather than obeying the dictates of ordinary terrestrial logic. The result is an exciting, spontaneous, unpredictable poetry whose substance it would be impossi
...more
Great collection, translations seems legit (my French is rather rudimentary so I'm not the best judge), and the notes were fair and balanced. Apollinaire's imagery is always competent, often startling and very clever. I loved the blending of modern/ism with mythology and even Christianity (although my relationship with the religion itself is complex and dysfunctional). At least here in the verse the mix of symbolism, mythologies (classical, Christian, and personal), with wool-gathering and a sur
...more
On a positive note: there were some nice metaphors I guess, but that doesn’t make up for the time I wasted in analyzing that ENTIRE thing.
God I hate French sometimes.
God I hate French sometimes.
Apollinaire is a fascinating poet because he synthesized or presaged several early 20th-century movements (cubism, futurism, surrealism, modernism) with his own unique vision. A few of these poems are like knotty puzzles that can only be decoded via footnotes, but overall this collection is solid, and the best poems (Zone, Song of the Poorly Loved, Rhenanes, The Bethrothal, The House of the Dead, Vendemiaire) are sublime. This edition's translator (Anne Hyde Greet) offers copious, helpful notes
...more
i enjoyed bits of this. it saddened me to see so much rhyme in the original French that accompanies the more liberal English translations. i was inspired to read Apollinaire after seeing the first few lines of "Zone" referenced in an introduction to Stephen Mitchell's translations of Rilke:
"At last you're tired of this elderly world
Sheperdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating
You're fed up with living in antiquity"
i liked a lot of the images, but i got lost in the denser poems ...more
"At last you're tired of this elderly world
Sheperdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating
You're fed up with living in antiquity"
i liked a lot of the images, but i got lost in the denser poems ...more
Best French poetry ever.
I liked it, but didn't love it. I felt nothing reading some poems, and others really charmed me. My favorite is probably "L'adieu".
...more
very good. Zone, Mirabeau Bridge, The Song of the Poorly Loved, Procession, and The Harvest Month stood out to me the most but I liked all of them
I read this book of poems while I was a young premed student. At that time, I was still avid of French symbolist poetry, and Apollinaire was a big step away from that. ("A la fin tu est las de ce monde ancien") Apollinaire is not at all a symbolist, he is not bored and exotic and artificially violently yearning. While, he is a master of verbal music making, as symbolitst were, he boldly experimented with form and thought content, but at the same time remained profoundly and immediately human, ev
...more
Take a clean sheet of paper, add some serious heliotropes for uplift, but damp down with the melancholy of almonds and gypsies and sad hotels. Note the pallor roseying, the radiance, the soar that switches to hover with the discreet scent of violets and leather. Some rainy alleyways. Paris. Wit an poignancy and spontaneity with an aftertaste you'd have to be an idiot not to appreciate.
...more
Appollinaire, charter member of the surrealists, had a wistful and humorous tone that some of his bros and sisters lacked. His poem "Zone" - "You are tired of this ancient world at last" is all he needed to write. But I'm glad he wrote more. (Again, read long ago, not sure if this is the same translation)
...more
Possibly the best book of poetry I've ever read. Does this say more about the book or how sadly few books of poetry I've read, I'll leave up to you. After you read this, of course. Which you should. I reap upon it all the hyperbolic praise your imagination can muster.
...more
this summer i heard a reading of zone in paris. i thought there was something very special in it.
some of the poems in this book are very awkward and difficult... and some of them make me cry.
some of the poems in this book are very awkward and difficult... and some of them make me cry.
Nov 28, 2015
Edita
rated it
liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
poetry,
guillaume-apollinaire
And turning my eyes from all the empty future
I see the whole past growing in myself.
Nothing is dead but what has not become:
*
I have had the courage to look backward.
The cadavers of my days
Mark the way I’ve come and I weep for them.
[…]
In the garden of my memory.
I see the whole past growing in myself.
Nothing is dead but what has not become:
*
I have had the courage to look backward.
The cadavers of my days
Mark the way I’ve come and I weep for them.
[…]
In the garden of my memory.
If you are an amateur-poet and want to learn, how the modern poetry should look like, this is the book you should begin with.
Five stars for the original poems. Three for a fairly unimpressive translation.
French poetry. My favorite poem in the world is in this collection, "Le Pont Mirabeau"
...more
Apollinaire's poetry is a little weird for me.
...more
Jun 27, 2010
Cornelia
rated it
really liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
paperback,
litterature
magnific, brillant deep and beautiful
Oct 06, 2010
Hope Lyca Youngblood
rated it
really liked it
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
fans of the french cannon
The poem "Zone" contains one of my favorite lines in all of litterature. "You drink an alchohol as caustic as your life." I am so smitten by it that I used it as a central theme in a short story.
...more
Zone.
Poetry by the French poet Appolinaire. Difficult, hermetic. I think I have to try this later on, in translation, and with sufficient additional explanation.
With an exclamation point after each star!
Very original poetry.
A difficullt book to read.
and with the first line....
At last you're tired of this elderly world ...more
At last you're tired of this elderly world ...more
[read in french] I love it. it was kind of sad but beautiful all along
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Goodreads Librari...: Missing page number | 4 | 18 | Jan 20, 2021 09:25AM |
Readers also enjoyed
Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire (in French pronounced [ɡijom apɔliˈnɛʁ]) was a French poet, writer, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother.
Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century, he is credited with coining the word surrealism and writing one of the earliest works described as surrealist, the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917, ...more
Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century, he is credited with coining the word surrealism and writing one of the earliest works described as surrealist, the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917, ...more
News & Interviews
Readers have a lot to look forward to this year! Just feast your eyes upon all of these debut books to check out and emerging authors to...
178 likes · 47 comments
No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »
“Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
des éternels regards l'onde si lasse
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
l'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante
L'amour s'en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l'Espérance est violente
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure”
—
16 likes
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
des éternels regards l'onde si lasse
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
l'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante
L'amour s'en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l'Espérance est violente
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure
Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure”
“J'ai cueilli ce brin de bruyère
L'automne est morte souviens-t'en
Nous ne nous verrons plus sur terre
Odeur du temps brin de bruyère
Et souviens-toi que je t'attends”
—
7 likes
More quotes…
L'automne est morte souviens-t'en
Nous ne nous verrons plus sur terre
Odeur du temps brin de bruyère
Et souviens-toi que je t'attends”
