The Central Laboratory

by Max Jacob, Alexander Dickow (Translator)

The first English translation of the Cubist poet’s most important collection of verse poems―a wild grab bag of contradictory styles When Max Jacob published The Central Laboratory in 1921, Parisian Dada had just officially come to an end and Surrealism was yet to be born. The poetic scene in Paris was between definitions, and Jacob embodied that moment.
The Central Laboratory is distinctly modern, yet utterly discordant with anything else that had been published a grab bag of popular genres, operettas, Breton folk song, nonsense poetry, nursery rhyme, doggerel, parody and puns in which sound often trumps sense and Jacob changes register on a dime. Employing Symbolist obscure reference, Cubist fracturing of perspective and Dadaist discontinuity, Jacob’s art of mixed signals and mocked allegory formulates a camp sensibility, a “queering” of literary style as riddled with contradiction as Jacob himself had been in his lifetime.
A century after its initial publication in French, the book remains utterly peculiar and lost for too long in the shadow of Jacob’s more famous book of prose poems, The Dice Cup . Jacob himself said of The Central Laboratory : “it sums up 20 years and reflects 20 states of soul, often 20 styles either suffered or created by me.”
Max Jacob (1876–1944) was a French poet, painter, writer and critic. A key figure of bohemian Montmartre and the Cubist era, he rubbed shoulders with such figures as Apollinaire and Modigliani, and was a lifelong friend to Picasso, Gris and Cocteau. Jacob converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1915. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, he died in a deportation camp of pneumonia. Rosanna Warren's critically acclaimed biography of Jacob was published in 2020.

Genres: Poetry, France

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1921

About the author

After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career. He was one of the first friends Pablo Picasso made in Paris. They met in the summer of 1901, and it was Jacob who helped the young artist learn French. Later, on the Boulevard Voltaire, he shared a room with Picasso, who remained a lifelong friend (and was included in his artwork Three Musicians). Jacob introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire, who in turn introduced Picasso to Georges Braque. He would become close friends with Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Christopher Wood and Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait in 1916. He also befriended and encouraged the artist Romanin, otherwise known as French politician and future Resistance leader Jean Moulin. Moulin's famous nom de guerre Max is presumed to be selected in honor of Jacob.
Having moved outside of Paris in May, 1936, to settle in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Loiret, Max Jacob was arrested on 24 February 1944 by the Gestapo, and interned at Orléans prison, (prisoner #15872). Jewish by birth, Jacob's brother Gaston had been previously arrested in January, 1944, deported to Auschwitz concentration camp, and gassed upon arrival with his sister Myrthe-Lea; her husband also deported and murdered by the Nazis. Following his incarceration at Orléans, Max was then transferred to Drancy internment camp from where he was to be transported in the next convoy to Auschwitz in Germany. However, said to be suffering from bronchial pneumonia, Max Jacob died in the infirmary of Le Cité de la Muette, a former housing block which served as the internment camp known as Drancy on 5 March.

Reviews

[Ulysse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Max Jacob
Wore make up
Made poems
Like totems
Rambled long
Humming songs
On the shore
Of blue Armor
Then knew war
First and second
Bugles beckoned
Death counts reckoned
Good friends dead
Full of lead
Muddy bed
Soul up fled
From green lips
Last eclipse
Painters painted
Women naked
Writers made it
Others faked it
Jacob sainted
And converted
His subverted
Extroverted
One-of-a-kind
Image-mind
For religion
Kept a pigeon
On his arm
Feathers warm
Easy does it
Fancy puppet
Pearly wings
When he sings
Poet’s fancy
Now in Drancy
Memories
Of extacies
Hills and mountains
Sunny fountains
Playing footsie
With a tootsie
Dressed in drag
Snowbound slag
Crossing borders
Against orders
Getting caught
Prospects naught
Sent to work camp
Where the cold damp
Put a stamp
On his lamp

Take a look
At this book
Man who wrote it
Was a poet

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like to read poetry. That doesn’t mean I understand it. There’s something appealing in letting words go by without attaching meaning to them.

[Jerome Berglund · Rating 5 out of 5]

** A must read for any fan of Jacob and the Paris creative vanguard, dada and surrealism, metered classical poetry and diverse voices, antifascist resistance and LGBTQ literary groundbreakers **

Elegantly translated, with discussion and history that well justify the purchase alone for any fans of surrealism, cubism, dada and the artists and luminaries who flocked around this icon throughout his short and extraordinary lifetime. The rhyming and meter are preserved exquisitely, a feat few dare attempt let alone achieve this stunningly. Explanatory notes help explain and contextualize important work that I agree should be at least as well known and regarded as Jacob's seminal Dice Cup. This is different and unique in ways from the unparalleled prose poems the author is best known for, perhaps more resembles romantic or symbolist writings of Keats or Shelly or Byron, but the core absurdity and whimsy, imagination and strain of otherworldliness we associate with this legend is no less potent or present throughout. A tad more challenging than his short prose work, but you get out what is put in, and ultimately this collection represents many of the poet's loftiest, most impressive achievements. Don't miss this critical work.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wakefield does it again. There’s no book review here. This book is so wonderful that an Oscar speech is appropriate, inevitable.

First: What a magnificent translation! I don’t know French from Lebanese. But the choices here, if you read and reread and compare, reveal endless rewards. There are awkward moments. Garcon to kiddo, for example among many examples throughout this fat collection. But Max Jacob has presented an extremely formidable challenge, if you’ll excuse my overemphasis. Reading these poems is like watching them spin, some slower in their rotation, few of them disposable, few of them not eternal, like the settling of a candle after lighting it that you recognize from another under the same darkness decades ago.

Second: Wakefield created a perfect edition for English readers here. The cover is a gorgeous use of a Juan Gris painting. The binding is strong, sturdy and appropriate for collector (scum) or the ongoing traveler. The pages are firm and it feels good to turn them. Each poem is given its own place to stand up and announce itself, or insinuate itself, or pretend to be something that it is.

Third: Thanks to Mr. Max Jacob. This is a ride.

“To Modigliani To Prove I Am A Poet” is a favorite.

[….]

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published somewhere between the death of Dada and the birth of Surrealism, but with more classicism and piety than either (anti)tradition would allow. Full of repetitions, clumsy rhymes and other awkward traps to befuddle any reader.

[Gas Bou · Rating 1 out of 5]

Le pire est encore l'égarement mystique de la dernière partie