Picabia briefly bruited a post-Dada movement to be called Instantaneism, and what Lowenthal rightly calls his "adherence to the present" is really the substance of what may seem the incoherence or arbitrariness of movement from line to line in his poems. He is so radically focused on the immediate presence of each line that the connections between them can be left to fend for themselves. Meaning exists in the instant, and the instant is continually born anew. As Picabia explained in 1920 to a journalist from, of all places, the proto-Fascist newspaper L'Action française, "We paint without worrying about depicting objects, and we write without taking heed of the meaning of words. We seek only the pleasure of expressing ourselves, but we give the sketches we make, the words we string together, a symbolic meaning, a translation value: not just apart from every common convention, but through an unstable, rash convention, which lasts only as long as the very moment we are utilizing it." This adhesion to the instant is linked to the second factor in Picabia's abstraction, which is also a personism, namely, that Picabia's verse rarely lets go of an intense and implicit specificity of address--usually the addressee is a woman--that allows the most important things to remain unsaid, or to be shamelessly revealed, equally, and thanks to which the poem, as O'Hara put it, "is at last between two persons instead of two pages."

Between the two stages of Picabia's poetic career lies his break with Dada and disaffection with any collective avant-garde. Not that he returned to the dreary conservatism of his young manhood; he simply cut his ties and went adrift on his own. Like Giorgio de Chirico, he became one of those artists whose later works were ignored by art history; likewise, his influence as a poet was forgotten. And also, as with de Chirico, his late paintings have since the '80s undergone recurrent spasms of rediscovery that still have not produced a clear picture of his developing thought as an artist. Baker, too, consigning the later work, literary as well as pictorial, to "the cold, hard land of regression and pastiche," turns away from it with relief. If Picabia's early poetry awaits rediscovery, his later work, to some extent, is only now being discovered for the first time.

While Picabia began writing in the shadow of World War I, it merely hovered in the background of most of his early poetry. Twenty-five years later, things would be different; dread of war was the subject that moved him to start writing again: "Since September 1939/the sun seems to have set/everything has grown suspect/everything has grown older/events are nothing more than rumors." Even living in neutral Switzerland, he felt the threat of violence as a personal threat, but also the spur to expression. Poems of Dingalari, the posthumously published book written in late 1939, ends with these lines: "One can imagine/a long-range shooting/an exceptionally long one would be needed/for the bullet/to remain in my head/and serve me as a quill/to write this book." Picabia was now writing much differently from twenty years before. His poetry during and after World War II has a new plainness and directness. The exuberance that energized even the most agitated and disturbing images--for instance in the suicide poem "Poison or Revolver"--has turned to a naked melancholy expressed with epigrammatic simplicity.

This new aphoristic tendency is at the heart of what Lowenthal seems to consider his great feat of literary detective work, the discovery that some of Picabia's late writing, and in particular much of Chi-Lo-Sa, a book of brief aphorism-like poems published in 1950, is taken directly from Nietzsche. Is Lowenthal right to see Picabia's book as a simple plagiarism of The Gay Science? Even those who agree with Picabia that "if the work of another translates my dream, his work is mine" might concur with Lowenthal that Chi-Lo-Sa makes for "an uncomfortable reading experience" once one recognizes the recurrent source. And yet a comparison between Picabia's versions and the "originals" cited in Lowenthal's notes shows that Picabia has adapted and sometimes inverted Nietzsche's thought to a degree Lowenthal does not acknowledge.

Given that Lowenthal seems to have finished his labors having less respect for Picabia than he may have started out with, it is all the more remarkable that he has presented such a scrupulous translation, one certain to be a standard work for a long time. But it is not the work of a poet. Compare Lowenthal's version of the first poem from Are We Not Betrayed by Seriousness with the same one from a version of the book (Are We Not Betrayed by Importance) recently published in a microscopic edition by the Massachusetts-based poet Geoffrey Young. Here's Lowenthal, who titles the poem "Incapable Intoxication": "I fear that your memory/is going with you/your lips are going to leave/my lips/your heart/left/just like the rest." And here's Young's version of the same work, called "Drunken Stumbling":

I'm afraid that your memory
will go when you go
your lips
will leave
my lips
your heart
be gone
with the rest

Both versions accurately convey the sense of the original, except for Young's slight but justifiable liberty with the title, but Young's brings it into sharper focus while maintaining an intimacy that gets lost in Lowenthal's translation. Likewise, within I Am a Beautiful Monster itself, the one piece translated by a different hand, Jesus Christ Rastaquouère, shows a distinctly higher level of linguistic verve in a version by poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein (who, I should disclose, for a long time used to edit my occasional contributions to Art in America). Still, the completeness of Lowenthal's edition makes it invaluable, and it will be a benchmark against which future translations of particular works can be measured, and which one hopes at least some of them will surpass.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.