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Max Jacob

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The Rain

Mr Yousouf has forgotten his umbrella
Mr Yousouf has lost his umbrella
Mrs Yousouf, someone’s stolen her umbrella
There was an ivory knob on her umbrella
What went into my eye was the tip of an umbrella
Didn’t I leave my umbrella
Last night in the stand you have for any old umbrella?
I’ll have to buy an umbrella
I never actually use an umbrella
I have a dust-coat with a hood to keep the rain from my fontanella
Mr Yousouf, you’re in luck doing without an umbrella.

During his blue period, Picasso did a comic strip of Max Jacob glorified, accepted into the French Academy, driven in a chariot to the Arc de Triomphe, wearing a toga and carrying an umbrella, and receiving a laurel crown from Pallas Athene in the Elysian Fields. Max, in the habit of saying his poems to Pablo, could well have penned ‘La pluie’ (from Les Pénitents en Maillots Roses, 1925) as a jest in response, as every line but one ends in parapluie and that one ends in pluie (rain). Or he may have written it as a horizontal umbrella poem in response to Apollinaire’s almost vertical rain poem, ‘Il pleut’, (written in July 1914, published in SIC in 1916 and then in Calligrammes in 1918). Being bald, Max himself may have been quite content to do without an umbrella – he could have one in his imagination, and not just one, but a skyful à la Magritte. My ‘my fontanella’ may be a far cry from the rain of the original, but the Italian word, rhyming with umbrella (a rhyme being absolutely essential here) means, as well as ‘fontanelle’ (a part of the body most likely to feel the rain when there’s no umbrella), ‘little fountain’ – allowing me to be hand-in-glove with Max’s childlike pleasure in word-games! Yousouf must be a Muslim mystic (souf = wool worn by ascetics) and mysticism was a Jacob trait. He read palms, cards and coffee grounds and saw, on a wall of his room where he had painted a landscape, a vision of God in yellow silk with blue facings.

Translated by Christopher Pilling

Page(s) 140-141

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