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     Along with Apollinaire, and more especially Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob is frequently characterised as a “Cubist poet”. To what extent this description, taken from plastic art, may be properly applied to literature is questionable (Reverdy himself denied its validity); but it does serve to identify these three poets as playing the same sort of role in respect of poetry as the Cubists played in painting. That is to say, they initiated a radical break with almost everything that had preceeded them (Rimbaud is their only true precursor) and ushered in the modern movement.

     It is significant that Reverdy and Jacob were both ardent devotees of the poem in prose, which became an essential element in “literary Cubism”. Jacob’s own reputation rests primarily on his collection of prose poems, Le Cornet a dès.

     In his “Petit histoire du Cornet a dès” Jacob summed up his sources of inspiration as follows: “I strove to capture within me, by every means, the material of the unconscious: words at liberty, daring associations of ideas, night and day dreams, hallucinations and so on... Clearly, this manner of working foreshadows the Surrealists and their principle of “automatic writing”. Jacob is distinguished from the Surrealists in theory by his insistence on the role of the will, his conscious adumbration of a theory of the prose poem and his avowed aim to “situate” each poem, that is to say to give each poem its own specific colour and atmosphere. In fact, as Breton became increasingly disillusioned with the results of “automatic writing”, Surrealist practice - at least in the hands of its more serious and gifted representatives, such as Paul Eluard - moved ever closer to that of Max Jacob and Pierre Reverdy, who can now be seen as not merely the precursors of Surrealism but actually as two of its most outstanding exponents.

     That aspect of Jacob’s work, as of Reverdy’s, which may properly be called Cubist - though in a limited sense - is the striving “to dissociate the elememts of reality so as to reassociate them in a
new order” (Suzanne Bernard, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours). To this is added, especially in the case of Jacob, the tendency to draw the majority of his images from the most commonplace elements of everyday life, which are rendered striking and significant by their unexpected juxtapositions, as in the paintings of Juan Gris, Picasso and Braque.

     It is imporatnt to note also, the powerful element of parody in Jacob’s work, an aspect which distinguishes him from Reverdy. This parody is directed not only at such obvious targets as the bourgeoisie and generally accepted ideas, but also at various literary genres, from journalism to biography, and even at some of Jacob’s greatest forerunners such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, as exemplified in those poems written “in a manner not my own”.

     Finally, attention must be drawn to the type of poem based almost entirely on word play, which is not represented among these translations because it cannot be translated, but only, at best, “imitated”, a venture I was not prepared to embark upon. This was a way of writing very dear to Jacob, in keeping with his dedication to “words at liberty”. The following may be considered a typical example from among the many to be found in Le Cornet a dès:

     Cet allemand était fou d’art, de foulards et de poulardes. Dans son pays, la Reine-Claude est peinte sur les foulards; à table, on en sait aussi qui rôdent autour des poulardes.

     The thirteen poems presented here represent only a random sample from Jacob’s second volume, Derniers Poèmes, selected because of their personal appeal or their relative susceptibility to translation. It is to be hoped that they will stimulate the reader to go to the original and reawaken interest in this vitally significant forerunner of the modern movement in poetry, whose life, like so many of his generation, was brought to a violent and untimely end by Nazi brutality because of his Jewish origins.