The Modernist Bestiary COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND CULTURE Series Editors TIMOTHY MATHEWS AND FLORIAN MUSSGNUG Comparative Literature and Culture explores new creative and critical perspectives on literature, art and culture. Contributions offer a comparative, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary focus, showcasing exploratory research in literary and cultural theory and history, material and visual cultures, and reception studies. The series is also interested in language-based research, particularly the changing role of national and minority languages and cultures, and includes within its publications the annual proceedings of the ‘Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies’. Timothy Mathews is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, UCL. Florian Mussgnug is Reader in Italian and Comparative Literature, UCL. The Modernist Bestiary Translating Animals and the Arts through Guillaume Apollinaire, Raoul Dufy and Graham Sutherland Edited by Sarah Kay and Timothy Mathews First published in 2020 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk Collection © Editors, 2020 Text © Contributors, 2020 Images © Copyright holders named in captions, 2020 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work, providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Kay, S. and Mathews, T. (eds.). 2020. The Modernist Bestiary: Translating Animals and the Arts through Guillaume Apollinaire, Raoul Dufy and Graham Sutherland. London: UCL Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787351516 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at http://creative commons.org/licenses/ Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons licence unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978-1-78735-182-0 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-157-8 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-151-6 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-78735-188-2 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-78735-206-3 (mobi) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787351516 Contents List of illustrations vii Notes on contributors ix Acknowledgements xiii Headpiece: Oblique and prolonged 1 Timothy Mathews 1 Graham Sutherland – The Bestiary or the Procession of Orpheus: An introduction 27 Dawn Ades 2 The Voice of Light: Nature and revelation in The Bestiary or the Procession of Orpheus 35 Sarah Kay 3 Ombre terreuse: Shades of meaning in Vergil, Ovid and Apollinaire 58 Sarah Spence 4 Apollinaire’s Octosyllabic Quatrain, Translation and Zoopoetics 74 Clive Scott 5 Animals on Parade: Collecting sounds for l’histoire naturelle of modern music 92 Rachel Mundy 6 Beasts of Flesh and Steel: The post-industrial bestiaries of Apollinaire, Dufy and Sutherland 110 Matthew Senior 7 How is Orpheus honoured? Procession, association and loss 127 Timothy Mathews CONTENts v 8 Notes Towards A Hybrid Bestiary: Out of Apollinaire, Sutherland and others 144 George Szirtes Tailpiece 161 Sarah Kay Index 165 vi THE MODERNIST BESTIARY List of Illustrations 1 Guillaume Apollinaire and Raoul Dufy, Le Bestiaire, ‘Orphée’ 7 2 Guillaume Apollinaire and Raoul Dufy, Le Bestiaire, ‘La Tortue’ 8 3 Guillaume Apollinaire and Raoul Dufy, Le Bestiaire, ‘Le Cheval’ 9 4 Guillaume Apollinaire and Raoul Dufy, Le Bestiaire, ‘Le Chat’ 10 5 Guillaume Apollinaire and Raoul Dufy, Le Bestiaire, ‘Le Poulpe’ 11 6 Guillaume Apollinaire and Raoul Dufy, Le Bestiaire, ‘Les Sirènes’ 12 7 Guillaume Apollinaire and Raoul Dufy, Le Bestiaire, ‘Ibis’ 13 8 Guillaume Apollinaire and Raoul Dufy, Le Bestiaire, ‘Le Bœuf’ 14 9 Graham Sutherland, Bestiary, ‘Orpheus’ (1) 15 10 Graham Sutherland, Bestiary, ‘Tortoise’ 16 11 Graham Sutherland, Bestiary, ‘Lion’ 17 12 Graham Sutherland, Bestiary, ‘Mouse’ 18 13 Graham Sutherland, Bestiary, ‘Elephant’ 19 14 Graham Sutherland, Bestiary, ‘Orpheus’ (2) 20 15 Graham Sutherland, Bestiary, ‘Fly’ 21 16 Graham Sutherland, Bestiary, ‘Orpheus’ (3) 22 17 Graham Sutherland, Bestiary, ‘Octopus’ 23 18 Graham Sutherland, Bestiary, ‘Sirens’ 24 19 Graham Sutherland, Bestiary, ‘Ibis’ 25 20 Graham Sutherland , Bestiary, ‘Pyre’ 26 21 Guillaume Apollinaire, manuscript draft for the Bestiaire 44 22 Northumberland Bestiary, Adam naming the animals 48 23 Northumberland Bestiary, creation of humans and animals 49 24 Clive Scott, graphic 1: ‘Octopus’ 82 25 Clive Scott, graphic 2: ‘Ibis’ 86 26 Clive Scott, graphic 3: ‘Carp’ 89 27 Music example 1: Louis Durey, ‘La Chèvre du Thibet’ 96 28 Music example 2: Francis Poulenc, ‘La Chèvre du Thibet’ 97 29 Gustave Soury, Dompteur Emmanuel with his cats 102 30 Charles Levy, circus poster 103 LIst OF ILLUstRATIONS vii 31 Bestiary, British Library, Royal MS 12 C XIX, Manticore 111 32 Villard de Honnecourt, Sketchbook, Lion 114 33 Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, right panel 120 viii THE MODERNIST BESTIARY Notes on contributors Dawn Ades is Professor Emerita at the University of Essex, a Fellow of the British Academy, a former trustee of the Tate and Professor of the History of Art at the Royal Academy, and was awarded a CBE in 2013 for her services to art history. She has been responsible for some of the most important exhibitions in London and overseas over the past 30 years, including Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978), Art in Latin America (1989), the Salvador Dalí centenary at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (2004), The Colour of my Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2011) and Dalí/Duchamp at the Royal Academy (2017). She was Associate Curator for Manifesta 9 (2012). Her publications include standard works on photomontage, Dada, Surrealism, women artists and Mexican muralists. Sarah Kay teaches French, comparative literature and medieval studies at New York University. A former Fellow of the British Academy, she has written widely on medieval texts across genres and languages, particularly on poetry and its connections with philosophy and literary theory. Her most recent books are Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, and Philology’s Vomit: An Essay on the Immortality and Corporeality of Texts (both 2017); her current work is on medieval song from Aristotle to opera. Timothy Mathews is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism at University College London. In his writing and translating he explores what relating to art can tell us about relating to people. His interests include relations of literary and visual art, translation and creative critical writing. He has written on many modern artists and writers, notably Apollinaire; his most recent monograph is Alberto Giacometti: the Art of Relation (2013). He is currently completing a book of creative critical chronicles and preparing a translation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s La Femme assise. He is a member of the Academy of Europe and Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix Rachel Mundy is Assistant Professor of Music in the Arts, Culture and Media programme at Rutgers University in Newark. She specialises in twentieth-century music at the juncture of sound studies, the history of science and animal studies. Her book Animal Musicalities traces histories of modern sound through comparisons between animal and human musicality, drawing on the history of biology, anthropology, psychology and comparative musicology. Her current research explores the place of animal voices in modern narratives of environmental crisis. Clive Scott is Professor Emeritus of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of the British Academy. His research interests lie in comparative poetics, in the relationship between photography and language, and in the experimental translation of poetry (see Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading (2012), Translating the Perception of Text: Literary Translation and Phenomenology (2012) and Translating Apollinaire (2014)). His most recent book, The Work of Literary Translation, was published in 2018. He is at present preparing a set of studies entitled ‘Dialogue, Movement, Rhythm: Essays in the Philosophy of Literary Translation’. Matthew Senior is Ruberta T. McCandless Professor and Chair of the Department of French and Italian at Oberlin College. He has edited three collections of essays in the field of animal studies: Animots: Postanimality in French Thought, co-edited with David Clark and Carla Freccero (2015); A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Enlightenment (2007); and Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History from the Middle Ages to the Present, co-edited with Jennifer Ham (1997). He is also the author of In the Grip of Minos: Confessional Discourse in Dante, Corneille, and Racine (1994). Sarah Spence is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. Her work has focused both on the ancient poet Vergil and on the process of poetic adaptation and reception of the classics. She is the author of three monographs and several edited volumes including Poets and Critics Read Vergil, which features poets in conversation with Vergilians. She has served as editor-in- chief of three journals: Literary Imagination, Vergilius and Speculum. In 2014, with Elizabeth Wright and Andrew Lemons, she published a translation and commentary of Vergilian Latin poems written about the 1571 Battle of Lepanto. She is currently working on a book on the poetic treatment of the island of Sicily and the adaptation of the myth of Proserpina in works from Cicero to Dante.