Today’s Poem: One Hundred Visions of War

Haiku in the trenches

Pieter Brueghel, The Triumph of Death, 1562 (Wikimedia Commons)

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One Hundred Visions of War (a selection)

by Julien Vocance, translated by Alfred Nicol

Blackening three months
between the trenches, the dead
have lost all their hair.
•
At ground level
fifteen days, I recognize
every clump and weed.
•
Cla cla cla cla cla . . .
— like a skeleton counting 
fingers on its teeth. 
•
Stop panting like that.
Yeah, yeah, you’re covered in blood —
A bullet grazed you. 
•
Little girl, you’ve lost
an arm. That’s no way to play.
You could be my Vieve.        ○ Genevieve
•
Faces gashed and scarred;
pitiful, loathsome bodies 
no woman will love.
•
Their eyes are shining
with health, youthfulness, and hope.
Bright eyes—made of glass.
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Joseph Bottum writes:

The American poet Alfred Nicol (b. 1956) is the author of such collections as After the Carnival and Animal Psalms. In 2022 he published 100 Visions of War, a translation of little-known French verses.

It was such a strange project undertaken by Julien Vocance (the penname of Joseph Seguin). Published in 1916, the poems relate the poet’s experience in the trenches of the First World War, but rendered in the form of Japanese-style haikus — an alien and little-studied form in French at the time. And just over a hundred years later, Alfred Nicol in turn undertook the ridiculously difficult task of rendering those French haikus as English haikus.

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Alfred Nicol writes:

Though not nearly as well known as the English soldier-poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, the Frenchman Joseph Seguin (1878–1954) also fought in the First World War — and also wrote poetry about his experiences at the front. In 1916, under the pen name “Julien Vocance,” he published Cent visions de guerre, “A Hundred Visions of War.” Although little known among English readers, it is a profound work of the moral imagination.

As a young man, having just earned his bachelor’s degree, Vocance served ten months of a three-year enlistment in the French army. He then moved to Paris in 1898 to continue his studies. And it was there in Paris that he began to meet with a group of students at the apartment of the French philosophy student Paul-Louis Couchoud (1879–1959).

Couchoud and his creative friends shared an interest in a Japanese literary form they called hai-kai, which had only recently arrived in France through French translations of British works, especially W.G. Aston’s History of Japanese Literature in 1899 and Basil Chamberlain’s seminal essay, “Basho and the Japanese Poetical Epigram,” in 1902. Some of the first haiku written in French — some of the first haiku written in the West — resulted from this poetry workshop at the turn of the century.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Vocance was mobilized into the infantry, even though by then he was 36 years old, already married with children. He described his war experience on the spot in a series of haiku, the form he and his friends had been so excited to discover. These new haikus, however, break nearly all of the rules of the classic Japanese form.

Where haiku traditionally speaks of the beauty of Nature, particularly the change of seasons, Vocance uses the form to depict the horror and brutality of armed conflict, as seen from the trenches. Readers get a ground-level view of unimaginable slaughter.

The immediacy of perception and absence of rhetoric that define haiku made it, in Vocance’s mind, the perfect vehicle to convey the experience of mechanized modern warfare. Translated here into English haikus — three-line poems of five, seven, and five syllables — the poems are snapshots of the battlefield, illuminating like strobe-light flashes from artillery the experience of the Great War’s slaughter.

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