The American poet Alfred Nicol (b. 1956) is the author of such collections as “Animal Psalms” and “Elegy for Everyone,” and one of the nation’s best translators. In 2022 he published “100 Visions of War,” a tour-de-force rendering of Julien Vocance’s French haikus as English haikus. The New York Sun is proud to run his selection of seven of his translations of Vocance’s brief poems for the third day of a week of World War I poetry in honor of Veterans Day (Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, in other English-speaking countries) on November 11.

Guest editor 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,” or “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.

A Hundred Visions of War (a selection)
by Julien Vocance (translated by Alfred Nicol)

The young men’s bodies
celebrate bloody weddings,
clinging to the earth.                           
*
Strapped in the canvas
a comrade shoulders—slaughtered meat
a mother waits for
*
To their frugal meal
a black sausage is added,
smashing three chests.
*
Every day, you see
new ones spring up from the ground:
white wooden crosses.
*
The cannons exhale
flames, like blasts from a forge—
panting from slaughtering.
*
Terror in his eyes,
his own death snarling at him,
he bolts from the trench.
*
He’s left the battle,
the old vet. The post-war years
will tear him to shreds.

___________________________________________
With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.