Apollinaire and Madeleine Pagès: Translating the photography of a relationship

The epistolary relationship between Apollinaire and Madeleine Pagès was significantly fuelled by the photographs Madeleine sent to the poet. Apollinaire himself becomes the photographer of Madeleine in his poem 'Photographie' (October 13 1915), a curiously muted, Symbolist 'image'. But the version finally published in Calligrammes (1918), after the end of the affair, is very different in layout, and more Cubist than Symbolist in spirit. This dispositional shift necessitates a radical re-thinking of strategy for the translator of these two versions.