One Hundred Visions of War by Julien Vocance, translated by Alfred Nicol, Preface by Dana Gioia, published November 2022, Wiseblood Books Haiku, traditionally subtle and nature-oriented, seems a miscast form for writing from the trenches of a brutal war. Yet Joseph Seguin, who wrote under the pen name Julian Vocance, used it to great effect in his book One Hundred Visions of War to share his observations from the trenches of World War I. Recently, after hearing Alfred Nicol read from his new French-to-English translation, I purchased the slender volume; read it through several times; and could only echo author Joshua Mehigan’s blurb: “Holy shit.” The tension between form and theme increases the powerful impact of Vocance’s work. And Nicol’s translation and sequencing further amplify its force, with its simple, accessible tercets that illuminate the brutality of modern, mechanized warfare. As the title suggests, one-hundred discrete imagistic moments comprise the sequence. Each haiku appears alone at the top of a page. Each is self-contained yet relates to the next, so that a story builds and gains a collective resonance as one reads. Below is an example. Shrieking as it climbed, but taking its own sweet time, the shell passed us by. That haiku is followed on the next page, by a companion that also works alone. A brown swirl of shells rolling in the dirt like schoolboys. These poems remain sadly relevant with yesterday’s schoolboy-soldiers replaced by today’s. The young men’s bodies celebrate bloody weddings, clinging to the earth. Nicol asserts that the great value of Vocance’s work lies “... in its witness to the experience of the human being caught up in a battle which, as Wendell Berry put it, ‘the machines won’” And those machines have grown increasingly powerful, multi-faceted, and ubiquitous over the last hundred years, disrupting our everyday lives in their many guises including the violence that plagues American schools, houses of worship, and homes. Vocance might have been talking about Sandy Hook or Uvalde, the Pulse nightclub, or Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church when he wrote: Bloody machine gun. Before it died, it spread out its fan of corpses. In his preface to Nicol’s translation, Dana Gioia states: “More than a century after its publication, Vocance’s sequence has lost neither its shock value nor its strange tenderness. Alfred Nicol deserves every accolade for his brilliant and affecting translations. He has restored a lost masterpiece to English-language memory.” I agree and am grateful for having learned about this book. As Wiseblood Books summarizes, One Hundred Visions of War is a triumph in which “an obscure soldier-poet pits his human art against overwhelming military technology, and his art survives.” ///// Julien Vocance, a French writer (1878-1954), served in the trenches in WWI, where he lost an eye in combat. He wrote numerous visceral haiku about his experiences in that war. ///// About the Translator (taken from the book) Alfred Nicol worked in the printing industry for twenty years after graduating from Dartmouth College, where he received the Academy of American Poets Prize. He now lives in West Newbury, Massachusetts. A longtime member of the Powow River Poets, he edited the Powow River anthology, published by Ocean Publishing in 2005. Nicol was the recipient of the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award. For his first book of poems, Winter Light, published by the University of Evansville Press. He has published several other books and his poems have appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, Dark Horse, and elsewhere. ///// Reviewer Mary Beth Hines is a frequent contributor to Lightwood. Read additional reviews and her poetry by going to our Search button and entering her name.
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