August 26, 1880

Guillaume Apollinaire (August 26, 1880 to November 9, 1918,) was born in Rome as, poets.org reminds us:

...Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris Kostrowitzky... . He purposefully kept his parentage clouded in speculation but was most likely the illegitimate child of Angelica Kostrowitzky, a Polish woman living in the Vatican. Apollinaire was raised in the gambling halls of Monaco, Paris, and the French Riviera; during his education in Cannes, Nice, and Monaco, he assumed the identity of a Russian prince.

In his twenties he worked for a Parisian bank and kept company with artists such as Picasso, Braques, Chagall, Max Jacob, Eric Satie, Marcel Duchamp, and his lover, Marie Laurencin. During this time, he published a number of semi-pornographic books, proclaiming that the writing of the Marquis de Sade would gain prominence in the new century.

Apollinaire’s first collection of poetry, L’enchanteur pourrissant, appeared in 1909, and his reputation was established in 1913 with Alcools, a melange of classical versification and modern imagery. Apollinaire had a reputation as a thief—he was detained for a week in 1911 on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa—and decided to become a French national by enlisting in the infantry during World War I.

He was stationed on the front in Champagne until 1916, when he suffered a head wound and had to be trepanned. He outlined his poetic and political beliefs in L’esprit nouveau et les poëtes in 1917. In 1918, after a series of short-lived affairs, he married Jacqueline Kolb. War-weakened, Apollinaire died shortly after of the Spanish Flu... in Paris. Calligrammes, a collection of concrete poetry, was published a few months after his death.

His series Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée contains multiple feline references. We quote

Le lion

Ô LION, malheureuse image
Des rois chus lamentablement,
Tu ne nais maintenant qu'en cage
À Hambourg, chez les Allemands.


Here we find this translation of "Le Lion" and the other poems in his Bestiary:

Lion

Oh lion, miserable image
Of kings lamentably fallen,
Now you’re born only in cages
In Hamburg, among the Germans.