Writers of short stories often say that there’s an assumption they’re simply a stepping stone on the way to writing The Great Novel of Ideas; stories are apprentice works, foothills leading to the higher mountain of long (maybe too long: discuss) fiction, but of course in the view of many people including me the literary short story is its one form and it doesn’t need the novel to aspire to.

The same is often said of pamphlets, that a pamphlet is the waiting room before the door opens to the glittering palace of the full collection but I like pamphlets as pamphlets rather than calling cards or visions of the future, and here’s a fine crop of recent ones.

Arc Poetry in Todmorden have been publishing beautifully-produced new work for decades, but in this fantastic translation of one of the fathers of surrealism, Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1911 collection The Bestiary, takes us right back to the fountainhead of so much writing that’s being produced today. Apollinaire seems, like Debussy, effortlessly modern with his playfulness his subverting of structure, his freedom to experiment with tradition. Bestiaries have a long tradition, going back at least as far as Medieval times; they’re stories of real and mythical animals that often have a moral attached to them and Apollinaire delightfully subverts this tradition in tightly-organised poems of mostly four lines. Here’s ‘The Dolphin’:

Dolphin, you play among the waves
Yet how bitter stays the sea.
So what if now and then my joy erupts?
Life keeps up its cruelty.

Martin Sorrell, the translator, in helpful notes the poem. tells us that ‘the implication is that, the friendly dolphin is betrayed by the sea – in the form presumably of its human predators - so the joyful poet is all too easily swallowed up by malicious forces’. He’s right and all! I like the dual-language presentation of the pamphlet, too, tempting armchair translators like me to have a go, and why not?