The first English translation of the Cubist poet’s most important collection of verse poems―a wild grab bag of contradictory styles When Max Jacob published The Central Laboratory in 1921, Parisian Dada had just officially come to an end and Surrealism was yet to be born. The poetic scene in Paris was between definitions, and Jacob embodied that moment. The Central Laboratory is distinctly modern, yet utterly discordant with anything else that had been published a grab bag of popular genres, operettas, Breton folk song, nonsense poetry, nursery rhyme, doggerel, parody and puns in which sound often trumps sense and Jacob changes register on a dime. Employing Symbolist obscure reference, Cubist fracturing of perspective and Dadaist discontinuity, Jacob’s art of mixed signals and mocked allegory formulates a camp sensibility, a “queering” of literary style as riddled with contradiction as Jacob himself had been in his lifetime. A century after its initial publication in French, the book remains utterly peculiar and lost for too long in the shadow of Jacob’s more famous book of prose poems, The Dice Cup . Jacob himself said of The Central Laboratory : “it sums up 20 years and reflects 20 states of soul, often 20 styles either suffered or created by me.” Max Jacob (1876–1944) was a French poet, painter, writer and critic. A key figure of bohemian Montmartre and the Cubist era, he rubbed shoulders with such figures as Apollinaire and Modigliani, and was a lifelong friend to Picasso, Gris and Cocteau. Jacob converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1915. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, he died in a deportation camp of pneumonia. Rosanna Warren's critically acclaimed biography of Jacob was published in 2020.
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After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career. He was one of the first friends Pablo Picasso made in Paris. They met in the summer of 1901, and it was Jacob who helped the young artist learn French. Later, on the Boulevard Voltaire, he shared a room with Picasso, who remained a lifelong friend (and was included in his artwork Three Musicians). Jacob introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire, who in turn introduced Picasso to Georges Braque. He would become close friends with Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Christopher Wood and Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait in 1916. He also befriended and encouraged the artist Romanin, otherwise known as French politician and future Resistance leader Jean Moulin. Moulin's famous nom de guerre Max is presumed to be selected in honor of Jacob. Having moved outside of Paris in May, 1936, to settle in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Loiret, Max Jacob was arrested on 24 February 1944 by the Gestapo, and interned at Orléans prison, (prisoner #15872). Jewish by birth, Jacob's brother Gaston had been previously arrested in January, 1944, deported to Auschwitz concentration camp, and gassed upon arrival with his sister Myrthe-Lea; her husband also deported and murdered by the Nazis. Following his incarceration at Orléans, Max was then transferred to Drancy internment camp from where he was to be transported in the next convoy to Auschwitz in Germany. However, said to be suffering from bronchial pneumonia, Max Jacob died in the infirmary of Le Cité de la Muette, a former housing block which served as the internment camp known as Drancy on 5 March.
