A Season in Hell & Illuminations

PRAISE FOR WYATT MASON’S

RIMBAUD COMPLETE, VOLUME I: POETRY AND PROSE

“It’s quite likely that [the season’s] most exciting new book of verse was stamped Made in France more than a century ago.… Rimbaud Complete, Wyatt Mason’s bouncy new translation of the avant-garde poet’s hallucinatory corpus, finds new music in the writing, revealing a classical artist.”

—Entertainment Weekly, Editor’s Choice, A-

“An important new rendering of a major poet.”

—Library Journal

“Mason’s translations are confident and contemporary—muscular but without muscling in on the originals. There is no crabby diction, but neither is there that self-conscious pseudo-hipness with which it’s all too tempting to render Rimbaud’s lolling truculence of pose. Mason’s approach has been to aim for common (as distinct from middle) ground between the literalist and the free, and the decision to translate successive versions and drafts pays off too, letting English-speaking readers see the genesis of poems and trace their often substantial alterations. Mason gets Rimbaud’s range across impressively.”

—The Times Literary Supplement

“Mason does a splendid job in arrangement and translation.”

—The Tampa Tribune

“Wyatt Mason’s translations of Rimbaud’s literary works manage, more than any others, to convey to contemporary ears the real sense of the work. Previous attempts had strained to maintain a sense of the French style or an equivalence in rhyme and form. For all their good intentions, these ideals forced the renderings into awkward locutions or pretentiously formal tropes, making Rimbaud sound as much like a biblical elder as a modern poet. Mason has finally given us an English Rimbaud we can read as we should, as if he were kin to Jack Kerouac, to Charles Bukowski, to Jim Morrison.… His Rimbaud Complete will surely live on as the standard edition.

—Toronto Star

“Wyatt Mason’s [translations] capture the rigours of the original.”

—London Review of Books

“Exceptional new translator Wyatt Mason limns the afterlife of Arthur Rimbaud’s thirty-seven chaotic years on Earth.… There is no small literary excitement in this, one of the best Rimbaud translations in English and certainly the most complete.”

—The Buffalo News, Editor’s Choice

“A monumental achievement … a book to treasure.”

—Scotland on Sunday

PRAISE FOR WYATT MASON’S

RIMBAUD COMPLETE, VOLUME II: I PROMISE TO BE GOOD, THE LETTERS

“Perhaps you know him only by myth: Bad boy rebel poet, possibly gay but probably bisexual, lover of the lesser poet Paul Verlaine, survivor of literary and romantic scenes worthy of Norman Mailer.… Wyatt Mason, in a word, detests all that; he shows us, in his straightforward translations of these letters from the second half of Rimbaud’s life (ages nineteen to thirty-seven), a man dedicated to factual information, a simple but elegant describer of the foreign lands … a man who gives up poetry to look at the world with a disciplined eye, who sleeps outdoors for the last twenty years of his life—now there’s a writer you can sink your teeth into.”

—Los Angeles Times

“The book is fascinating for the voice it reveals … the post-poetic Rimbaud, the man glimpsed in bracingly cold letters sent to his family.… Mason’s translation is crisp and lively, and his clear-eyed introduction is essential reading for anyone besotted with the image of the poet as tragic figure.”

—Time Out New York

“Mason, the American translator who last year published Rimbaud’s collected poems in English [unveils] an Apollonian craftsman, one who took infinite pains to achieve perfection of expression.… Mason’s an agile, skillful translator.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Thanks to Wyatt Mason’s masterly translations, Rimbaud has, after a century and a half, recovered his gift.”

—Askold Melnyczuk

“Modern Library’s Rimbaud Complete, translated and edited by Wyatt Mason … includes all of Rimbaud’s poetry as well as uncollected writings ranging from Latin school compositions to fragments of poems reconstructed by his acquaintances. This is now joined by I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, the largest sampling of the poet’s correspondence yet to appear in English.”

—The New Yorker

“Mason’s elegant translations flow smoothly off the page.”

—Library Journal

“Wyatt Mason’s translation of Rimbaud’s letters is a swashbuckler of a book, nothing less than a resurrection of a remarkable life. As such, it is a worthy companion to Mason’s fine translation of the poems. No admirer of Rimbaud will want to be without it.”

—Arthur Goldhammer

“The letters themselves are bizarre, twisted, and oddly welcoming.… Mason’s introduction is invaluable. It grounds the details from Rimbaud’s letters in a concrete narrative, filling in gaps without the benefit of other people’s return letters, the other half of Rimbaud’s conversations. Mason acts as conductor, whispering into our ears through footnotes that treat their subject playfully and respectfully at the same time.”

—The San Francisco Bay Guardian

2005 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The translations in this work were originally published, sometimes in a slightly different format, in Rimbaud Complete, translated by Wyatt Mason, published in 2002 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-80182-1
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-679-64327-3

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rimbaud, Arthur, 1854–1891.
[Saison en enfer. English & French]
A season in hell; & Illuminations/Arthur Rimbaud; translated, edited & with an introduction by Wyatt Mason.
p. cm.
Poems in English and French; commentary in English.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-679-64327-3 (trade pbk.)
I. Mason, Wyatt Alexander II. Rimbaud, Arthur, 1854–1891. Illuminations. English & French. III. Title: Illuminations. IV. Title.
PQ2387.R5S313 2005
841’.8—dc22

2005043884

Printed in the United States of America

www.BookishMall.com

Frontispiece: A sketch by Rimbaud from a school notebook, done when he was ten.
The waving figure sitting in the skiff is shouting au secours—help!

v3.1

To the memory of
Guy Mattison Davenport, Jr.
1927–2005

One must be absolutely modern.

—Arthur Rimbaud,

A SEASON IN HELL

A Note on Using This eBook

“LONG AGO, IF MY MEMORY SERVES [ … ]”

II. ALCHEMY OF THE WORD

A DRAFT OF A SEASON IN HELL

[FROM BAD BLOOD]

FALSE CONVERSION

[FROM DELIRIA II: ALCHEMY OF THE WORD]

“JADIS, SI JE ME SOUVIENS BIEN [ … ]”

II. ALCHIMIE DU VERBE

BROUILLON D’UNE SAISON EN ENFER

MAUVAIS SANG

FAUSSE CONVERSION

DÉLIRES II: ALCHIMIE DU VERBE

Selected Bibliography

About the Translator

A Note on Using This eBook

In this eBook edition of A Season in Hell & Illuminations, the title of each poem contains a hyperlink that allows you to navigate back and forth between the English translation and the original French text.

INTRODUCTION

He was arrested and thrown in jail, at fifteen, for vagrancy by the Paris police. He stabbed a photographer, at sixteen, who had taken his photographic portrait only weeks before. He seduced a fellow poet, at seventeen, prying the much older man away from his pregnant wife. And yet, these famous instances from the biography of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, while true (or as true as hundred-year-old hearsay can be), only hint at the young poet’s fundamental depravity, only show him splashing in its shallows. Its veritable depths, and nature, were revealed one winter in London’s British Museum.

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A Season in Hell & Illuminations Read Online

PRAISE FOR WYATT MASON’S

RIMBAUD COMPLETE, VOLUME I: POETRY AND PROSE

PRAISE FOR WYATT MASON’S

RIMBAUD COMPLETE, VOLUME II: I PROMISE TO BE GOOD, THE LETTERS

CONTENTS

A Note on Using This eBook

INTRODUCTION

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