Antoine Adam revised Rolland de Renéville’s and Jules Mouquet’s original 1946 Gallimard Pléiade edition in 1972, but it remains less informative and up-to-date than Murphy, Bernard/Guyaux, or Steinmetz. Nor does it contain explanatory notes, only textual variants.

All of Rimbaud’s poetry, verse and prose poems, is given in the present volume, with the exception of certain fragments and the very early Latin pieces. Some of the prose writing is also included, where I have found its bearing on the poetry especially important. Thus, ‘The Deserts of Love’ and ‘Fragments according to the Gospel’ throw light respectively on Rimbaud’s view of love as a desolation, and on Christianity as a pernicious force.

I am all too aware of the considerable debt I owe to the legion of earlier translators of Rimbaud. They are too numerous to list or to comment on in any detail. Not surprisingly, given the difficulties of a lot of Rimbaud’s visionary, mysterious writing, the quality of translation has been uneven. Too faithful a rendering, down to exact line length, in the French syllabic tradition, can be pedestrian, especially if accompanied by insistent end-stopping and rhyme. Where Rimbaud flies, the translator will walk, counting steps. The policy of straightforward, no-nonsense prose translation, line by line, is admirable, but to have value, the reading of the original and the resultant translation must be completely accurate—which has not always been the case. At the ‘non-faithful’ extreme, any number of poets and translators have made ‘versions’ of Rimbaud, often using him as a launching-pad for their own craft, sometimes with impressive, if startling results. In these cases it is up to the reader to decide if the English constitutes a good poem in its own right. In my own translations I have wanted to keep within fairly tight bounds. That said, I have not opted for rigorous syllabic lines (‘Drunken Boat’ is one exception), but have tried to vary line length. Sometimes I have taken what I consider justifiable liberties in order to capture essential poetic truth: hence the occasional neologism, for example, or the particularly condensed form of ‘Tortured Heart’, reduced from eight-to six-line stanzas. Rhyme in English can be tyrannical, and prone to unwanted comic effects; I have almost always eschewed it. Finally, while Illuminations is full of traps (which I hope Mark Treharne’s excellent renderings have helped me avoid1), the enigmatic little poems in A Season in Hell are particularly resistant to secure, convincing translation.

Whatever else, I have sought to give English-language readers a feeling of the vigour of Rimbaud’s poetic voice, its explosive force, its brilliance, and its poignancy and delicacy too.

Michael Pakenham, Evelyne Hervy, Dave Braund, and Lawrence Sail have each clarified recalcitrant problems. Judith Luna, my editor at OUP, has steered this book along with her customary tact and skill. In the early 1990s it was a pleasure and an education to have the leading Rimbaud scholar Steve Murphy as a colleague at Exeter. To all, my grateful thanks.

I want particularly to thank Stephen Minta, good friend and most sensitive reader of poetry, for first making me appreciate the greatness of Rimbaud.

Most especially, my thanks go yet again to my wife Claire, patient, encouraging, helpful, and such good company.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Given the large quantity of publications concerning Rimbaud, this Bibliography is necessarily most selective. Detailed bibliographies, some including articles about Rimbaud, are to be found in many available publications, including some of those listed here.

Principal Complete Critical Editions, Currently Available

Oeuvres complètes, rev. edn. by Antoine Adam (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1972).

Oeuvres, rev. edn. by Suzanne Bernard and André Guyaux (Paris: Garnier, 1991).

Oeuvres, 3 vols. ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz (Paris: Flammarion, 1989).

Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Steve Murphy (Paris: Champion, 1999).

Biography

Berrichon, Paterne, La Vie de Jean-Arthur Rimbaud (Paris: Mercure de France, 1897). The first, and largely unreliable, biography, by Rimbaud’s brother-in-law.

Delahaye, Ernest, Delahaye témoin de Rimbaud (Neuchâtel: La Bacon-nière, 1974). The various writings of Rimbaud’s friend brought together.

Izambard, Georges, Rimbaud tel que je l’ai connu (Nantes: Le Passeur, 1991).