Illuminations

ILLUMINATIONS

RIMBAUD
ILLUMINATIONS
and
Other Prose Poems

TRANSLATED BY

LOUISE VARÈSE

REVISED EDITION

A NEW DIRECTIONS EBOOK

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BY WAY OF A PREFACE (Les Lettres du Voyant)

ILLUMINATIONS (Illuminations)

AFTER THE DELUGE (Après le Déluge)

CHILDHOOD (Enfance)

TALE (Conte)

SIDE SHOW (Parade)

ANTIQUE (Antique)

BEAUTEOUS BEING (Being Beauteous)

LIVES (Vies)

DEPARTURE (Départ)

ROYALTY (Royauté)

TO A REASON (A une Raison)

MORNING OF DRUNKENNESS (Matinée d’lvresse)

PHRASES (Phrases)

WORKING PEOPLE (Ouvriers)

THE BRIDGES (Les Ponts)

CITY (Ville)

RUTS (Ornières)

CITIES (Villes)

VAGABONDS (Vagabonds)

CITIES (Villes)

VIGILS (Veillées)

MYSTIC (Mystique)

DAWN (Aube)

FLOWERS (Fleurs)

COMMON NOCTURNE (Nocturne Vulgaire)

MARINE (Marine)

WINTER FÊTE (Fête d’Hiver)

ANGUISH (Angoisse)

METROPOLITAN (Métropolitain)

BARBARIAN (Barbare)

PROMONTORY (Promontoire)

SCENES (Scènes)

HISTORIC EVENING (Soir Historique)

MOTION (Mouvement)

BOTTOM (Bottom)

H (H)

DEVOTIONS (Dévotion)

DEMOCRACY (Démocratie)

FAIRY (Fairy)

WAR (Guerre)

GENIE (Génie)

YOUTH (Jeunesse)

SALE (Solde)

OTHER PROSE POEMS

THE DESERTS OF LOVE (Les Déserts de l’Amour)

THREE GOSPEL MORALITIES (Trois Méditations Johanniques)

Notes on Some Corrections and Revisions

A Rimbaud Chronology

INTRODUCTION

BY LOUISE VARÈSE

ILLUMINATIONS

Since the original New Directions publication of Illuminations (1946), Rimbaud’s manuscripts have been made available to some French scholars. Two editions have resulted: Henri de Bouillane de Lacoste’s Illuminations, Edition Critique (Mercure de France, 1949), and the Pléiade edition, Rimbaud, Œuvres Complètes (Gallimard, 1946), edited by Rolland de Renéville and Jules Mouquet. Now, with the errors of former editors corrected, we probably have the poems as Rimbaud left them. In revising my translation I have consulted both the Pléiade and de Lacoste’s Edition Critique.

The French text I originally used was that of Paterne Berrichon’s 1912 edition of Œuvres de Rimbaud, in the 1924 printing (Mercure de France), which was the standard edition for many years. It contains Paul Claudel’s famous preface, a pious amen to Isabelle Rimbaud’s sanctification of her brother, in which he calls Rimbaud “a mystic in the savage state.”

The history of the peregrinations of the manuscript of Illuminations, like everything to do with Rimbaud, is still a matter of dispute among the specialists. Most of our information comes from Verlaine, who certainly knew more about Rimbaud than any one else, but whose native deviousness and inability to say anything simply and clearly make most of his statements subject to interpretation, and the interpretations have confused the confusion. It seems at least more than probable that in 1875 Rimbaud gave the manuscript to Verlaine when, after being released from prison, he pursued his former “companion in hell” to Stuttgart in a futile attempt to renew their friendship. It is also more likely than not that it was the same manuscript which Verlaine (mentioning simply “prose poems”) says, in a letter written shortly after his visit to Stuttgart, that he had immediately sent, at Rimbaud’s request, to Germain Nouveau in Brussels. How the poems later came into the possession of Charles de Sivry, Verlaine’s brother-in-law, is still a mystery. After that they passed through several hands before being published for the first time in five issues of a Symbolist periodical, La Vogue, in 1886. That same year La Vogue brought them out in book form. Then Félix Fénéon, who had been entrusted with preparing the manuscript for publication, returned it to the publisher, Gustave Kahn. Instead of sending it to Verlaine, who had long been claiming it, Kahn, after holding it for some time, at last, unfortunately, let it be dispersed, giving or selling it here and there. Today, with the exception of the autographs of Democracie, Devotion and Genie, which have been lost or are still in hiding, the manuscript is divided among several collectors, the bulk of it (thirty-four poems) being in the Lucien-Graux collection.

As for the original order of the poems, Bouillane de Lacoste, after exchanging many letters with Félix Fénéon on the subject, came to the conclusion that, except where two or three poems are written on the same page, there is no way of determining the order assigned them by Rimbaud. After half a century it is hardly surprising that there were lacunae in Fénéon’s memories. He describes the manuscript as “a sheaf of loose, unnumbered sheets” of ruled paper, like the paper in schoolboy copybooks (now they are handsomely bound in red morocco!). He cannot remember if the present pagination is his or not, or whether the poems in the periodical La Vogue were brought out in the order they were in when he received the manuscript. But since the manuscript had been handled by many persons after Rimbaud parted with it in Stuttgart, even that order may not have been his. For this edition I have adopted the same order as the Pléiade which, for the first thirty-seven poems, is the same as that in which they first appeared. These are followed by five which were not discovered until later and were published by Vanier in 1895. Considering the unrelated nature of the poems (do I hear voices raised in protest?) the whole question seems rather academic and unimportant. This order is at least preferable to that of Berrichon which I followed before. Berrichon, not having seen the manuscript, could not respect even the sequence of the poems written on the same page, which the present order preserves.

It is again through Verlaine and Verlaine alone that we know Rimbaud’s title. The word “Illuminations” does appear once in the manuscript at the end of Promontoire between parentheses, but not, the experts say, in Rimbaud’s handwriting. Although the work has always been called Les Illuminations by successive editors and critics (with the exception of de Lacoste), the first time Verlaine mentions it, in a letter to his brother-in-law, Charles de Sivry, in 1878, he calls it simply Illuminations: “Have re-read Illuminations (painted plates)….” Writing at a later period he explains that “the word is English and means gravures coloriées, colored plates.” That, he says, was the subtitle Rimbaud intended to give his work. To many exegetes it is a kind of sacrilege to suggest that the title could mean anything so simple as colored prints. Verlaine did not understand Rimbaud anyway, they say, and they could even point out that Rimbaud said so himself. In Une Saison en Enfer (Delire I ), he has the Foolish Virgin (Verlaine) lament: “I was sure of never entering his world.… Sometimes chagrined and sad I said to him, I understand you. He would shrug his shoulders.” On the other hand gravures coloriées inevitably recalls Rimbaud’s enluminures coloriées, the brightly colored cheap popular prints or “images d’Epinal” of the period, which he lists in Alchemie du Verbe among the things that delighted him at the time when he “held in derision the celebrities of modern painting and poetry.” But “colored plates,” or prints, would be a most misleading subtitle if, as some critics suggest, Illuminations means enluminures in the sense of medieval illuminated parchments, which were hand colored and not gravures. Or if, as the saint-seer-angel-God cults must perforce believe, Rim-baud intended Illuminations to be taken in the figurative sense, philosophic or religious—the sudden enlightenment of the mind or spirit, either by abstract wisdom or God (the same in both French and English)—he did not tell the Foolish Virgin.