In 1874, after the catharsis of Une Saison en Enfer, with his new companion in London, he was still interested enough in his own literature to copy the forty-two poems we know as Illuminations —even perhaps to write some of them. In 1875, although “in the grip of acute ‘philomathic’ fever” (languages were to be the open sesame to his new world, escape from the old), the writer’s urge to be printed had not left him. Verlaine, in a letter (already mentioned) to Ernest Delahaye, dated May I, 1875, wrote in his usual ambiguous way: “Rimbaud having asked me to send, to have printed, some prose poems, his, (which I had) to the same Nouveau, then in Brussels (I’m speaking of two months ago) I did send—postage 2 francs 75!!!—instanter….”

Whatever the outcome of the battle of the scholars, we ought to be grateful to de Lacoste for having at least taken a little air out of the mystical balloon of Rimbaud criticism. We may now be permitted to read Rimbaud without praying. Etiemble in his prodigious de-mythefying thesis, Le Mythe de Rimbaud, says that if he had to write a life of Rimbaud he would be “incapable of forming a single sentence” so suspect do all the facts still seem to him. A pity—for a brief (necessarily if only factual) unbiased biography would be a refreshing start toward a fresh approach to his work. Etiemble’s concluding advice is best: “Revenir au texte.” I often wish, when I read some of Rimbaud’s exegetes, that Rimbaud had taken as an epigraph for his Illuminations Aloysius Bertrand’s injunction: “Here is my book as I wrote it and as it should be read before the commentators obscure it with their elucidations.”

 

English readers who are interested to know more about the “burning problem” will find the arguments briefly reviewed by that erudite and perceptive authority on French literature, Wallace Fowlie, in his Rimbaud’s Illuminations. For a bird’s-eye view of a hundred years of Rimbaud and Rimbaldiens (anti-Rimbaldiens too) I recommend Enid Starkie’s Zaharoff Lecture for 1954: Rimbaud, 1854—1954 (Oxford University Press). It is an excellent summary of the history of Rimbaud’s literary output and the far more abundant output of his critics and biographers.

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Revised Translation of Illuminations

To revise, the dictionary says, is to correct, to improve, to bring up to date. Corrected and brought up to date to conform to the latest scholarly findings, my translation, I hope, is also improved. When a translation of poetry like Rimbaud’s is whisked out of the translator’s head, so to speak, into the hands of the printer, the very excess of the translator’s enthusiasm mitigates his critical acumen, which needs a cooler climate. Ideally, a translation of poetry as mysteriously beautiful as Rimbaud’s last works should be kept for months—years—before being published. On the other hand, nothing reveals a translation’s mistakes, inadequacies and infelicities with such ruthlessness as the printed page.

The difficulty in translating the Illuminations is not, as many people seem to think, their obscurity. It is their extreme density combined with their prismatic and protean quality. In most of them the literal meaning, which has been lost in the many-faceted poetic meaning, is scarcely more important than a composer’s initial idea which becomes completely metamorphosed into music. By his special use of language Rimbaud’s thought becomes condensed into nothing but poetry. And this dense poetic mass is continually moving and changing. One is reminded of a chemical process as words join other words in the sentences to form an ever more complex compound. And who can tell, of these kaleidoscopic atoms, which ones are ideas and which ones are objects? To activate English words to perform similar miracles—that is the difficulty.

It is not to excuse any failures on my part that I point out the difficulties, but to warn the English reader that his imagination must be ready to make up for my deficiencies.

As this revised translation of Illuminations goes to press, there is that same old sensation in the pit of my stomach—the dreadful anticipation of the revelations of the printed page. Once more, I have to remind myself of what Valéry said of writers (substituting “translation” for “work”): “One does not finish a [translation], one abandons it.”

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Rimbaud’s Other Prose Poems

The Deserts of Love and Gospel Moralities (both probably fragmentary series) have been incorporated in this edition of Illuminations in order to complete the publication in English of all Rimbaud’s prose poems—at least all that have so far come to light. A Season in Hell appears in a separate volume in New Directions’ New Classics series. That Rimbaud wrote other prose poems we know from references to them by both Verlaine and Delahaye, so that we may still hope that some of them will one day turn up as did two of the Biblical poems only a short time ago. I should particularly like to see the one of which Verlaine said that it “contained strange mysticities and the keenest psychological insights”—probably the famous lost Chasse Spirituelle which probably no one but Verlaine ever saw.

We are told by Delahaye that Les Deserts de l’Amour was Rimbaud’s first prose poem, that it was written in the spring of 1871, and that the idea of attempting this poetic form came to him after reading Baudelaire’s prose poems. If Les Deserts de l’Amour was really modeled on Spleen de Paris, one can only say that it is as “singularly different” as Baudelaire said his work was from its “mysterious and brilliant model,” Gaspard de la Nuit. The spark could have come from a single line in Baudelaire’s dedication to Arsène Houssaye: “Which one of us, in our ambitious moments, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhyme and without rhythm, supple enough and abrupt enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, the undulations of revery, the jolts of conscience.” Too many of the Petits Poèmes en Prose are only prose, even prosaic, whereas The Deserts of Love is pure poetry. At least to me. Not, it would seem, to most Rimbaud commentators, since they have strangely neglected it. Enid Starkie even presents it as merely a “psychological study” whose “interest does not lie in its literary value.” De Lacoste calls it “one long sob of a disenchanted child”—but a child, I should say, who sobs with the art of a conscious craftsman. The poem was first published in 1906. Berrichon dated its composition as “probably” late 1871. De Lacoste gives 1872 as the date of the manuscript, which is again quite evidently a copy.

 

No title appears in the manuscript of the three poems which, for reference convenience and with a bow to Jules Laforgue, I have called Gospel Moralities. The first two are a recent discovery, and this is the first time they have been translated into English and published in this country.