Rimbaud: First Blood

V

version

Well-known member
Where to begin? Looked at picking up A Season in Hell or Illuminations, but every edition had someone lamenting the translation.

rimbaud-superlarge.png
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
I recently read the penguin edition, it’s a parallel text which helps, I think - it also had a decent selection of his letters. What I did was read it while keeping an eye on the original and if I had the time, I’d search up other translations. You have to just accept translations of poetry are always going to be less than perfect.
 
woops

woops

is not like other people
ah, Rimbaud.

now he had written his great work when he was even younger than you are now.

have you ever tasted an English bilberry? you simply can't get them anymore
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member

Morning of Drunkenness​

BY ARTHUR RIMBAUD
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY JOHN ASHBERY

O my good! O my beautiful! Atrocious fanfare where I won’t stumble! enchanted rack whereon I am stretched! Hurrah for the amazing work and the marvelous body, for the first time! It began amid the laughter of children, it will end with it. This poison will remain in all our veins even when, as the trumpets turn back, we’ll be restored to the old discord. O let us now, we who are so deserving of these torments! let us fervently gather up that superhuman promise made to our created body and soul: that promise, that madness! Elegance, knowledge, violence! They promised us to bury the tree of good and evil in the shade, to banish tyrannical honesties, so that we might bring forth our very pure love. It began with a certain disgust and ended—since we weren’t able to grasp this eternity all at once—in a panicked rout of perfumes.
Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror in the faces and objects of today, may you be consecrated by the memory of that wake. It began in all loutishness, now it’s ending among angels of flame and ice.
Little eve of drunkenness, holy! were it only for the mask with which you gratified us. We affirm you, method! We don’t forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole lives every day.
Behold the time of the Assassins.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Luka reckoned the version I have (Oxford World Classics) was shit but he never did tell me what a good one was.

What Jenks said, basically. Some of the stuff in the one I have works, other bits less so, and it does have the French too. Maybe best to try and pick up as many cheap second hand copies as you can find.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Yeah, I think that ones generally considered his first masterpiece. The original is in rhymed metred verse I think, and the translation I have keeps the verse form but abandons the rhyme. Maybe a good free prosey translation would work best in English but I haven't investigated enough yet to have an opinion Tbh
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Didn't know until I started reading Nova Express the other day that Burroughs was into him, but of course it makes perfect sense.
 
V

version

Well-known member

Lives​

By Arthur Rimbaud
Translated by Wallace Fowlie

I
Oh! the huge avenues of the holy land, the terraces of the temple! What has happened to the brahmin who taught me the Proverbs? From then and from there I can still see even the old women! I remember silvery hours and sun near rivers, the hand of the country on my shoulder, and our caresses as we stood in the fiery fields. —A flight of red pigeons thunders around my thoughts—In exile here I had a stage on which to perform the dramatic masterpieces of all literatures. I might tell you about unheard-of wealth. I follow the story of the treasures you found. I see the next chapter! My wisdom is as neglected as chaos is. What is my void, compared with the stupefaction awaiting you?

II
I am a far more deserving inventor than all those who went before me; a musician, in fact, who found something resembling the key of love. At present, a noble from a meager countryside with a dark sky I try to feel emotion over the memory of mendicant childhood, over my apprenticeship when I arrived wearing wooden shoes, polemics, five or six widowings, and a few wild escapades when my strong head kept me from rising to the same pitch as my comrades. I don’t miss what I once possessed of divine happiness: the calm of this despondent countryside gives a new vigor to my terrible scepticism. But since this scepticism can no longer be put into effect, and since I am now given over to a new worry—I expect to become a very wicked fool.

III
In an attic where at the age of twelve I was locked up, I knew the world and illustrated the human comedy. In a wine cellar I learned history. At some night celebration, in a northern city, I met all the wives of former painters. In an old back street in Paris I was taught the classical sciences. In a magnificent palace, surrounded by all the Orient, I finished my long work and spent my celebrated retirement. I have invigorated my blood. I am released from my duty. I must not even think of that any longer. I am really from beyond the tomb, and without work.
 
entertainment

entertainment

Well-known member
I can recommend the complete works cause you can follow along with him aging in those crucial years, his style unfolding, shedding its stale elements almost neurotically
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
version said:
There's about him and "association blocks," in the notes.

"correlating a certain smile an accent a way of holding a cigarette - The Color Alphabet is useful training - Take a name like IAN - Now assign colors to the letters [...] Associate to the poetry of RIMBAUD without words seeing the images in his work - Live ember raining in gust of frost - I embraced the Summer dawn - Corridors of black gauze - banner of raw meat - silk of seas - pensive drowned - a young man has grown up anywhere - perfumes of wine gas - etc. - Images free of word that shift and permutate improbably desertion on the suburban air - candor of vapors and tents - associate other image poets sad as the death of monkeys - "
Click to expand...

Vowels​

by Arthur Rimbaud
Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O - vowels,
Some day I will open your silent pregnancies:
A, black belt, hairy with burst flies,
Bumbling and buzzing over stinking cruelties,

Pits of night; E, candour of sand pavilions,
High glacial spears, white kings, trembling Queen
Anne's lace;
I, bloody spittle, laughter dribbling from a face
In wild denial or in anger, vermilions;

U,…divine movement of viridian seas,
Peace of pastures animal-strewn, peace of calm lines
Drawn on foreheads worn with heavy alchemies;

O, supreme Trumpet, harsh with strange stridencies,
Silences traced in angels and astral designs:
O…Omega…the violet light of His Eyes!
 
V

version

Well-known member
Benny B said:
Didn't know until I started reading Nova Express the other day that Burroughs was into him, but of course it makes perfect sense.
Click to expand...

There's a bit about him and "association blocks," in the notes.

"correlating a certain smile an accent a way of holding a cigarette - The Color Alphabet is useful training - Take a name like IAN - Now assign colors to the letters [...] Associate to the poetry of RIMBAUD without words seeing the images in his work - Live ember raining in gust of frost - I embraced the Summer dawn - Corridors of black gauze - banner of raw meat - silk of seas - pensive drowned - a young man has grown up anywhere - perfumes of wine gas - etc. - Images free of word that shift and permutate improbably desertion on the suburban air - candor of vapors and tents - associate other image poets sad as the death of monkeys - "

The Drunken Boat made me think of Burroughs. A violence and energy paired with colour and description.

I have seen enormous swamps ferment, fish-traps
Where a whole Leviathan rots in the rushes!
Avalanches of water in the midst of a calm,
And the distances cataracting toward the abyss!

Glaciers, suns of silver, nacreous waves, skies of embers!
Hideous strands at the end of brown gulfs
Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs
Fall down from gnarled trees with black scent!

The stuff in The Soft Machine where he starts listing and stacking up descriptions is like a more jagged, alien, hack-and-slash treatment of this sort of thing.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I don't really have that sort of synaesthetic sort of mind but I suppose you could try and train yourself to do it, which I guess Burroughs was very preoccupied with and maybe got from reading Rimbaud. It's another way of generating imagery and associations through conscious experiments, like cut-up was, to open up a new imaginative world.
 
V

version

Well-known member
Benny B said:
I don't really have that sort of synaesthetic sort of mind but I suppose you could try and train yourself to do it, which I guess Burroughs was very preoccupied with and maybe got from reading Rimbaud. It's another way of generating imagery and associations through conscious experiments, like cut-up was, to open up a new imaginative world.
Click to expand...

He had a thing he called 'color walks' where he'd go out and try only to see things of a certain colour.
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
I’ve just been reading about Proust and synesthesia- I wonder if it’s something that he picked up from Rimbaud.

What I like about Rimbaud is the full blooded, unapologetically extreme way he expresses himself. It seems so totally alien from English poetry - only Swinburne has that unhinged quality but he doesn’t have the bile and venom. Rimbaud is a great hater. He wants total honesty even if it’s costly.
 
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