Illuminations: Prose poems

by Arthur Rimbaud

Overview

The definitive translation of the one of the brightest geniuses of French poetry.

The prose poems of the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth century. They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varèse. Mrs. Varèse first published her versions of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in 1946. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations. This edition also contains two other series of prose poems, which include two poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varèse discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud’s writing. Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations––"des vertiges, des silences, des nuits." These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up––now here, now there––unexplored aspects of experience and thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811201841
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/17/1957
Pages:	228
Sales rank:	229,322
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Unknown beyond the avant-garde at the time of his death in 1891, Arthur Rimbaud has become one of the most liberating influences on twentieth-century culture. Born Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud in Charleville, France, in 1854, Rimbaud’s family moved to Cours d’Orléans, when he was eight, where he began studying both Latin and Greek at the Pension Rossat. While he disliked school, Rimbaud excelled in his studies and, encouraged by a private tutor, tried his hand at poetry. Shortly thereafter, Rimbaud sent his work to the renowned symbolist poet Paul Verlaine and received in response a one-way ticket to Paris. By late September 1871, at the age of sixteen, Rimbaud had ignited with Verlaine one of the most notoriously turbulent affairs in the history of literature. Their relationship reached a boiling point in the summer of 1873, when Verlaine, frustrated by an increasingly distant Rimbaud, attacked his lover with a revolver in a drunken rage. The act sent Verlaine to prison and Rimbaud back to Charleville to finish his work on A Season in Hell. The following year, Rimbaud traveled to London with the poet Germain Nouveau, to compile and publish his transcendent Illuminations. It was to be Rimbaud’s final publication. By 1880, he would give up writing altogether for a more stable life as merchant in Yemen, where he stayed until a painful condition in his knee forced him back to France for treatment. In 1891, Rimbaud was misdiagnosed with a case of tuberculosis synovitis and advised to have his leg removed. Only after the amputation did doctors determine Rimbaud was, in fact, suffering from cancer. Rimbaud died in Marseille in November of 1891, at the age of 37. He is now considered a saint to symbolists and surrealists, and his body of works, which include Le bateau ivre (1871), Une Saison en Enfer (1873), and Les Illuminations (1873), have been widely recognized as a major influence on artists stretching from Pablo Picasso to Bob Dylan.

Table of Contents

Après le déluge / After the Flood
Enfance / Childhood
Conte / Tale
Parade / Circus Parade
Antique / Antique
Being Beauteous / Being Beauteous
Vies / Lives
Départ / Departure
Royauté / Royalty
À une raison / To a Reason
Matinee d’ivresse / Morning of Drunkenness
Phrases / Phrases
Ouvriers / Workers
Les Ponts / The Bridges
Ville / City
Ornières / Ruts
Villes (Ce sont des villes!...) / Cities
Vagabonds / Vagabonds
Villes (L’acropole officielle...) / Cities
Veillées / Vigils
Mystique / Mystic
Aube / Dawn
Fleurs / Flowers
Nocturne vulgaire / Crude Nocturne
Marine / Seascape
Fête d’hiver / Winter Festival •Angoisse / Agony
Métropolitain / Metropolitan •Barbe / Barbarian
Promontoire / Promontory
Scènes / Scenes
Soir historique / Historic Evening
Mouvement / Movement
Bottom / Bottom
H / H
Dévotion / Devotion
Démocratie / Democracy
Fairy / Fairy
Guerre / War
Génie / Genie
Jeunesse / Youth
Solde / Going Out of Business
Translator’s Afterword
Index of French Titles
Index of English Titles

What People are Saying About This

Norma Cole

“Divided as it still is among its several collectors, the manuscript of Illuminations, ‘a sheaf of loose, unnumbered sheets,’ (Félix Fénéon) was not exactly a book, and may not actually have been called Illuminations, or The Illuminations, but that is another story. In this new translation, Donald Revell becomes neo-alchemical transpositions of Arthur Rimbaud. He fancifully exhibits dreams and hallucinations, new elliptical ultrasounds ending ‘with angels of fire and ice.’ Revell’s dedicated translation presents these astonishing prose poems ‘bedecked with flags and flowers’.”

Cole Swensen

“Finally, a translation that brings Rimbaud, entire and vital, into English. In his masterful and acutely intuitive treatment of this classic, Donald Revell has caught the immediacy of tone and the jarring, often downright alarming juxtapositions and word choices that make Rimbaud's work still so unnervingly modern. Revell has made these familiar poems no longer familiar, but strange and raw—what a pleasure to be able to discover them all over again!”

Jean Valentine

“What a blessing to be given Donald Revell's revelling again in the work of Rimbaud, this time in The Illuminations, Rimbaud's ecstatic vision of life on earth and its end. His "further gospel" (following that of Jesus of Nazareth) proclaims not hope, but happiness. And all in Revell's brilliantly buoyant natural language, and, as in A Season in Hell, the gift of his risky and devoted Translator's Afterword.”

Editorial Reviews

Celebrated poet Revell (The Bitter Withy) received the 2007 PEN USA Translation Award for his ravishing take on Rimbaud's A Season in Hell. Rendered into English with utmost sympathy and flare, this bilingual edition of Rimbaud's prose masterpiece is sure to receive comparable acclaim. Considered by many to be the infamous French wunderkind's highest achievement, the book's (mostly) prose poems present the still teenage poet's acrobatic efforts to resist the stranglehold of habit, logic and bourgeois respectability: “I've strung ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I'm dancing.” Revell's version is no more or less accessible than previous translations, and dips into the contemporary idiom are thankfully infrequent and unobtrusive. What distinguishes Revell's work is its exquisite, carefully modulated musicality. His phrasing is rich and fluid (“The soft perfume of the stars and of the sky and of everything drifts down from the hilltop”) or crisp and strident (“Unsought air and unsought world. Life./ —Was that it, then?/ —And the dream grows cold”), in perfect keeping with the protean, inestimably influential original, making this among the finest of its English translations yet produced. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

I have yet to come across a better living translator working in French today, and I wholeheartedly recommend Revell's translations to francophone and English-speaking readers alike.

Prick of the Spindle Web Magazine

"What distinguishes Revell's [translation of The Illuminations] is its exquisite, carefully modulated musicality . . . in perfect keeping with the protean, inestimably influential original, making this among the finest of its English translations yet produced."  —Publishers Weekly

"What a blessing to be given Donald Revell's revelling again in the work of Rimbaud, this time in The Illuminations, Rimbaud's ecstatic vision of life on earth and its end. His 'further gospel' (following that of Jesus of Nazareth) proclaims not hope, but happiness. And all in Revell's brilliantly buoyant natural language, and, as in A Season in Hell, the gift of his risky and devoted Translator's Afterword."  —Jean Valentine, poet

"I have yet to come across a better living translator working in French today, and I wholeheartedly recommend Revell’s translations to francophone and English-speaking readers alike."  —Prick of the Spindle Web Magazine

From the Publisher