ARTHUR RIMBAUD: A SEASON IN HELL
edited and translated by Andrew Jary
A new translation of Arthur Rimbaud's extraordinary poetic
statement, written in 1873. The sensual, violent and anguished
emotion in Rimbaud's visionary 'alchemy of the word' remains
startling, and continues to inspire poets.
Printed with the French text facing the translation.
For a time, when he was a teenager until he was 19, art was
crucial for the psychic well-being of the restless Arthur Rimbaud
(1854-1891). The young would-be rebel Rimbaud escaped from the
bland provincial town of Charleville in Northern France to wander
the streets of Paris in poverty. After writing his Illuminations
and A Season in Hell, some of the most extraordinary poems of all
world literature, Rimbaud renounced it all for a hellish and
apparently boring life in Aden. 'Mortel, ange ET demon, autant dire
Rimbaud, ' as Rimbaud's lover, Paul Verlaine wrote ('Mortal, angel
AND demon, that is to say Rimbaud'.)
Arthur Rimbaud is the tornado of world poetry. He out-blasts
just about every other poet. For poets, he is more significant than
the so-called 'founding fathers' or influential philosophers of
modern times: Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Einstein. For poets, he is
'everybody's favourite hippy', a Communard, a 'precursor of the
current movement of subversion of Western notions of self, society,
and discourse', and a savage mystic.
Arthur Rimbaud is one of the most authentically rebellious of
modern poets. Other poets have written of rebellion and radical
action, but Rimbaud is one of the very few who actually carried it
out (and didn't sound like an idiot when he spoke of it). Picture
the young poet in his mid-teens, utterly bored by the living deaths
of suburban life, aching to run away to Paris. Though he was
dragged back a number of times, Rimbaud's life after his early
teens was never again centred in his homeland. True, he returned to
his mother, family and homeland, but his true heartland, his
landscape of the soul, was elsewhere. Rimbaud was ever a poet of
elsewhere, the other place, displacement. He was always another
person: 'Je est un autre (I is an other).
He rebelled partly for the joy of rebellion. His early poetry is
marked by an extraordinary virulence and anger. Illuminations and A
Season in Hell, his major works, are also powered by an immense
anger - a cosmic anger, a psycho-cultural-spiritual turmoil.
Illustrated, with a newly revised text for this edition.
Introduction, bibliography and notes. ISBN 971861713773.
www.crmoon.com
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