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.

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New Directions is pleased to announce the relaunch of the long-celebrated bilingual edition of Rimbaud's A Season In Hell & The Drunken Boat - a personal poem of damnation as well as a plea to be released from "the examination of his own depths." Rimbaud originally distributed A Season In Hell to friends as a self-published booklet, and soon afterward, at the age of nineteen, quit poetry altogether. New Directions's edition was among the first to be published in the U.S., and it quickly became a classic. Rimbaud's famous poem "The Drunken Boat" was subsequently added to the first paperbook printing. Allen Ginsberg proclaimed Arthur Rimbaud as "the first punk" - a visionary mentor to the Beats for both his recklessness and his fiery poetry. This new edition proudly dons the original Alvin Lustig-designed cover, and a introduction by another famous rebel - and now National Book Award-winner - Patti Smith.

One of the world's most influential poets, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) is remembered as much for his volatile personality and tumultuous life as he is for his writings, almost all of which he produced before the age of twenty. Paul Schmidt's acclaimed collection brings together his complete poetry, prose, and letters, including "The Drunken Boat," "The Orphans' New Year," "After the Flood," and "A Season in Hell." "Complete Works" is divided into eight "seasons"--Childhood, the Open Road, War, the Tormented Heart, the Visionary, the Damned Soul, a Few Belated Cowardices, and the Man with the Wind at His Heels--that reflect the facets of Rimbaud's life. Insightful commentary by Schmidt reveals the courage, vision, and imagination of Rimbaud's poetry and sheds light on one of the most enigmatic figures in letters.

Cette uvre (edition relie) fait partie de la serie TREDITION CLASSICS. La maison d'edition tredition, basee a Hambourg, a publie dans la serie TREDITION CLASSICS des ouvrages anciens de plus de deux millenaires. Ils etaient pour la plupart epuises ou uniquement disponible chez les bouquinistes. La serie est destinee a preserver la litterature et a promouvoir la culture. Avec sa serie TREDITION CLASSICS, tredition a comme but de mettre a disposition des milliers de classiques de la litterature mondiale dans differentes langues et de les diffuser dans le monde entier.

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 Varese. Mrs. Varese 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 Varese 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.

The modernist masterpiece that is Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations has been given new life with the publication of John Ashbery's "dazzling" (The Economist) new translation, widely hailed as one of the literary events of the year. Presented with French text in parallel and a preface by its translator, Ashbery's rendering powerfully evokes the glittering, kaleidoscopic beauty of the original

Enduring icon of creativity, authenticity, and rebellion, and the subject of numerous new biographies, Arthur Rimbaud is one of the most repeatedly scrutinized literary figures of the last half-century. Yet almost thirty years have elapsed without a major new translation of his writings. Remedying this state of affairs is Rimbaud Complete, the first and only truly complete edition of Rimbaud’s work in English, translated, edited, and introduced by Wyatt Mason.

Mason draws on a century of Rimbaud scholarship to choreograph a superbly clear-eyed presentation of the poet’s works. He arranges Rimbaud’s writing chronologically, based on the latest manuscript evidence, so readers can experience the famously teenaged poet’s rapid evolution, from the lyricism of “Sensation” to the groundbreaking early modernism of A Season in Hell.

In fifty pages of previously untranslated material, including award-winning early verses, all the fragmentary poems, a fascinating early draft of A Season in Hell, a school notebook, and multiple manuscript versions of the important poem “O saisons, ô chateaux,” Rimbaud Complete displays facets of the poet unknown to American readers. And in his Introduction, Mason revisits the Rimbaud myth, addresses the state of disarray in which the poet left his work, and illuminates the intricacies of the translator’s art.

Mason has harnessed the precision and power of the poet’s rapidly changing voice: from the delicate music of a poem such as “Crows” to the mature dissonance of the Illuminations, Rimbaud Complete unveils this essential poet for a new generation of readers.


From the Hardcover edition.

Arthur Rimbaud was one of the wildest, most uncompromising poets of his age, although his brief literary career was over by the time he was twenty-one when he embarked on a new life as a trader in Africa. This edition brings together his extraordinary poetry and more than a hundred of his letters, most of them written after he had abandoned literature. A master of French verse forms, the young Rimbaud set out to transform his art, and language itself, by a systematic "disordering of all the senses," often with the aid of alcohol and drugs. The result is a highly innovative, modern body of work, obscene and lyrical by turns--a rigorous journey to extremes.

Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock's new translation includes Rimbaud's greatest verse, as well as his record of youthful torment, A Season in Hell (1873), and letters that unveil the man who turned his back on poetry.Includes a generous selection of Rimbaud's major poetry followed by more than 100 of his lettersContains the French text of the poems on facing pagesIntroduction examines Rimbaud's two very different careers

Written by Rimbaud at the age of 18 in the wake of his tempestuous affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, "A Season in Hell" has been a touchstone for anguished poets, artists, and lovers for more than a century.

Incluido por Verlaine en su volumen de poetas malditos, Rimbaud llevo hasta sus ultimas consecuencias el desequilibro de los sentidos para emprender cualquier forma de amor, sufrimiento y ternura. Esta edicion ofrece las "Primeras Prosas," las "Prosas evangelicas" y "Una temporada en el Infierno," terminando con "Las iluminaciones."

'Rimbaud, the poet of revolt, and the greatest' Albert Camus Rimbaud is the enfant terrible of French literature, the precocious genius whose extraordinary poetry is revolutionary in its visionary, hallucinatory content and its often liberated forms. He wrote all his poems between the ages of about 15 and 21, after which he turned his back on family, friends, and France to roam the world. In his final years he was a trader in the Horn of Africa. Out of the brief, colourful life and the poetry of sensory wildness has been created the myth of Rimbaud, an enduring icon of youth, rebellion, and freedom. But behind the myth lies a poetic adventure of high ambition and painful rigour, poignant yet heroic. Rimbaud is one of the greatest French poets of all times. This bilingual edition provides all of Rimbaud's poems, with the exception of his Latin verses and some small fragments. It also includes some of his prose pieces, chosen because they offer a commentary on his poetic concerns. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.