A Season in Hell »

Arthur Rimbaud is the author of Illuminations. He is considered the most outrageous and iconoclastic poet of French symbolism and one of the originators of free verse. Donald Revell is the author of Pennyweight Windows and My Mojave, which won the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize; translator of two volumes of Guillaume Apollinaire's poetry; and poetry editor of Colorado Review. He is twice winner of the PEN Center USA Award for Poetry, a former fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations, has twice been granted fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment of the Arts, and is a professor of English and director of creative writing programs at the University of Utah. He lives in Las Vegas.

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.

Publishers Weekly

As a wild, drug-taking teen in the 1870s, Rimbaud helped engender modern poetry. This dizzying, brilliant, blasphemous last book of mostly prose poems explores his angers, gratitudes and regrets about the visions and erotic transports celebrated in earlier poems. Revell (Pennyweight Windows) is just the right kind of poet to bring something new to this familiar work; his own recent verse reflects religious visions, and he has translated Rimbaud's successor, Apollinaire. Rimbaud's verve, fascination with the forbidden, and the self-loathing that led him to give up poetry altogether come across with a confident swagger in Revell's wiry syntax. "I dance... hand-in-hand with hags and children," Rimbaud says. Sometimes Revell modernizes ("Copyright remains with me"); elsewhere he courts controversy (for the much-quoted "Il faut etre absolument moderne," Revell gives "I must" not "One must" "be absolutely modern"). Yet Revell's method fits Rimbaud's near-madness: the translation shows, and Revell's afterword explains, how this hallucinatory modernism jump-starts an Anglo-American tradition that leads from Blake to the present day. This is an inspired new version of a strange, harsh classic. (Apr.)

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A Season in Hell     18
"Back when..."     20
Bad Blood     22
Night of Hell     36
Deliriums I     42
Deliriums II     52
The Impossible     66
Lightning     72
Morning     74
Farewell     76
A Translator's Afterword: Outrageous Innocence/Innocence Outraged     81
Morning of Drunkenness     98
Suggested Reading     99