Rimbaud illuminations poems8/22/2023 ![]() ![]() By contrast Ashbery, of course, is now in his eighties and still writing up a storm. And then, consider how essential it is to Rimbaud’s legend that his meteoric career played itself out by the time he was twenty. ![]() As paradoxical as it ought to be that a poet as rude and rebellious as Rimbaud is part of the world’s literary canon, there he is - jostling for position, maybe, with Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, and giving them dirty looks. ![]() “Rimbaud hallucinates,” as Jean-Luc Steinmetz said, “and creates an epic.” That the epic is conveyed in shreds and tatters makes it no less epic and all the more contemporary. While it makes all kinds of sense that someone who loves Roussel or Schubert or Martory would love Rimbaud too, the fact remains that Rimbaud hardly needs the sort of rescue operation that they do. Ashbery’s other recently published translations from the French include a very little-known prose piece by Pierre Reverdy and the poems of Pierre Martory, whose work is apparently as unfamiliar in France as it is in the English-speaking world. He has been, rather, as a proponent of “other traditions,” to borrow the title of his 1989-90 Norton Lectures at Harvard, published as a book in 2001, which offered a spirited defense of certain kinds of “minor poetry” through sympathetic readings of such overlooked or cultish figures as John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. ![]() For one thing, Ashbery has never been known as a man for underwriting the canon. But it’s surprising that people haven’t been more surprised by John Ashbery’s decision to undertake a translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations. And they have, so maybe I should think twice before adding more kudos to the pile. In 2011 he was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award.It’s to be expected that when America’s greatest living poet publishes a translation of one of the greatest and - to borrow a phrase from the titles of old forgotten anthologies - best-loved poets of world modernity, readers would take notice. Pulitzer Prize–winning poet John Ashbery (1927-2017) translated many French writers, including Alfred Jarry, Pierre Reverdy, and Raymond Roussel. 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. Rimbaud died in Marseille in November of 1891, at the age of 37. Only after the amputation did doctors determine Rimbaud was, in fact, suffering from cancer. In 1891, Rimbaud was misdiagnosed with a case of tuberculosis synovitis and advised to have his leg removed. 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. It was to be Rimbaud’s final publication. The following year, Rimbaud traveled to London with the poet Germain Nouveau, to compile and publish his transcendent Illuminations. The act sent Verlaine to prison and Rimbaud back to Charleville to finish his work on A Season in Hell. 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. 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. Shortly thereafter, Rimbaud sent his work to the renowned symbolist poet Paul Verlaine and received in response a one-way ticket to Paris. While he disliked school, Rimbaud excelled in his studies and, encouraged by a private tutor, tried his hand at poetry. 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. 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. ![]()
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