Rimbaud

[Guest]

There was a time - not that long ago - when it was necessary to mispronounce his name (when talking to certain people), for fear that they'd think you were referring to Sylvester Stallone.

I love the stuff he wrote as a teenager when he was wandering the war-ravaged French countryside and just taking it all in and I love the stuff he wrote when he was 'en coupe' with Verlaine (who is my favourite poet of all time, but that's for another thread)...but I'm not sure about his prose poetry or his 'masterpiece' Une Saison En Enfer.

Whatever, I think it's high time A.R. was rescued from pretentious teenagers.

Any thoughts?

[hackneyvi]

Do you recommend a particular translation, Mandryka? I'm exposing myself to a good deal of poetry at the moment but hadn't looked at Rimbaud, as yet. Somehow, I'd expected him to be difficult.

Having looked at an online edition of Les Illuminations (reading Mary's remark below), it's luxurious, cantering verse; long lanes of lines which my tongue runs hill down. After the Flood, Childhood, Tale, Parade, Antique! Wonderful music!

I can see now where Allan Ginsberg's rhapsodic rhetoric comes from and how many others? Auden, Wallace Stevens, everyone? And what he must have meant to gay poets in the 20th century, particularly.

[Mary Chambers]

My thoughts are immediately - Britten, Les Illuminations. He was introduced to Rimbaud's verse by Auden, and wrote this marvellous orchestral song cycle in the late 1930s.

[Mandryka]

Do you recommend a particular translation, Mandryka? I'm exposing myself to a good deal of poetry at the moment but hadn't looked at Rimbaud, as yet. Somehow, I'd expected him to be difficult.

Having looked at an online edition of Les Illuminations (reading Mary's remark below), it's luxurious, cantering verse; long lanes of lines which my tongue runs hill down. After the Flood, Childhood, Tale, Parade, Antique! Wonderful music!

I can see now where Allan Ginsberg's rhapsodic rhetoric comes from and how many others? Auden, Wallace Stevens, everyone? And what he must have meant to gay poets in the 20th century, particularly.

I'd definitely advise getting an edition with a parallel text, vi - all poetry is difficult to translate and Rimbaud's exceptionally so. I have an ancient Penguin Poets edition by Oliver Bernard, which also includes some of his letters - it's pretty good, as you can get the musicality of the verse, then look below for the sense of it.

Post 1965, I'd say most people have come to Rimbaud via Bob Dylan's once fairly frequent dropping of his name.