Arthur Rimbaud

John Ashbery

Presents a new translation of the author's collection of prose poems, rendered for a contemporary audience by a noted American poet.

Illuminations

Donald

I can't stop reading books alongside Infinite Jest.

Today I checked out Ashbery's new translation of Illuminations from the library and read it in one sitting in my kitchen. I'm glad I did it. It's a beautiful book. I don't know much French, but I will fight anyone who says this is not a good translation.

Really, we should all be singing these poems to each other. We should've fought for the last copies in bookstores and read them all the first night they were published. If we care about poetry and literature, this is it. This is as good as it gets (no, better). This is the divine-impossible-can't-be-real shit.

Rimbaud's biography has to be fiction. Like Wittgenstein, it is too perfect to be true. He is a character in a Pynchon novel, not a real person. Right? He is Icarus, not a real person. Right?

"To roll with one's wounds, through the wearying air and the sea; with physical torment, through the silence of murderous water and air; with tortures that laugh, in their heinously stormy silence."

It is difficult to quote this book because if I kept going I would just quote the entire thing.

(The design of the book is also gorgeous. Sometimes the big publishers don't fuck things up.)

anne caroline

This uncompleted suite of poems by French poet Arthur Rimbaud was first published serially in the Paris literary review magazine "La Vogue." The magazine published part of "Illuminations" from May to June 1886. Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud's lover, suggested the publication of these poems, written between 1873 and 1875, in book form. All forty-two of the poems generally considered as part of "Illuminations" are collected together here in this edition. Of these forty-two poems almost all are in a prose poem format, the two exceptions are "Seapiece" and "Motion," which are vers libre. There is no universally defined order to the poems in "Illuminations," while many scholars believe the order of the poems to be irrelevant, this edition begins traditionally with "Après Le Deluge" or "After the Flood." Albert Camus hailed Rimbaud as "the poet of revolt, and the greatest." The worth of this praise for Rimbaud can be seen in "Illuminations," one of the most exemplary works of his poetic talent.

Illuminations

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