(translation from Rimbaud, Complete Works, trans. Odours to not make his nostrils quiver / He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his breast, / Silent. Smiling as / A sick child would smile, he is taking a nap: / Nature, cradle him warmly: he is cold. A young soldier, his mouth open, his head bare, / And the nape of his neck bathing in the cool blue watercress, / Sleeps he is stretched out on the grass, under clouds, / Pale on his green bed where the light rains down. It is a green hollow where a river sings / Madly catching on the grasses / Silver rags where the sun atop the proud mountain / Shines: it is a small valley which bubbles over with rays. Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme: Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut. Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,Įt la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,ĭort il est étendu dans l’herbe, sous la nue, Luit: c’est un petit val qui mousse de rayons. But that knowledge doesn’t tell the full story of the poem, far from it: it leaves out how the final line is prefigured (spoiler alert!) in the repeated vowel sound of ‘bouche ouverte’ of line 5 of how the standard twelve-syllable line is destabilized several times, with punctuation an accessory to the crime:Ĭ’est un trou de verdure où chante une rivièreĪccrochant follement aux herbes des haillonsĭ’argent où le soleil, de la montagne fière, Yes, of course, it is helpful to know that ‘Le Dormeur du val’ is dated October 1870, and so Rimbaud set out to his presentation of war’s bloody interruption ruining the bucolic Ardennais countryside just weeks after France capitulated in Sedan, a dozen miles from his hometown. Instead, I set out to weave two parallel stories. Mixing life and literature can be dangerous business: reducing a poem to a biographical detail flattens the poem and removes so much of what makes literature sing (how it sounds, how it’s rhythmed, how it feels, how it moves the reader…). In addition, some time before he left Europe in 1875 he wrote the first two free-verse poems (poems in verse but lacking end-line rhyme) in French. His innovations include a collection of prose poems - poems set in paragraphs rather than verses - entitled Illuminations. Looking back at all that he did, it’s almost possible to forget that he wrote some of the most enduring poems in the French language, blowing his way through centuries of rules to create new ways of thinking about and writing poetry. Some of it is well-known, and almost didn’t need to be recounted: his childhood in sleepy Charleville (now Charleville-Mézières), in eastern France his brash arrival in Paris and torrid relationship with fellow poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), which ended with Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in a Brussels hotel room Rimbaud’s departure from poetry and Europe, criss-crossing half of the globe and ending up spending the last fifteen years of his life as a trader in the Arabian peninsula and present-day Ethiopia. Étienne Carjat, via Wikimedia CommonsIt was those urges that I tried to capture in my recent biography. If Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) is French teenagers’ perennial favourite, it’s because during the course of his short life and even shorter literary career - he stopped writing poetry by the age of 21 and died at the age of 37 - he embodied some of the fundamental urges that we all have known, at one time or another: bursts of creativity seeing how far rules can be bent before they break and the desire to pick up and move away, expanding horizons and learning about self and the world. Writing about one of France’s most famous authors was a daunting task, but what made it less so was what makes his story so compelling to all lovers of literature: year after year, generation after generation. Here, he reflects on the writing process and the tricky relationship between life and literature. Seth Whidden, Fellow and Tutor in French at The Queen’s College, has recently published a biography on Rimbaud. Rimbaud captured the imagination of his readers, both on account of his experimental writing style and his turbulent personal life. This week’s post explores one of the most famous French poets of the nineteenth century, Arthur Rimbaud, whose collections include Une Saison en enfer and Illuminations.
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