Customer Reviews

Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works (Perennial Classics)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Highly unreliable. Schmidt has produced some very good English-language poetry, but it ain't Rimbaud. He conceals this by not printing the original on a facing page. Worse yet, he prints the Illuminations as free verse, when they were written as prose poems (on the rationale that the prose poem isn't as successful a genre in English as it is in French.) I am sternly against this kind of translation, unless you're going to go all the way and admit that what you're doing is a poem by Paul Schmidt "after" Rimbaud. But he doesn't. Rimbaud newbies are directed instead to Louise Varese's superb versions of Illuminations and A Season in Hell; those who want a complete works should go for Wallace Fowlie's less memorable but more faithful edition; total Rimbaud freaks should learn French (and mortgage the house in order to be able to afford the magnificent Pleiade edition of the originals).

I've collected several translations of Rimbaud's poetry over the years, some good and some leave much to be desired. Schmidt accomplishes a very difficult task here - translating the French in a way that does Rimbaud's work justice. This title is my favorite, and the most used translation when referring to his work. If you must buy one - this is the only translation you'll ever need.

I have a collection of various translations by Arthur Rimbaud. This book was a revelation to me. The difference is remarkable. By abandoning precise translations, Schmidt allows the full beauty and vulgarity of these works to be free. There is no stilted translation present here. This book is a work of art. It may not be translation in the traditional sense, but it is its own remarkable undertaking - and I believe it will stand the test of time. Congratulations Mr. Schmidt.

I wrote an earlier review of this edition of Rimbaud back when I called myself lexo-2; I'd now amend it, if I could, to say that the only translations of Rimbaud that non-French speakers are going to need is Wyatt Mason's superb bilingual edition in two volumes for the Modern Library. Schmidt has a lovely turn of phrase, but this is really a collection of poems by Paul Schmidt inspired by the work of Rimbaud, and not in my view a translation at all.

Rimbaud is the finest poet that has ever lived and this translation is excellent. It is easy to read, well thought out in it's context and the order of the poems. It offers just enough history on the life of Rimbaud for first time readers to want and read more about the man.
Most importantly is the letters included in the back from Rimbaud to various friends and family. I believe that these letters are where the real fans of his get to see the real Arthur Rimbaud. Excellent book. I couldn't give it a better rewiew. I carry this book in my bookbag and read it when I am in between classes, and the beauty carries me through the rest of the day.

This book was one of the most fundamentally influential books for me as a developing poet. I think it's by far the best translation of Rimbaud, much more enjoyable to read than the Pleide edition, which seems to me outdated. It may be true that Schmidt took some creative license and his translations of these poems may not be as literal or as accurate as others, but his gift for interprettation makes the poems better than in other translations, and that to me is more important than just strict accuracy. When I read these poems, I know I'm reading Rimbaud--the imagery, the atmosphere is all his. It doesn't bother me at all if from time to time the translator must re-position a word here or adjust a phrase there, or even invent an approximate figure-of-speech for one that doesn't exist in English--the main thing is that this translation is compelling and easy to understand and has Rimbaud's poetic style and ideas down to a T.

David Rehak
author of "Poems From My Bleeding Heart"

I've read this book in Turkish. Then in English. I think Rimbaud is still the future of poetry. If you are looking for something to hold on to, you should have a look at this book. There is nothing but pure life, smell of the colors and eyes of the light which swows us the meaning. For we can make it bigger. That is what Rimbaud has done. That is what todays poetry and i am looking for i think.

Out of all the books and poems I have read about or by Rimbaud, I'd have to say that this is the difinitive view on his life and works. It includes all the greats, from Illuminations to A Season in Hell, a definite must buy for literature fans

This book contains many unmusical, undistinguished, unfaithful translations. As poetry in English, it is no worse than most poetry one finds in contemporary journals. But it is particularly disturbing that Richard Howard, who is a very intelligent man, and a very important man in the poetry world, and a responsible translator himself, should offer the effusive and utterly mendacious encomium that accompanies the book, making it not just bad but imperiously bad. Schmidt does not pay enough attention to his own, or to Rimbaud's, use of rhyme and meter. He cuts words and images and frequently uses his own fabrications for rhyme's sake. Yet the rhymes are very often inaudible because of the lack of a consistent metrical pattern. And, though he dispenses with important details completely, or wrenches the lines, because the versions are so prosodically loose, Schmidt forfeits the excuse that he was struggling to fill a metrical formula. Quite a few lines read like translations from a bad tourists' guidebook. Sokolov, in the other blurb on the backcover, has unwittingly said it best: "Schmidt has truly made Rimbaud his own."

These translations of Rimbaud are quite strong. Rarely will translators try to give you the whole of a poet's work, as Eshleman has certainly tried with Vallejo or Cesaire--quite admirably and with successes that have made the project well worth it, I should add--so, in attempting to absorb the poet's work, as Schmidt has done, or in summoning it--it's hard to find the proper term for such an organic, imaginal, maybe cellular process (dreaming his way into it? performing it, as in a kind of primordial "theater of cruelty"? neither seems accurate) one has to jettison as untenable those fragile, mandarin, academic (in the worst sense) and ultimately incommensurate theories of form that readers such as "N'body" demand. As for "music," the Schmidt translations render many of those cracked melodies that Rimbaud's poems crank, as from a carnival squeeze-box, that emanate from and counterpoint his "Season in Hell." The shorter poems also ring with sound in French, not tinkling, as some of the reviews here might suggest, but with that pitch a boxed ear sometimes has. If you can imagine a melody heard through a boxed ear, that is the music one hears in Rimbaud. Not a music "from which all music has been banished," in Adorno's conservative phrase, but that one strains to hear past, that one cannot separate from the high-pitched, terrible, and absolutely painful ringing, a music of tinnitus that the translator must attempt to hear and, while hearing, convey to the readers who are safely on the other side. This makes the translation of Rimbaud a completely heroic process. How can a translator stand to hear the sound of the poems and still make those gestures, letters and motions--so similar to a St. Vitus' dance--that we call, comfortably, "translation"? This is the task. Not a shout into the forest of language, but a terrible possession similar to electrical execution or the shaking of delirium tremens. Those lines sketched out on the seizure victim's body: those are the marks of translation.