Customer Reviews

Rimbaud Complete (Modern Library)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is said to be the most complete collection of Rimbaud's works ever collected in English and includes some of his early schoolwork, rough drafts, incomplete writings notes & ideas. To a Rimbaudophile such as myself this is an incredible resource; and perhaps the last great addition to the study of Rimbaud and his poetry ever, unless, miracle of miracles, the lost manuscript of "La Chasse Spirituelle" were to be discovered in some dead French book collector's attic. Alas! Until then we must be satisfied (and grateful) with being able to read and compare early drafts of A Season in Hell, or some early texts translated into English for the first time. In addition to this volume, Mason has also collected Rimbaud's correspondence in "I Promise to be Good" (2003). This companion volume includes a previously unpublished photograph of Rimbaud in Abyssinia (on the cover & inside as well) and reads like an autobiography of sorts.

I've put Wyatt Mason's translations of Rimbaud on my best books of all time list ("Heavy Hitters, Inspiration, & Enlightenment") because Rimbaud's poetry was revolutionary in its time and influential in our own. Mason's goal is to ". . . find common, rather than middle, ground between the two poles represented by Fowlie and Schmidt," (other translations worth comparing) and his focus is on how Rimbaud "might have written" were he writing in English. I suppose it all comes down to what concepts of translation you prefer; for the most part I like Mason's style and the rhythm and structure of the originals seem to be there. It is always interesting to see different authors, and especially poets, interpret original texts in a foreign language. The fact is not everyone will be pleased with the results (cf. critical reviews on Amazon). The solution? Learn French and read the texts in the original. Short of that, or in addition, read multiple translations (I recommend Oliver Bernard's prose translations in the Penguin paperback for a more direct approach) and come to your own conclusions. Better yet, translate Rimb's poems on your own! In the end, Rimbaud is difficult, if not impossible, to penetrate regardless of whether or not you understand French). To read Rimbaud is one thing, but to see and feel him is quite another. Mason does his best.

This latest addition to the long list of Rimbaud translations and biographies proves that Rimbaud belongs to no individual biographer or translator, but rather to the seekers, wanders, poets, and workers of the world searching for that "I is an other" sense of themselves, settling for nothing less than a total reinvention of love. In the end, what the poems mean to you and how you choose to incorporate them into your life will be the most important factor in deciding whether or not you'll buy into the fruits of Wyatt Mason's own poetic endeavors, and ultimately, Rimbaud's. I for one, think this is an indispensible addition for any student of Rimbaud's life and works.

Some unnamed reviewer up above claims "There have been no fully satisfactory translations of the brilliant modernist forerunner Rimbaud." Whoever wrote that clearly didn't read Wyatt Mason's new translation of Rimbaud's complete works very carefully, because it's a lot more that satisfactory: it's beautiful. While the Wallace Fowlie translation (the blue one) is dependable, it's nothing more than that. It's good if you read French pretty well and need some help. But if you want to try to experience Rimbaud's poems in English as Poems, Mason's work is the only time I've found myself reading along and finding that he's caught both the meanings of words and the feeling of the poems (my mother is French, so I have read Rimbaud in the original). Mason's introduction is also, far and away, the best brief essay on Rimbaud's life and art imaginable, and it also talks really interestingly about translating poetry, and how he's gone about it. This is also the only edition available in English that contains everything Rimbaud wrote. The others, even if they say they're complete, don't come close. Neither do the other translators. I can't recommend this book enough.

First, it ought to said that, as poetry in English, this translation of Rimbaud fails utterly. Mason indicates in the introduction that he attempts to walk the line between literal and 'poetic' translation. If by this he means that he neither resorts to the kind of inanity with which Paul Schmidt destroyed Rimbaud for late 20th-century Americans, nor to the faithful but poetically unsatisfying Fowlie edition, then he's telling at least a version of the truth. But who could not, with fluent French and enough time, translate French works faithfully into prose? And yet because he is comparatively a novice writer in English of the analogous sort of poetry to that which Rimbaud wrote in French, the concessions and compromises he must make are just terrible as regards both the literal and technical aspects of the poems. Concerning the early (verse) poems, it becomes quickly clear that the translator has no skill as a versifier. Translating requires a resourcefulness bred of technical experience. I don't know if Mason writes original poems, but if so they must be of a very modern sort, which is to say contemporary (as opposed to Modernist) free verse. Of course few people now have good ears for versification, but to those who do--to those who wish a translation to convey something of the greatness, at least, of the original--the technical performance sounds woefully like that of a beginner. His rhymes are forced, his syntax is wrenched for rhymes that aren't particularly good in the first place, and his meter is extremely slack if it exists at all. This is particularly a problem as the greatness of Rimbaud's 40-some-odd early poems derives in large part from his technical genius. To take at random only one of many examples, in his translation of "Les Corbeaux," Mason translates what in English means roughly "Strange army with [your] harsh cries,/Cold winds are ravaging your nests" as "Strange armies with cries that crack/ Cold nests that winds attack." This contains the sort of forcing of rhymes that an adept poet would know to avoid. Mason has added highly unnatural demonstrative pronouns to these two very short phrases in order to get a rhyme whose first element "crack" is way off. The result is an ugly fragment. Of course crows' cries might be described as cracking, but not in this poem. The same translation ends with "Alas" which is no where in the original, and is again inserted for rhyme's sake. Falling as it does at the end of the last line, it makes the poem sound glib and world-weary. In French, the poem is certainly not glib and not exactly world-weary in the way that "Alas," as the poem's final word, makes it sound. I could go on for a page with problems I find in just this one poem. The text is filled--filled--with such clunkiness, and it makes for bad poetry _and_ bad translation of meaning. If Mason were a good, resourceful poetic translator, he would not be quite so baffled by the formal constraints. Perhaps he should have rendered a prose translation. Surely he should have worked harder at it. But I guess few are the people who know how to translate poems, and even fewer are those who can spy a bad translation.

It's true that this translation includes some writings by Rimbaud never before (so far as I know) available or accessible to a reader strictly limited to english. But, should you spend your hard earned money on it? That's a difficult question. I wish I hadn't.

Wyatt Mason's english:
"...The Gospel! The Gospel!
I await God, hungrily.
There I am..."

the french (included in the rear of the book):
"...l'Evangile! l'Evangile!
J'attends Dieu avec gourmandise. Je suis de race inferieure de toute eternite.
Me voici sur..."

What happened to "Je suis de race inferierue de toute eternite"!

I gave this book three stars because it contains writings never before available to the strictly english reader.

The inspiration of Kerouac and Morrison, as well as myself, has never been translated so poorly. Of the works of Rimbaud that I own, this would be my least favorite. Wyatt Mason does no justice to the boy poet who's youth bore the greatest poetry in the last several hundred years.

An example (third stanza of the Drunken Boat):
"Deafer than a dreaming child, I ran
Into winter's furious rippling tides.
Penisulas wrenched from shore
Have never know scuh hurly-burly."
Hurly-burly!!!

While the tranlator could have been bettered by a first year french student, the amount of work collected in the book is greater than any other volume I own. I especially was excited to see a first draft of "A Season in Hell." So if you are looking for a good amount of the french collected in one volume, this books for you, but I wouldn't suggest it if you are looking for a well translated text.

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was a French poet who experimented with many verse structures at an early age. Always interested in the theme of liberty, Rimbaud's work challenged the boundaries of traditional poetic expression. Wyatt Mason, the translator of the poet's work in Rimbaud Complete (2003), wrote a wonderful description of Rimbaud's style. "And the poems - vessels of indeterminacy, ambiguity and frequently strange beauty - are easily disfigured by a blunt critical blade." Reading this description, the reader can understand the popularity of the poet's work with the "Beat" generation and the surrealists. Much of the work translated by Mason is reminiscent of Alan Ginsberg's beat poem "Howl" and Andre Breton's surrealist novel, Nadja.

Mason's translation is an attempt to remain true to the French but also help the reader experience Rimbaud's images with contemporary English expressions. This process produces art that is very different from other translations of the poet's work. The reader has to be open to free association of images, tangential emotions, and surprising personal reactions. Later, this would be the `stuff' of Kerouac, Kesey, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Breton, Genet and others.

I read the book with frequent surprising flights of fancy that I scribbled in the margins of the book. This is the best way to stay in tune with Rimbaud who I believe meant his work to produce such reader reaction. Of course, he meant the work for the few free spirits who might someday chuck it all and hit the road as he did. Timothy Leary's infamous line, "Tune in, turn on, drop out" captures the insightful reader's approach to the work of Arthur Rimbaud.

First, of all I must say that this book is a godsend. I've been trying to piece my way through the Oeuvres Completes for some time now, and having Jugurtha, the Prologue and some of the other earlier texts from 1866-1870 in English is a great pleasure. Possibly the only thing necessary now is a translation of Akakia Viala and Nicolas Bataillet's 1949 "La chasse spirituelle", which is in some French editions. However, despite the wealth of new material which Mason's translation gives us, I find it is still lacking when compared to Fowlie's. The decision not to print the original French texts on the facing page was a great error, and despite some very excellent renditions of the poems (particularly Memoire), Mason still does not have Fowlie's sense to leave the poems as they are and let the words speak for themselves. However, alongside Louise Varese's translations of the prose & of course Fowlie, most probably, this will come to be seen very shortly as one of the three indespensible Rimbaud translations that we have available in English.

At first I was sceptical of this translation. Mason sometimes veers wildly from the original French. However, the Introduction to the volume is so well-reasoned that I became convinced that this is a very fine, thoughtful piece of work. It may not be the literal French, but it is almost as close to Rimbaud's French as the English idiom can be. I also highly recommend the Treharne translations of A Season in Hell and Illuminations, although it is currently out of print.

As a native Italian speaker who speaks English as a foreign languge, I know how difficult it is to translate anything (--even a shopping list!--) into another language. I have always loved Rimbaud, and read him first in Italian, and later in French. I fell in love with Rimbaud in Italian, and wanted to read him in English after I heard about this new translation on the radio, on a show called The Connection which I think is only heard in Boston where I live. Anyway, the translator and editor Mason spoke with passion about Rimbaud and poetry and translation. As I write this 'review', I must say how surprised I am by a few of the reviews here, and how angry and condescending some people sound! Comparing a translator as talented as Mason certainly is to a 'first-year French student' I think makes clear how irrational and crazy people get about Rimbaud--a point Mason made on the radio! Anyway, Mason's translations certainly are the work of a gifted translator, are very wonderful, and capture the sound of Rimbaud, and are very careful, accurate versions. Nothing could be more personal than how you feel about a poem, except I guess how you feel about a translation of a poem (and about Rimbaud)! But I have to say that after comparing Mason's versions to some of the others in the bookstore, his seem very much the best to me. I would be suspicious of anyone who would be so dismissive as some of the 'reviewers' here of what seems to be a very successful work. If you read Mason's version of 'Drunken Boat' and think it's not a good translation, then you don't really have a very good idea of poetry, in French or English. This is a wonderful book.

Rimbaud is treated well at the hands of Wyatt Mason: the original's fine sense of line and form is well respected, the English is clear and concise.

If you have not done so, you should absolutey read Rimbaud immediately, along with Baudelaire. Not only will your friends drool in envy of your knowledge of obscure French artistic movements but you will immediately become better looking and capable of mythic feats of romance.