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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hail Rimbaud!, May 14, 2004
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 This companion volume includes a previously unpublished photograph of Rimbaud in Abyssinia (on the cover & inside as well) and reads like an autobiography of sorts.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.
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally: A Great Translation of Rimbaud, March 21, 2002
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.
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48 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Prosy or clunky, and not as faithful as it might be, May 30, 2002
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.
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