Written by Rimbaud at age 18 in the wake of a tempestuous affair with fellow poet, Paul Verlaine, "A Season in Hell" has been a touchstone for anguished poets, artists and lovers for over a century. This volume presents the text in French and English with photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)
Original Language: French
Original Language: French
About the Author
This book brings together two of the most notorious artistic rebels of their respective eras, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) and Robert Mapplethorpe. Rimbaud wrote most of his work as a teenager, then renounced poetry to pursue an adventurous but unprofitable career as a soldier, coffee trader, and gun runner. The controversial and highly regarded photographer Robert Mapplethorpe earned acclaim during the late 1980s for his nudes, portraits, and still lifes. Books with Bulfinch are: Robert Mapplethorpe (1988), Some Women (1989) and Flowers (1990). Paul Schmidt has translated the complete works of Rimbaud as well as selected works of Chekhov, Pushkin and other Russian authors.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Anguished and Brilliant,
By A Customer
This review is from: A Season in Hell (Hardcover)
In the collection of prose poems and verse fragments that make up the short book A Season in Hell, begun in April 1873 in an outbuilding at Rimbaud's family farm at the village of Roche and completed by the end of August, he looks back in despair over his life as a poet. In one of the fragments, titled "Ravings number two" he talks about "the history of one of my follies. I invented the colors of the vowels!" he claims, and goes on: "I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language accessible...to all the senses...I expressed the inexpressible. I defined vertigos...I ended up regarding my mental disorder as sacred." Rimbaud draws a picture of his affair with Verlaine in cynical terms, painting Verlaine as a weak and foolish virgin and himself as an "infernal bridegroom," a monster of cruelty. It wasn't far from the truth. The last chapter of A Season in Hell is titled "Farewell." It has an air of exhaustion and relief about it. "I have tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new tongues. I believed I had acquired supernatural powers. Well! I must bury my imagination and my memories. A fine fame as an artist and story-teller swept away! I! I who called myself magus or angel, exempt from all morality, I am given back to the earth, with a task to pursue, and wrinkled reality to embrace. A peasant!" A Season In Hell was finished in August 1873. Rimbaud somehow persuaded his thrifty mother to pay to have the book printed in Belgium. He sent his six author's copies to his friends and to men of letters in Paris. Many people see this manuscript as his farewell to literature. It certainly reads like that, although Enid Starkie believes that it was Rimbaud's farewell to a certain kind of literature--visionary, mystical, growing out of the selfish and hallucinatory lifestyle that had crashed to a halt only a few months before with his shooting and the jailing of Verlaine--and a commitment to something more humble and realistic. "Well, now I shall ask forgiveness for having fed on lies," Rimbaud wrote. He hoped that the French literary world would offer him the forgiveness that he was now prepared to seek, and give his book favorable reviews. He the proceeded to Paris to see how his book had fared. Favorable reviews? He must have been mad. To those literary men, the dilettantes Rimbaud had mocked and despised a year or two earlier, Rimbaud was the insolent catamite who had destroyed their old friend Verlaine: sponged off him, wrecked his marriage, corrupted his soul and ruined his life, and then, when he had used him up, had turned him in to the police to face hard labour in a Belgian jail. We have an eyewitness account of Rimbaud on the day when the last door in Paris had been slammed in his face, at the moment when he realized that the literary career he'd embraced so passionately was over. It was the evening of the first of November, 1873, a holiday, and the cafés and restaurants were crowded. The poet Poussin had joined some writer friends at the Café Tabourey. He noticed a young man alone in a corner, staring into space. It was Rimbaud. Poussin went over and offered to buy him a drink. "Rimbaud was pale and even more silent than usual," he later recalled. "His face, indeed his whole bearing, expressed a powerful and fearsome bitterness." For the rest of his life Poussin "retained from that meeting a memory of dread." When the café closed, Rimbaud--who hadn't spoken to anyone all evening--set out to walk home through the late autumn countryside. It took him about a week. When he got to Charleville he built a bonfire and burned all his manuscripts. He didn't bother to collect the remaining five hundred copies of his book from the printer--they moldered there until they were discovered by a Belgian lawyer in 1901. That should have been the end of it. But Rimbaud couldn't quite let go. The following year in London he carefully copied out his prose poems, gathered together under the title, Illuminations. The year after that he tried to get them published. For the anguished but brilliant Rimbaud, giving up poetry must have been akin to weaning himself from a potent drug.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Timeless poetry merges with wonderfull photography.,
By A Customer
This review is from: A Season in Hell (Hardcover)
Truely a great moment in literature. The marraige of Rimbaud's words with the eye of Mapplethorpe makes this thin volume a classic. Paul Schmidt's introduction shed considerable light on Rimbaud's use of certain words and his translation of this piece is beautiful. The photographs are breathtaking. A must have for anyone who admires the work of either of these fine artists.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a desperate hallucinatory journey,
By A Customer
This review is from: A Season in Hell (Hardcover)
this is perhaps one of the most bizarre epics ever written, with a million possible interpretations. it is essentially a book about descent into hell and getting out again. a brilliant love poem that hardly seems so. recommended for all those in love baudelaire, symbolism, or surrealism.
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