Customer Reviews

A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

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This is one of the better translations of a Season in Hell. It's very faithful to the original French without compromising its poetry; many of the passages are nothing short of brilliant. Also, it's a bilingual edition for those who are either able or willing.

However, Varese struggles a bit under the poetic demands of the Drunken Boat. For example:

(Varese):
I can no longer, bathed in your languors, O waves,
Obliterate the cotton carriers' wake,
Nor cross the pride of pennants and of flags,
Nor swim past prison hulk's hateful eyes!

>> But trust me, for the superb quality of translation in A Season in Hell, this book's well worth the price.

A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud is one of the turning points of world literature and poetry. Henry Miller, the Surrealists and the Beat Generation poets as well as rock star Jim Morrison owe a great debt to young Prince Arthur. This passionate leap into the depths of insanity is enthralling. The meek would be well advised to steer clear. This is the granddaddy of modern poetry. Now, is truly the time of the assassins

I was given this book by a Morrocan Jew in exchange for a matt-black Zippo lighter whilst I was working in a North London psychiatric hospital as a cook.

The diabolic devotions and insights from a revolutionary modern french poet, social philosopher and prophet. As a whole his words remind me of that saying in the Gospel of Thomas; "I took my stand in the midst of the world, and in flesh I appeared to them. I found them all drunk, and did not find any of them thirsty..." (28) Rimbaud is perceptive, agonizing, tortured, cruel, and poor. In anguish he struggles to understand life; skimming the horizon of a dysfuntional and chaotic world for some sight of salvation, yet it never comes and he cries out with a piercing lament. Idolatry, science, nobility, justice, war, debauchery, crime, punishment, damnation, delerium... Arthur Rimbaud walks a path of rotten corpses with a crown of thorns in search of honor, reason and restitution. He seeks a God only to find in the discovery that he is at once sent back into the dark impenetrable battle of human existence.

This is a poet that sets the heart and soul on fire, he initiates a frantic search for meaning and relevance. Look! he says, see the world untinted, without all the trappings and trimmings, calculate the length and breadth of despair, circumnavigate the emotions and come back to understand yourself and the inevitability of your extinction. Like a present day Francois Villon he is an explorer of visions, the varied manifestations of humanity and society, he has adopted all the tricks of the trade and speaks the 'lingua' of the professional criminal.

In the end Rimbaud the prophet dies like the rest of us, albeit in a syphilitic fever with an amputated right leg... he can walk no more, but he is the one who can knock us off our comfortable seat in civilisation, inspire us to consider the real world and invent our own sustaining myths. Perhaps that lighter would have come in handy... to ignite the remnaining stagnant swamps in my own breast and burn like a comet across a purple blood sky.

For those who wish to come closest to the essence of the poet's passions - his desires and dispositions, his ambitions and disappointments, prophesies, philosophies, cultural commentaries, his romance and self-deprecating humor, his music - this is the poem with which to begin, and this is the translation. In a sense, when I refer to "the poet" I am referring to all poets, because among them all Rimbaud may be the most sincere, most completely open, and least marked by pretense. He may be the most genuine poet we have read, and Season in Hell may be the most genuine of his poems. After this, there is not much to be gained elsewhere... and so, it may be better to read last rather than first after all.

This was a reread for me-- and a reacquisition. Somehow, my old copy was lost in one of my many moves. The Varèse edition is well-respected, with reason. I really appreciated the bilingual layout of the book and the slightly larger print. My French wouldn't have been up to reading the nuances in the original, but was good enough to be greatly assisted by the approach. I had the feeling I read the work in both languages.

I wouldn't feel up to reviewing the Rimbaud reading experience. I haven't looked closely at these works in many years. I had expected that as an older woman I would find less in them-- I've always fundamentally thought of them as poems of youth. While I did find *different* things, I was a little surprised how much it was still able to move me.

I'd recommend both the edition and the work.

This Louise Varese version of Rimbaud's "A Season in Hell", in my opinion, is the best translation to appear in English, with the French on each opposing page, for Varese has nothing to hide. I feel that the recent translations to appear attempt to differ from the Varese version, in order to bring a more literal and therefore less poetic vision to this visionary poetry. Compare the opening page:

"My Life was a Feast..." to the end of the page

with any other version. The Varese version simply best convey's the spirit of the poem.
When I read any other version, I actually find myself substituting Vareses' choices.
Varese was the wife of avant-garde composer, Edgard Varese, the first to write electronic music.
There is nothing electronic, or robotic, however, with regard to these translations.
They are as fresh, still, as freshly-cut flowers.

Robert Shapiro (author of "Les Six: The French Composers and Their Mentors Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie" published by Peter Owen in 2011)

.
What an amazing passionate book of prose and poetry! It's alive with pain, chaos and joy, screaming in anguish in streaming movement that is pouring out of the pages in utter agonizing derision and pain, flowing in surreal release of tension and expression.

The beginning of the book has a short bio and although short and concise, it vaguely talks about how scandalous Rimbaud and his companion Verlaine were in descriptive sexual analogy, refusing to use the word "sexual" and "lover."

Here was a young man who found a gay lover 20 years his senior and traveled in complete uncertainty and insecurity, a "Faustian Man," such as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's 'On The Road.' Rimbaud was a man who lived in the present moment of risk, spontaneity and the faith to walk in uncertainly and courageously. And this of course brings true living over the comfort zone of existing, which accompanies such an artist with intense pain, guilt, creativity, joy, hurt, anguish and exploding passions. The pages reek with chaotic artistic surrealism.

This man was a rare creator. An outcast of society, a vagabond in decadence and carousing avenging scandal, however a living man of flowing movement, unlike our dead, civilized and rational society. And for this, the man and his poetry snubbed and forgotten, only to be noticed at a later time and recognized for its aesthetic, passionate value. This is typical with almost all true creators of autonomous ability and dangerous living.

From page 23:

"Boredom is no longer my love. Rages, debauchery, madness, - I have known all their soarings and their disasters, - My whole burden is laid down. Let us contemplate undazed the extent of my innocence. I would no longer be capable of begging the solace of a bastinado. I don't fancy myself embarked on a wedding with Jesus Christ as father-in-law. I am not a prisoner of my reason. I said: God, I want freedom in salvation: how am I to seek it? Frivolous tastes have left me. No more need of devotion or of divine love. No more regrets for the age of render hearts. Each of us has his reason, scorn and charity; I reserve my place at the top of that angelic ladder of common sense. As for established happiness, domestic or not . . . no, I cannot. I am too dissipated, too weak. Life flourishing through toil, old platitude! As for me, my life is not heavy enough, it flies and floats far above action, that precious focus of the world. What an old maid I am getting to be, lacking the courage to be in love with death! If only God would grant me celestial, aerial calm, prayer, - like the ancient Saints, - Saints, giants! anchorites, artists such as are not wanted any more! Farce without end? My innocence would make me weep. Life is the farce we all have to lead."

After reading his Illuminations, I decided that I definitely wanted to encounter more of Arthur Rimbaud. I was intrigued by his creative proposition that in order to become engaged with existence the poet must place himself at variance with life. This positioning of the poet in surging counter-subjectivity to life is somewhat Hegelian in that it induces not only a creative synthesis but suffering as its essential Muse. While A Season in Hell is mature Rimbaud toward the end of his life, the Drunken Boat is clearly his finest individual poem. One discovers a symbolic clarity in this single work that summarizes his amazing thirst for life and the human condition in a brief poem of only 25 stanzas. This really is a magnificent work reminiscent of Blake with a style and a passion that transformed his genre and left him immortal. I earnestly invite you to read this telling, visually rich and important work by a major poet of immense talent. It will broaden the palette through which you perceive the brush strokes and colors of your life's impressions.

oh what a good book thes is. i rekomind it tgo all of my frinds. if you are smart you wil read this book.