A Season in Hell and The Illuminations [Paperback]

Arthur Rimbaud (Author), Mark Treharne (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2000

Rimbaud's vagrant and dissolute life in Paris and England with fellow poet, Paul Verlaine, which ended with a shooting drama in Brussels, is the stuff of legend and led to Rimbaud's being mythologized and idolized, particularly by the French surrealists. His poetry - visionary, unnerving, idiosyncratic, disorientating - has had a profound influence on modern writing. A Season in Hell (1873) reviews his visionary claims for poetry - his ideal of the poet as seer, through the systematic disordering of the senses, of poetry as part of life and of action. His is an agonized, divided voice, pulled in all directions by instabilities of emotion and belief. Illuminations (pub. 1886), an extended prose poem, is both a series of visual images - landscapes, cityscapes, clowns, circuses, interiors - and of mood pictures, with no one voice or identity. Fragmented, hallucinatory, decentred, the poet, in a series of shifting roles, explores pluralistic notions of the self.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Rimbaud, born in 1854, started to write at an early age. By 17 he had written his most famous poem, 'The Drunken Boat'. He then embarked on a turbulent homosexual relationship with the poet Verlaine, from which came some of their most original work, including A Season in Hell and Illuminations. Rimbaud rejected writing at the age of 20. After years of travelling and gun-running in Africa, he died in 1891, aged 37. Editor Biography Mark Treharne taught in the University of Warwick before becoming a freelance translator. Currently he i

Product Details

• Paperback: 164 pages
• Publisher: Trafalgar Square Publishing (March 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0460879847
• ISBN-13: 978-0460879842
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,917,905 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rimbaud is a deadent genius, April 8, 2000

By 

"fourthmensch" - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Season in Hell and The Illuminations (Paperback)

Arthur Rimbaud is one of the great poetic geniuses in the canon of world history. His brilliance manifests itself in his iconoclastic criticism of the world at large, a world which condemns him in his relentless pursuit of truth. These poems are a vision of personal truth, one rooted in pain and experience, in the lessons of a life which was bled out of him in the streets of Paris and the crumbling cities of the Old World. Rimbaud, like Baudelaire, is a decadent genius, offering insights into the human soul and its relation to a world which offers nothing but alienation. His verses are strange and unfamiliar, breaking conventional poetic forms to such an extent that it cannot be considered rebellion; it is almost as though he disregards the work of every poet before him to find a perfectly honest form of expression. And the results are striking. If sometimes a bit obtuse, his poems have the feeling of a revelatory hymn: each word conveys layers of meaning, and when taken together they form a sort of gestalt for the human spirit. Rimbaud, like those he inspired--from Jim Morrison to Alan Ginsberg--is voice of suffering and redemption that should not be ignored.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Season in Hell : Illuminations, March 29, 2000

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EJ (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Season in Hell and The Illuminations (Paperback)

It's been well over a century since Arthur Rimbaud penned "A Season in Hell" and "Illuminations" in his native French. It is said by many that "Illuminations" was the most complex collection that Rimbaud wrote in his short span of writing, but this translation by Mark Treharne truly captured the essence of Rimbauds work. "A Season in Hell & Illuminations" embodies Rimbauds thoughts and state of being at the time with his amazing use of metaphors and grasp of the written word. This book is definately a must have for the most zealous Rimbaud fans and new readers alike.