Arthur Rimbaud

Looming against a snowy landscape, a titanic Being of Beauty. Whistlings of death and circles of soft music make this adored body rise, stretch and waver like a phantom; black and scarlet wounds burst in the splendid flesh. The very colours of life darken, dance, and disengage themselves around the Vision in progress. And shudders arise and grumble, and the deranged taste of these effects becoming charged with the deadly whistlings and raucous musics that the world, far behind us, sends out to our mother of beauty, – she backs away, draws herself up. Our bones are dressed in a new body of love!

 O the ashen face, the escutcheon of horse’s mane, the arms of crystal! the cannon onto which I must throw myself amidst the confused combat of the trees with the light air!

A Prince was annoyed at merely spending his time in perfecting commonplace acts of generosity. He had in mind astonishing revolutions in love, and suspected that his wives were capable of more than that accommodating attitude adorned with heaven and luxury. He wanted to see the truth, the hour of essential desire and satisfaction. Whether or not it would turn out to be an aberration of piety, that is what he wanted. He possessed, to say the least, a rather large degree of human power.

All the women he had known were assassinated. What devastation  within the garden of beauty! As the sword was put to their necks, they blessed him. He didn’t ask for any new ones. – More women turned up.

He killed all those who had followed him, after the hunt or to libations. – Everyone followed him.

It amused him to slit the throats of prized animals. He set palaces ablaze. He pounced on people and cut them to pieces. – The crowd, the golden roofs, the beautiful animals were still there.

Is it possible to go into raptures over destruction, to make oneself young again through cruelty! The people made not a murmur of protest. Nobody could come up with an argument against his views.

One evening, he was galumphing along. A Genie of ineffable, even unmentionable, beauty appeared. His features and bearing radiated the promise of multiple and complex love! of unspeakable, even unbearable happiness! The Prince and the Genie most likely destroyed each other in their essential health. How could they  not have died from it? Together, then, they died.

But the Prince expired, in his palace, at the usual sort of age. The prince was the Genie. The Genie was the Prince.

Classical music never reaches what we wish for.

Note: These translations of Les Illuminations will eventually be published by “Poetry in Translation”. S.H.  

I

That idol with dark eyes and yellow mane, without relatives or court, more noble
than fables, Mexican and Flemish; her domain, insolent azure and verdure, runs
across beaches named by waves empty of ships with names ferociously Greek,
Slavonic and Celtic.

At the forest’s edge –  dream flowers chime, burst open, brighten, –  the girl with orange lips, her legs crossed in the clear deluge welling up from the meadows, her nudity shadowed, traversed and clothed by rainbows, flora, the sea.

Ladies whirling around on the terraces near the sea; young girls and giantesses, proud black women in the verdigris foam, jewels standing on the thick soil of groves and thawed-out allotments, – young mothers and elder sisters who look at you with faces recalling pilgrimages, Sultanas, princesses with tyrannical costumes and bearing, tiny foreign women and mildly unhappy people.
How tedious is the hour of the “dear body” and “dear heart”!

II

It is her, the dead girl, behind the rosebushes. –  The young deceased mother descends the staircase. –   Her cousin’s calash squeals along the sand. –  Her younger brother –  (he is in the East Indies!) there, before the setting sun, on the meadow of carnations. –  The old men  buried standing up in the rampart covered with wallflowers.

Swarms of golden leaves surround the general’s house. It is in the South of France. –  Following the red road, you arrive at the empty inn. The château is for sale; the shutters are hanging off. –  The priest must have taken the church key. –  All around the park, the keepers’ lodges are uninhabited. The fences are so high that you can only see the rustling treetops. Anyway, there is nothing to see inside.

The meadows rise as far as the hamlets which have neither roosters nor anvils. The sluice-gate is open. Oh the calvaries and windmills of the desert, the islands and haystacks.
Magical flowers
hummed. The grassy slopes rocked him to sleep. Beasts of fabulous elegance ran
around. The clouds gathered over the high sea made from an eternity of hot tears.

III

In the wood, there is a bird, his song stops you short and makes you
blush.

There is a clock that does not chime.

There is a hole with a nest of white animals.

There is a cathedral going down and a lake coming up.

There is a small coach abandoned in the copse, or running down the path with ribbons tied on.

There is a band of tiny actors in costume, glimpsed on the road that runs through the edge of the wood.

Finally, when you are hungry and thirsty, there is someone who chases you away.

IV

I am the holy man, at my prayers on the terrace, –  while peaceful animals graze as far as the sea of Palestine.

I am the learned man in the dark armchair. Branches and rain batter against the library window.

I am the walker along the highway through dwarven woods; the din of the canal locks covers my footsteps. I watch for a long time the sunset’s melancholy wash of gold.

I might well be the child left behind on the jetty cast adrift onto the high seas, the little servant walking down the alley whose front touches the sky.

The paths are harsh. The hills are covered in shrub. The air is motionless. How distant the birds and springs are! It can only be the end of the world in front of us.

V

If only they would rent me this whitewashed tomb with its rows of cement reliefs, – far underground.

I sit with my elbows on the table, the lamp illuminates very brightly these newspapers that I am stupid enough to read, these books of no interest.

At an enormous distance above my subterranean salon, houses put down roots, mists gather. The mud is red or black. Monstrous city, night without end!

Not quite as high, are the sewers. To the sides, nothing but the bulk of the globe. Possibly gulfs of azure, pits of fire. It may be that on these levels moons meet comets, seas fables.

In the hours of bitterness I imagine myself to be made of balls of sapphire, of metal. I am master of silence. Why should it appear as though an air-vent at the corner of the vault is whitening with the light of day?

Note: These translations of Les Illuminations will eventually be published by “Poetry in Translation”. S.H.   

One evening, let us say, when the naïve tourist, isolated from our economic  horrors, finds himself, a master’s hand brings to life the harpsichord of  the meadows; people are playing cards at the bottom of the lake, a mirror showing queens and sweethearts; we have holy women, veils and threads of harmony, and legendary chromatic tones, in the light of the setting sun.

He shudders as hunts and hordes pass by. Theatre drips onto the grass stage. Oh, the confusion of the poor and weak on these stupid levels!

A slave to its vision, Germany rises up towards moons; the Tartar deserts light up; old revolts swarm at the centre of the Celestial Empire; by the rock stairs and armchairs a small world, pale and flat, Africa and Occidents, is about to be constructed. Then a ballet of known seas and nights, a valueless chemistry, and impossible melodies.

The same bourgeois magic at all the ports where the packet boat deposits us. The most rudimentary physician feels that it is no longer possible to put up with this idiosyncratic atmosphere, a mist of physical remorse, the very sight of which is an affliction.

No! It is the time of the sweating-room, of the seas rolled back, of the underground blazes, of the planet torn from its orbit, and of the resulting exterminations, certitudes foretold with so little spite in the Bible and by the Norns and which it will be up to the serious person to watch out for. – However, it will  not look anything like a legend!

Note : These translations by Robert Yates will eventually be published by Poetry in Translation editor Sebastian Hayes.  S.H.

The swaying movement on the bank by the river falls,
The stern-post gulf,
The swiftness of the gangway,
The enormous capriciousness of the current
Lead on with their unprecedented lights
And chemical innovation
The travellers surrounded by the valley’s torrents
And the strom.

 They are the conquerors of the world
Each seeking their personal chemical fortune;
Sport and comfort travel with them;
They take along education
Races, classes and beasts, on this vessel
Is both rest and tumult
The light is diluvian,
The evenings of study terrible.

Because, amongst the chattering in the middle of the apparatus, the blood, the flowers, the fire, the jewels,
From the troubled account-taking aboard this runaway ship,
– Can be seen, rolling like a flood barrier beyond the motive hydraulic road,
Monstrous, shooting out light, – their stock of studies;
They who are chased into harmonious ecstasy,
And the heroism of discovery.

 Accompanied by the most surprising atmospheric effects
A young couple stand aside under the arch,
– Is this ancient savagery that we pardon? –
And sing and take position.

Mouvement par Arthur Rimbaud

Le mo0uvement de lacet sur la berge des chutes du fleuve,
Le gouffre à l’étambot,
La célérité du courant
L’énorme passade du courant
Mènent par les lumières inouïes
Et la nouveauté chimique
Les voyageurs entourés des trombes du val
Et du strom.

Aux accidents atmosphériques les plus surprenants,
Un couple de jeunesse, s’isole sur l’arche,
— Est-ce ancienne sauvagerie qu’on pardonne? —
Et chante et poste.

Note : These translations by Robert Yates will eventually be published by Poetry in Translation editor Sebastian Hayes.  S.H.