A Season in Hell and The Illuminations

by Arthur Rimbaud, Enid Rhodes, Henri Peyre (Foreword by)

Overview

Written by Rimbaud at the age of 18 in the wake of his tempestuous affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, A Season in Hell has been a touchstone for anguished poets, artists, and lovers for more than a century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195017601
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/09/1974
Series:	Galaxy Books
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 5.33(h) x 0.41(d)
Lexile:	1080L (what's this?)

About the Author

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was a visionary French poet from Charleville who dreamed of reinventing love and changing life with his poetry. At the age of sixteen, he traveled to Paris at the invitation of poet Paul Verlaine, ten years his senior, and exploded onto the literary scene with "The Drunken Boat." In the ensuing years, Rimbaud further confirmed his place in literature with the spiritual autobiography "A Season in Hell" (the only work Rimbaud had printed himself) and forty-four scintillating prose texts that were later published as "The Illuminations." As notorious for his life as he was for his poetry, Rimbaud had a productive but tumultuous relationship with Verlaine, who shot him in the wrist in Brussels. After abandoning literature at the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud enlisted in the Dutch colonial army in order to travel Java, deserting four months later and returning to France. In 1878, he traveled to Cyprus and worked as a foreman at a stone quarry. Two years later, he was living and working in Aden, Yemen, and then in Harar, Ethiopia, for an export agency. In 1885, he negotiated an arms deal with Menelik, the King of Shoa. A great walker all his life, Rimbaud developed a tumor in his right knee and soon returned to France in excruciating pain. His condition worsened, requiring doctors to amputate his right leg. Rimbaud died at the Hôpital de Conception in Marseille in 1891 at the age of thirty-seven; his body was returned to Charleville and buried in the Charleville-Mézières cemetery. Rimbaud's life and work have inspired countless writers, artists, and musicians, including the French Symbolists, the Beat generation, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Jim Morrison.

Table of Contents

	Rimbaud's Life and Work	3
	A Note on Translation	34
	Une Saison en enfer	40
	A Season in Hell	41
	Les Illuminations	106
	The Illuminations	107
	Index of French Titles	180
	Index of English Titles	181

Editorial Reviews

Each new generation looks forward to fresh translations of classic works, and the publisher has obliged with these bilingual versions of 19th-century France's most notorious poets. The poems found in Flowers of Evil reflect the hardship and suffering in Baudelaire's life. Their psychological atmosphere evolves around a double character, that of an artist interpreting the universe and that of a human being searching for the self through the torment of a spiritual and emotional chaos. Baudelaire was harshly prosecuted for obscenity and blasphemy, and six of the poems presented here were banned until 1949. Intended as a complement and a companion to Flower of Evil , the prose poems of Paris Spleen appear even more pessimistic, sentimental, and chaotic, symbolizing the disharmony of the modern human being. This very successful new translation is highly recommended. Rimbaud's Season in Hell is a combination of an autobiography and an enigmatic dream sequence. A first-person narrator with various voices and personalities depicts his struggle to overcome suffering. Rimbaud, one of the most imaginative French poets, reveals the tensions between the poet's dreams and reality, hope and despair. In Illusions , the adolescent poet merges the sky, the sea, and the land into a new and enigmatic universe of explosive beauty and fantastic landscapes. The tone of the narrator in both poems is frequently sarcastic and ironic but highly poetic. The translation is generally successful, though not as outstanding as that of Baudelaire's works. Still, it is recommended as an insightful new look at Rimbaud's poetry.-- Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y.

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