A Season in Hell (1873) & The Drunken Boat (1871) by Arthur Rimbaud (translated by Louise Varèse with an introduction by Patti Smith). COVID-19 Recreational Reading

A Season in Hell (1873) & The Drunken Boat (1871) by Arthur Rimbaud (translated by Louise Varèse with an introduction by Patti Smith). COVID-19 Recreational Reading

I’ve had a copy of the New Directions first edition of this volume since 1979. I got this second edition, the same translation by Louise Varèse, but with a short preface by Patti Smith. Smith, herself with a Rimbaud streak in her, notes that “To be spent, wrung out, is his dream. And how shall he be spent? Rimbaud knows too well the unfortunate answer.” And what is that answer? 

Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s’ouvraient tous les cœurs, où tous les vins coulaient. Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux.—Et je l’ai trouvée amère.—Et je l’ai injuriée.  -- Une Saison En Enfer

Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed. One evening I seated Beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter. And I cursed her. -- A Season in Hell.

Rimbaud’s literary reputation is based primarily on three works, these two and Illuminations (1874). His brief poetic career helped create the Symbolist (along with Paul Verlaine) in a Parisian lifestyle fueled by absinthe that defined la vie Bohème. Giving up poetry (and Europe) at 21, he traveled east and to Africa where he worked as a merchant in dubious good, dying, in Marseilles, at 37. 

Perhaps the power of his influence over artists is in his embrace of the not yet named “counter culture”: 

L’enfer ne peut attaquer les païens. / Hell has no power over pagans.

 -- Une Saison En Enfer

Connais-je encore la nature? me connais-je?—Plus de mots. J’ensevelis les morts dans mon ventre. Cris, tambour, danse, danse, danse, danse! Je ne vois même pas l’heure où, les blancs débarquant, je tomberai au néant. Faim, soif, cris, danse, danse, danse, danse!  -- Une Saison En Enfer

Do I know nature yet? Do I know myself?—No more words. I bury the dead in my belly. Shouts, drums, dance, dance, dance, dance! I cannot even see the time when, white men landing, I shall fall into nothingness. Hunger, thirst, shouts, dance, dance, dance, dance!  -- A Season in Hell

Whatever is was that drove him to embrace an (albeit exotic and adventurous) mercantile life can best be summed up with this quote: 

Farce continuelle? Mon innocence me ferait pleurer. La vie est la farce à mener par tous. / Farce without end? My innocence would make me weep. Life is the farce we all have to lead.

 -- Une Saison En Enfer

Pictured is the cover from the paperback copy (read first back in 1979 and whose cover is now loose from the text block). This read was from the more recent edition with an introduction by Patti Smith.

• Read: May 5 - 16, 2020 | Buy on Kindle
• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.