Illuminations

'Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th-century French poet, was a ferocious malcontent, who free-wheeled towards self-destruction with the help of hashish and quantities of alcohol. Rimbaud's most thoroughly modern masterpiece, Illuminations, is now translated by John Ashbury, who brilliantly captures the volume's dizzy-making, metropolitan imagery of subways, viaducts, raised canals and bridges.'
Ian Thompson, The Spectator, Books of the Year

'It is always a pleasure to have the extraordinary poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, teenage prodigy and (in later life) gun-runner, rendered anew into English: this version of the late poem cycle Illuminations translated by the American poet John Ashbery, is vertiginous, exhilarating and mildly hallucinogenic.'
Michael Glover, The Tablet

'One of the strongest, most exuberant and closely engaged translations of Rimbaud's work.'
The Guardian, 2011

'More than a century after Arthur Rimbaud composed his Illuminations they are reborn in John Ashbery's magnificent translation. It is fitting that the major American poet since Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens should give us this noble version of the precursor of all three.'
Harold Bloom

'Absolute modernity is perhaps granted by this translation, published nearly a century after the original work, infusing the poems with a newfound modernity...Rimbaud's hallucinatory visions translated as poetry and prose is beautifully rendered by Ashbery who manages to transcend the limits of language.'
Emma Kious, DURA

Since their first publication in instalments in the magazine La Vogue in 1886, these magical, dynamic poems (written mostly in prose) have fascinated, challenged, compelled and transformed readers. Illuminations is one of the most exciting and haunting pieces of literature ever written; its surface, constantly shifting and sliding, creates an extraordinary flow of connections and disjunctions fuelled by what Rimbaud memorably described as 'a long, prodigious and reasoned disordering of all the senses'.
John Ashbery, whose own exhilarating and controversial writing has frequently looked towards the innovations and energies of French poetry, delivers one of the strongest, most exuberant and closely engaged translations of Rimbaud's work. The book is presented in parallel text, and it's fascinating to see the attentions to detail and subtle transformations he sets up with the original.
One of the most successful pieces is 'Childhood'. Its second section describes a mysterious château and its inhabitants, presented with dark, gothic detail: 'That's her, the dead little girl, behind the rosebushes. - The dead young mother descends the front steps...The old people buried standing up in the rampart overgrown with wallflowers'. This mixture of the magical and macabre extends to an abandoned rural community: 'The swarm of golden leaves buzzes around the general's house. They're in the South. - You follow the red highway to arrive at the empty inn.' There's a nice touch here; Ashbery carries the bee metaphor, used to describe the leaves, just a little farther than the original; the word 'l'essaim' meaning 'the swarm' is precisely rendered, but he then translates 'entoure' not as 'surrounds' or 'gathers around' but as 'buzzes around'.
"a brilliant rendering of Rimbaud's greatest work"
Section 4 delivers a remarkable form of listing. We are presented with several versions of a constantly transforming self: 'I am the saint, at prayer on the terrace.../ /I am the learned scholar in the dark armchair.../ /I am the walker on the great highway...I gaze for a long time at the melancholy gold laundry of the setting sun.' In that last extended phrase we have one of the highlights of the book. The French word 'lessive', which Ashbery delivers wonderfully as 'laundry', is frequently expressed in English versions by the relatively low-key 'wash'. Here he addresses the startling possibilities of Rimbaud's metaphor and gives it flight.
The fifth and final section of 'Childhood' again relishes strange gothic perspectives. The poem's speaker is living in a rented tomb 'very far below the earth'. He is filled with boredom and simmering rage, combined with a dizzying sense of claustrophobia and inferno ('At a vast distance above my underground salon, houses take root, mistsassemble'). The section's complex final sentence has been read in various contradictory ways. The recent Penguin Classics version translated by Jeremy Harding, for example, has 'What is the feeble gleam at the corner of the ceiling-vault, like light through a vent?' But Ashbery keeps to the gothic theme and gives us something more akin to Edgar Allen Poe than to a glimpse of salvation - 'Why would a spectral cellar window turn livid in one corner of the vault?'
In contrast to the more elaborate structures of 'Childhood', there are also short declamatory poems such as 'Departure' or 'To a Reason'. These are assertive gestures, exhilarating in their confidence - 'Enough had. Sounds of cities, in the evening, and in sunlight, and always.' In 'To a Reason' there's a startling version of utopia, the poem hovering between the vatic and something more akin to megalomania - 'A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony'.
The dynamic suppleness, the heaping up and amassing of detail, is sustained through poem after poem. There are the exquisite transformations of the small prose piece 'Winter Festival' that swerves and switches as if everything were always happening at one and the same time: 'Trails of skyrockets lengthen, in orchards and garden paths along the Meander - the greens and reds of the setting sun. Nymphs out of Horace with Directoire coiffures - Siberian folk dances, Chinese girls painted by Boucher.'
In 'Barbarian' this unpredictability becomes deliberately violent, each word a contradictory punch: 'The pennant of bloody meat against the silk of arctic seas and flowers; (they don't exist) / Sweetness!/ Live coals raining down from gusts of frost, - Sweetness!'
The book ends, however, with the marvellous 'Genie', described by Ashbery as 'one of the greatest poems ever written'. It evokes a complex and striking hero, a new form of deity, haunting and idiosyncratic: 'He is affection and the present since he opened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer, he who purified drink and food, he who is the charm of fleeting places and the superhuman deliciousness of staying still.' That last phrase is wonderfully telling. Compare Oliver Bernard's 'the superhuman delights of halts' or Harding's 'the superhuman delights of things in repose'. It's Ashbery's immaculate sense of tone and register, his delight in carefully taking up and pushing the more lyrical and exuberant moments to their limit, that, more than anything, makes this such a brilliant rendering of Rimbaud's greatest work.
Verlaine, Rimbaud - and John Ashbery: the poetry of these men, once lovers, ranges from the Parnassian to the revolutionary
These two books define the opposite ends of the poetic spectrum, though they were written by two men who were briefly lovers and composed at times not so very far apart. Paul Verlaine’s Poèmes saturniens (1866) was his first book and owes much to the melodiousness of the Parnassian poets of the day such as Leconte de Lisle, and to the suave sensuality of Baudelaire. Everything in it makes perfect sense. Rimbaud’s Illuminations was probably written ten years later, though it was not published until 1886 – in fortnightly instalments in a review called La Vogue (and its author might not even have been aware of its publication). It is a revolutionary work, and initiates the penchant for “difficult” poetry that was to become characteristic of the twentieth century. Most of its poems are in prose; others are in free verse (said to be the first examples of free verse in French). Some of them are icy and futuristic. Almost nothing in the book seems autobiographical – quite in contrast to Une Saison en enfer, the volume of Rimbaud’s that preceded it.
This is not to say that Verlaine, in his more traditional way, did not want to be modern – even in the poems now translated by Karl Kirchwey as Poems Under Saturn. In fact Verlaine was always praising the 'modernity' and 'melancholia' of Baudelaire. In an article Verlaine wrote at the same time as the publication of Poèmes Saturniens he attacked the Romantic idea of inspiration and of 'life' and 'human nature' and came out in favour of a poetry completely mastered, controlled and formal. Nor did he in his best work present 'themes' that preceded and were external to the actual poems; as we read we feel that we are watching those poems materialize under his pen, just as Chopin’s Nocturnes come to life under his improvising fingers. Nevertheless, since this first book brought together some very early poems written in his collège days as well as his most up-to-date experiments, it is something of a grab-bag, and anything but consistent or programmatic.
The first poem in the collection, 'The Ancient Sages', places the whole book under the sign of Saturn, the melancholy god who murdered his father and was castrated by his son. (Baudelaire had already called his Les Fleurs du mal “a saturnine book”.) We learn that anyone born under the sign of Saturn shares 'a large part of misfortune and bile'. In the 'Prologue' we are given a rapid tour of other mythologies and then told that action and dream used to be fused but now are broken asunder – which has brought about the disaster of modern life. Unfortunately, the end of this poem shows how resistant Verlaine’s French is to translation into Kirchwey’s English (and perhaps English tout court). Verlaine’s lovely 'La voix qui rit ou pleure alors qu’on pleure ou rit' becomes the flat-footed 'The voice that cried or laughed, when one laughed or cried'; the poem closes with the envoi, 'Maintenant, va, Livre, où le hasard te mène', which becomes the thick-thighed 'Now go, my Book, where chance may indicate'. Where in French there is so little emphasis that the mind glides effortlessly along, in the English there is a harsh definiteness, which lends a peasant dignity (or a pedantic heaviness) to things.
"on page after page Ashbery finds the perfect twist to turn the English Rimbaud into something natural and eloquent" This very dignity communicates sincerity in, say, religious utterances – in Handel’s Hallelujah chorus, for example, the thrilling 'For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth' becomes in French the oily, sycophantic language of the court: 'Pour le règne de Dieu tout-puissant seigneur'. But English can turn Verlaine’s lightly brushed-in atmospherics into an earthbound plod. The subtle, shifting music of 'L’or des cheveux, l’azur des yeux, la fleur des chairs' becomes the brassy 'Blonde hair, blue eyes, the flesh in flower'. And the poker-faced subtle satire of 'Il est juste-milieu, botaniste et pansu' becomes the pedestrian 'A young man of means, a botanist, potbellied'.

Kirchwey has attempted partially to solve the problem by turning Verlaine’s rhymes (French is a language that rhymes almost spontaneously, and certainly unemphatically) into slant rhymes in English, which are a lot less thumping than full ones. But at times, in reaching for these partial rhymes, Kirchwey mars the beauty of a line. The phrase 'sa voix d’or vivant' should have stayed 'her voice of living gold' and not metamorphosed into 'Her gold voice, livened . . .'; nor should 'parmi l’odeur fade de réséda' have become 'amid the mignonette’s insipidities'. And the falling cadence of the line, 'L’inflexion des voix chères qui se sont tues' should not have turned into the sprightly 'The modulation of voices gone silent, but dear'. In general the more successful translations stick close to the original, as in 'Pale Venus rises, and it is night' for 'Blanche, Vénus émerge, et c’est la Nuit'.
In a few poems in this volume we encounter for the first time the lovely music that became Verlaine’s trademark. 'Chanson d'automne', for example, looks forward to the suave pleasures of 'Colloque sentimentale' and other poems that Debussy set to music. But there are also some strangely satisfying historical poems such as 'The Death of Philip II' with its mesmerizing vision of the Escorial in all its cruelty and piety.
Rimbaud’s Illuminations is a world apart. It is full of invocations to eerie, invented entities, strange beings inhabiting a utopia or possibly a dystopia. It feels as if it is set in the future. In any event it is unmistakably a book about the 'new'. Rimbaud speaks of “the new harmony”, “the new men” and “the new love”. The poet is often describing in precise detail a cityscape – but which city? London? Amsterdam? There are English words smuggled into the text that remind us that Rimbaud lived for a short time (some of it with Verlaine) in London, where he attempted to become a French tutor. But these are not real cities – they are ghostly, grotesque composites: 'What cities they are! This is a people for whom these oneiric Alleghenies and Lebanons of dreams arose! Chalets of crystal and wood that move along invisible rails and pulleys. Ancient craters ringed by colossi and copper palm trees roar melodiously amid the flowers'. At times the poems feel as if they are actual reports of a place, no matter how surreal, that has been seen in a hash dream, and at others they feel as if they are purely verbal constructs meant for the page – just as certain musical scores are meant to be read and only read and can be played only in an act of interpretation.
No one is better suited to translating this poetry than John Ashbery. He stays very close to the French but half a century of reading and speaking French has given him the sophistication and experience to interpret Rimbaud’s words. Ashbery knows from its context that when Rimbaud writes 'devoirs' he means 'homework', not 'duties'. Just as he understands that 'je suis à vos genoux' should be coaxed into the more explicit 'I’ll kneel down and worship you'. Sometimes he dedramatizes the French too much for my taste; I’m not sure 'le saccage des promenades' is just 'walks spoiled'. But on