The lamp shines brightly on these newspapers I am fool enough to read again,Īn enormous distance above my subterranean parlor,Īt the sides, nothing but the thickness of the globe. Let them rent me this whitewashed tomb, at last, It can only be the end of the world ahead. How far away are the birds and the springs! The little farm boy following the lane, its forehead touching the sky. I might well be the child abandoned on the jetty on its way to the high seas, I can see for a long time the melancholy wash of the setting sun. I am the pedestrian of the highroad by way of the dwarf woods
Rimbaud illuminations poems windows#
Like the peaceful beasts that graze down to the sea of Palestine.īranches and rain hurl themselves at the windows of my library. There is a troupe of little actors in costume, glimpsed on the road through the border of the woods.Īnd then, when you are hungry and thirsty, there is someone who drives you away. There is a little carriage abandoned in the copse or that goes running down the road beribboned. There is a cathedral that goes down and a lake that goes up. There is a hollow with a nest of white beasts. The clouds gathered over the high sea, formed of an eternity of hot tears. The slopes cradled him.īeasts of a fabulous elegance moved about. O the Calvaries and the windmills of the desert, the islands and the haystacks! The meadows go up to the hamlets without anvils or cocks. The enclosures are so high that nothing can be seen but the rustling tree tops.īesides, there is nothing to be seen within. The priest must have taken away the key of the church.Īround the park the keepers’ cottages are uninhabited. The chateau is for sale the shutters are coming off. – You follow the red road to reach the empty inn. Swarms of golden leaves surround the general’s house. The old men who have been buried upright in the rampart overgrown with gillyflowers. – The little brother (he is in India!) there, before the western sky in the meadow of pinks. The cousin’s carriage creaks on the sand. – The young mamma, deceased, comes down the stoop. It is she, the little girl, dead behind the rosebushes. What boredom, the hour of the “dear body” and “dear heart.” Little foreign misses and young ladies gently unhappy. Princesses tyrannical of costume and carriage,
Rimbaud illuminations poems full#
– young mothers and big sisters with eyes full of pilgrimages, sultanas, Jewels upright on the rich ground of groves and little thawed gardens, Ladies who stroll on terraces adjacent to the sea īaby girls and giantesses, superb blacks in the verdigris moss, Nakedness shaded, traversed, dressed by rainbow, flora, sea. The girl with orange lips, knees crossed in the clear flood that gushes from the fields,
– dream flowers tinkle, flash, and flare, – Runs over beaches called by the shipless waves, “This is a major event”, the Poetry Project declares, with assertiveness and pride, “and we are going to celebrate it”.That idol, black eyes and yellow mop, without parents or court, Tonight at the St Marks Poetry Project in New York, there’ll be a big group reading from the book featuring a host of readers (and musicians!), among them Richard Hell, David Shapiro, Sharon Mesmer, Franklin Bruno, Edwin Torres. This is an essential volume, a true classic.”Īllen’s Rimbaud-in-translation was, of course, the still-respected Louise Varese (1957, New Directions), tho’ he’d studied it earlier, and was also able to read it in the original French. Finally we have the key to open the door onto these magical Illuminations, and all their “elegance, knowledge, violence!”.
“This is the book that made poetry modern”, writes poet J.D.McClatchy, “and John Ashbery’s sizzling new translation lets Rimbaud’s eerie grandeur burst into English. Check out too the video of him reading (at the New School, a few months back) one of the translations in the book, “Promontory”. Read Fertile Destabilization – On Translating Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Ashbery’s note in the current Poetry magazine, and also The Illuminated Text, his phone-interview with Claude Peck for the on-line Rain Taxi. May 16 is the official publication date, but we couldn’t hold off posting a note about this much-anticipated book from Norton – John Ashbery’s translations of Arthur Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations.
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