'Illuminations' Arthur Rimbaud.
緬懷讓·尼古拉·阿蒂爾·蘭波（1854年10月20日-1891年11月10日），對現代文學和藝術影響深遠的法國詩人，也是超現實主義的先驅。
蘭波出生於沙勒維爾-梅濟耶爾，自幼便開始寫作，成績優異。然而，在普法戰爭期間，他青少年時期放棄了正規教育，離家出走。在青春期，他開始了大部分的文學創作，但在21歲完成其代表作之一《啟蒙》後，便徹底停止了寫作。
蘭波以放蕩不羈而聞名，他擁有一顆躁動不安的心，與詩人保羅·魏爾倫有過一段充滿暴力的戀情，這段戀情持續了近兩年。文學生涯結束後，他以商人的身份遊歷了三大洲，並在37歲生日後不久因癌症去世。
[謝謝，我的朋友 Arthyr Nouveau
我們想念你🤍 (( ]
《啟迪》
作者：亞瑟‧蘭波；譯者：約翰‧阿什伯里
評論：莉迪亞戴維斯
約翰·阿什伯里對法國生活、語言和文化有著深厚的了解，並將這份對亞瑟·蘭波詩歌的翻譯帶給了這部作品。
蘭波的睿智音樂
作者：莉迪亞戴維斯
出版日期：2011年6月9日
蘭波這個名字與一些熟悉的事物聯繫在一起：一張極具浪漫色彩的照片，拍攝於他初到巴黎幾個月後，當時他已經17歲，是一位波西米亞風格的藝術家，淡藍色的眼睛，茫然的目光，蓬亂的頭髮，隨意凌亂的衣服；那句令人震驚、被廣泛解讀的宣言「我是另一個人」；歲左右停止寫作，並且再也沒有重拾寫作，此後在異國他鄉從事各種有時神秘的商業和神秘事業，包括在非洲的一段時間的槍支走私（奇怪的是，他還試圖加入美國海軍）。
Remembering Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891), French poet who heavily influenced modern literature and arts, and prefigured surrealism.
Born in Charleville-Mézières, he started writing at a very young age and was a prodigious student, but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away from home amidst the Franco-Prussian War. During his adolescence he began the bulk of his literary output, but completely stopped writing at the age of 21, after assembling one of his major works, Illuminations.
With a reputation for being a libertine, he was a restless soul, and engaged in an often violent romantic relationship with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, which lasted nearly two years. After the end of his literary career, he traveled extensively on three continents as a merchant before his death from cancer just after his thirty-seventh birthday.
[Ty my friend Arthyr Nouveau
We miss u
(( ]
(( ]'Illuminations'
By ARTHUR RIMBAUD; translated by JOHN ASHBERY
Reviewed by LYDIA DAVIS
John Ashbery brings a long and deep familiarity with French life, language and culture to this translation of Arthur Rimbaud's poetry.
Rimbaud’s Wise Music
By LYDIA DAVIS
Published: June 9, 2011
Some associations with the name Rimbaud are very familiar: the highly romantic photograph taken a few months after he first settled in Paris, already at 17 the dedicatedly bohemian artist, with his pale blue eyes, distant gaze, thatch of hair, carelessly rumpled clothes; the startling, much interpreted declaration Je est un autre (“I is someone else”); the fact that he produced a masterly, innovative and influential body of poetry while still in his teens; that he stopped writing around age 21 and never went back to it, engaging thereafter in various sometimes mysterious commercial and mystical enterprises in exotic locations, including a period of gun-running in Africa (and, oddly, an attempt to enlist in the United States Navy).
Illustration by Hugo Guinness
ILLUMINATIONS
By Arthur Rimbaud
Translated by John Ashbery
175 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
Related
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Up Front: Lydia Davis (June 12, 2011)
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The Pleasures and Perils of Creative Translation (June 12, 2011)
Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis
一張阿蒂爾·蘭波的照片。
1891年，他因癌症在馬賽一家醫院去世，當時他還很年輕——實際上，他把在其他人看來漫長的藝術革命和奇異冒險的一生，濃縮到了短短的37年。深入了解這位傳奇人物，絕不令人失望：他是一位非凡的、如流星般閃耀的人物，他的爆發和隨後的成就至今仍令人驚嘆，難以言喻。
1854年，阿蒂爾·蘭波出生於法國東北部靠近比利時邊境的沙爾維爾。他的母親脾氣暴躁，篤信宗教，行為壓抑；父親則從軍，常年缺席，蘭波六歲時便永遠失蹤了。蘭波在學校成績優異，如飢似渴地閱讀，記憶力極強，常獲得年級年終獎。他早期的詩歌不僅用法語寫成，有時也用拉丁語和希臘語，其中包括一首獻給拿破崙三世幼子的60行頌歌（並寄給了他），以及一篇對數學作業的奇思妙想。
他16歲時就在一封信中宣布，他打算透過“理性地擾亂所有感官”，用一種全新的語言創作一種全新的詩歌。不到17歲，在老詩人保羅‧魏爾倫的資助下，他第一次成功逃往巴黎，做好了改變世界，或至少改變文學的準備。他立刻成為了一個多姿多彩的人物：一個渾身污穢、蝨子橫行、時而迷人、手腳粗大的年輕反叛者，他的使命是不僅透過他的詩句，而且透過他粗魯、自我毀滅和無政府主義的行為，來震驚傳統思想，挑戰道德準則；他是一位技藝精湛、多才多藝的詩人，不僅偶爾創作感傷的主題（孤兒在新年收到禮物），也創作出優美的猥褻詩句；他是一個有著孩子般面孔的年輕創新者，他的文學創作以閃電般的速度從一首詩發展到另一首詩。在巴黎，他與魏爾倫成為親密的朋友，並很快發展成為戀人——公開的同性戀行為是他自我探索和反抗社會計劃的重要組成部分。蘭波早已遠遠地欣賞過魏爾倫的詩歌，因為他的詩歌突破了傳統的形式限制，令人震驚的是，他竟然在亞歷山大體詩中巧妙地銜接了停頓。 （雖然這句詩出現在魏爾倫的第三本書中，但蘭波很可能也熟悉第一本《土星下的詩》，即 1866 年出版的《土星下的詩》，最近卡爾·基希韋將其譯成押韻優美的新譯本，這是該詩集首次以英文版出版。）他們風豐碩的時間都持續到比利時風碩和神碩，英國的時間都持續到比利時時期都令人興奮。
因此，120 年來，蘭波一直是人們奉為圭臬、詆毀他、各種對立的詮釋、混淆視聽以及依賴於往往有誤的回憶錄的完美對象——所有這些當然催生了詩人本人留下的幾百頁書信、少年詩集、約 80 首詩歌，其中包括他 16 歲時創作的 100行《醉舟》和九段懺悔自責的散文系列《地獄一季》，此外還有接近他最後一部作品的、以散文為主的系列詩《啟迪》。
如果這部最後作品中所有詩歌的創作日期無法準確核實，那麼它們的正確順序或出版前的情況也無法確定。魏爾倫不太可靠，他告訴我們，1875年他出獄後——他在布魯塞爾一家酒店房間裡射中了蘭波的手臂——這位年輕的詩人遞給他一疊散頁，請他找一家出版商。幾經輾轉，這些詩篇最終…
Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis
A photograph of Arthur Rimbaud.
Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 in Charleville, in the northeast of France close to the Belgian border, to a sour-tempered, repressively pious mother and a mostly absent soldier father who disappeared for good when Rimbaud was 6. He excelled in school, reading voraciously and retentively and regularly carrying off most of his grade’s year-end academic prizes. Early poems were written not just in French but sometimes in Latin and Greek and included a 60-line ode, dedicated (and sent) to Napoleon III’s young son, and a fanciful rendering of a math assignment.
He had announced in a letter written when he was only 16 that he intended to create an entirely new kind of poetry, written in an entirely new language, through a “rational derangement of all the senses,” and when, not yet 17, he made his first successful escape to Paris, financed by the older poet Paul Verlaine, he came prepared to change the world, or at least literature. He was immediately a colorful figure: the filthy, lice-infested, intermittently bewitching young rebel with large hands and feet, whose mission required scandalizing the conventional-minded and defying moral codes not only through his verse but through his rude, self-destructive and anarchical behavior; the brilliantly skillful and versatile poet not only of the occasional sentimental subject (orphans receiving gifts on New Year’s Day) but also of lovely scatological verse; the child-faced young innovator whose literary development evolved from poem to poem at lightning speed.
In Paris, he became close friends and soon lovers — openly gay behavior being very much a part of his project of self-exploration and defiance of society — with Verlaine, whose own poetry Rimbaud had already admired from a distance, with its transgression of traditional formal constraints including, shockingly, bridging the caesura in the alexandrine line. (Although this line occurred in Verlaine’s third book, Rimbaud may well also have been familiar with the first, “Poèmes saturniens,” or “Poems Under Saturn,” which was published in 1866 and has recently appeared in a deftly rhymed and metered new translation by Karl Kirchwey that offers it for the first time in English as an integral volume.) Their stormy relationship, which extended into Belgium and England and lasted a surprising length of time, was richly productive literarily on both sides.
Rimbaud has therefore been the perfect subject, for 120 years now, of sanctification, vilification, multiple rival exegeses, obfuscation, memoirs that rely on often faulty recollection — all of which has generated, of course, many times the few hundred pages left by the poet himself in the form of letters, juvenilia, some 80 poems, including the 100-line “Drunken Boat,” written when he was still 16, and the nine-section confessional and self-condemnatory prose sequence “A Season in Hell,” besides what was close to his last work, the sequence of mostly prose poems called “Illuminations.”
If the dating of all the poems in this last work cannot be verified precisely, neither can their proper order or the circumstances leading up to their publication. The rather unreliable Verlaine tells us that after he was released from prison in 1875 — he had shot Rimbaud in the arm in a Brussels hotel room — the younger poet handed him a pile of loose pages and asked him to find a publisher. After passing through several hands, the poems appeared in the magazine La Vogue 10 years later, in 1886, having been prepared for publication by Félix Fénéon (journalist, publisher and author of the bizarre collection of police-blotter-generated newspaper fillers published as “Novels in Three Lines” by New York Review Books in 2007).
Asked many years later, Fénéon could not remember whether the order was his own or whether he had preserved the order in which he received them — although, since he did not receive them directly from Rimbaud, that order was not necessarily the author’s. The work was greeted at the time with some laudatory reviews, though not many copies were bought.
Formally, “Illuminations” — the title may refer to engraved illustrations, to epiphanies or flashes of insight, or to the productions of the poet-seer who has transformed himself into pure light — consists of 43 poems ranging from a few lines to works of several sections covering multiple pages; some are in large blocks of type, some in paragraphs so brief they are virtually two-line stanzas. (At least once, a single comma at the end of the paragraph magically turns it into a strophe.) Only three poems have broken lines.
Despite the uncertainty of its dates of composition, “Illuminations” is quite clearly written after Rimbaud’s most defiant and scurrilous phase had passed. It does not contain the explicit playful or lyrical obscenity of earlier times, but rather a subtler incandescent or ecstatic range of congruous and incongruous, urban and pastoral imagery, and historical and mythological reference often grounded in near-recognizable autobiographical narrative. A wealth of images — mineral, industrial, theatrical, royal, natural and nostalgic — often develop by leaps of immediate personal association rather than by sequential or narrative logic, employing the techniques of Surrealism decades before it existed as a movement. The poems shift in tone and register from the matter of fact to the highly rhetorical (“O world!”), the statements from the simple (“the hand of the countryside on my shoulder”) to the more abstruse (“He is affection and the present since he opened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer”), while always departing from and returning to a concrete, sensory world. The more narrative poems — faux-reminiscences, exhortations, modern fairy tales — are punctuated by verse consisting almost solely of exclamatory lists of sentence fragments, what sound like celebrations of repeated amazement, contributing to create what John Ashbery, in his brief but enlightening preface to his new translation, calls “the crystalline jumble of Rimbaud’s ‘Illuminations,’ like a disordered collection of magic lantern slides, each an ‘intense and rapid dream,’ in his words.”
Ashbery has said he first read Rimbaud when he was 16, and he clearly took to heart the young poet’s declaration that “you must be absolutely modern” — absolute modernity being, as Ashbery says in his preface, “the acknowledging of the simultaneity of all of life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second.” When Rimbaud’s mother asked of “A Season in Hell,” “What does it mean?” — a question still asked of Rimbaud’s poetry, and of Ashbery’s, too — Rimbaud would say only, “It means what it says, literally and in every sense.”
If Rimbaud anticipated the Surrealists by decades, Ashbery is said to have gone beyond them and defied even their rules and logic. Yet though nearly 150 years have intervened since Rimbaud’s first declaration of independence, many readers in our own age, too, still prefer a coherence of imagery, a sameness of tone, a readable sequential message, even, ultimately, what amounts to a prose narrative broken into lines. Enough others, however, find the “crystalline jumble” intellectually and emotionally revitalizing and say, Yes, please do interrupt the reverie you have created for us to allow an intrusion of Popeye!
Besides his early absorption of Rimbaud’s work, Ashbery brings to this translation a long and deep familiarity with French life, language and culture, particularly artistic and literary culture, and the experience of having translated many other French works over the years — by Pierre Reverdy, Raymond Roussel, Max Jacob, Pierre Martory (as well as at least one detective novel, as the amusingly renamed Jonas Berry). These translations are part of a larger body of Ashbery’s work that has served to offer us — his largely monolingual Anglophone readership — access to poets of another culture, either foreign or earlier in time. (Notable, for instance, is his keenly investigatory, instructive and engrossing “Other Traditions,” the six Norton Lectures that open our eyes to the work of such luminaries as John Clare and Laura Riding.) In tandem, then, with his own 20-plus books of poetry (not to mention his teaching and his critical writings on the visual arts), Ashbery has extended his generous explicating intelligence to the work of many others, most recently in “Illuminations.”
In a meticulously faithful yet nimbly inventive translation, Ashbery’s approach has been to stay close to the original, following the line of the sentence, retaining the order of ideas and images, reproducing even eccentric or inconsistent punctuation. He shifts away from the closest translation only where necessary, and there is plenty of room within this close adherence for vibrant and less obvious English word choices. One of the pleasures of the translation, for instance, is the concise, mildly archaic Anglo-Saxon vocabulary he occasionally deploys — “hued” for teinte and “clad” for revêtus, “chattels” for possessions — or a more particular or flavorful English for a more general or blander French: “lush” for riches, “hum of summer” for rumeur de l’été, “trembling” for mouvantes.
Even a simple problem reveals his skill. In one section of the poem “Childhood,” there occurs the following portrayal of would-be tranquillity: “I rest my elbows on the table, the lamp illuminates these newspapers that I’m a fool for rereading, these books of no interest.” The two words sans intérêt (“without interest”) allow for surprisingly many solutions, as one can see from a quick sampling of previous translations. Yet these other choices are either less rhythmical than the French — “uninteresting,” “empty of interest” — or they do not retain the subtlety of the French: “mediocre,” “boring,” “idiotic.” Ashbery’s “books of no interest” is quietly matter-of-fact and dismissive, like the French, rhythmically satisfying and placed, like the original, at the end of the sentence.
It takes one sort of linguistic sensitivity to stay close to the original in a pleasing way; another to bring a certain inventiveness to one’s choices without being unfaithful. Ashbery’s ingenuity is evident at many moments in the book, and an especially lovely example occurs in the same poem: he has translated Qu’on me loue enfin ce tombeau, blanchi à la chaux as “Let someone finally rent me this tomb, whited with quicklime.” Here, his “whited with quicklime” (rather than “whitewashed,” the choice of all the other translations I found) at once exploits the possibilities of assonance and introduces the echo of the King James “whited sepulcher” without betraying the meaning of the original.
Some of the translations in this book have appeared previously in literary journals one by one over the past two years or so — evidently done slowly over time, as translations ought to be, especially of poems, and especially of these poems, given their extreme compression, their tonal and stylistic shifts, their liberating importance in the history of poetry. We are fortunate that John Ashbery has turned his attention to a text he knows so well, and brought to it such care and imaginative resourcefulness.
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