Jean Arthur Rimbaud Libri

The prose poems of the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth century. They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varese. Mrs. Varese first published her versions of Rimbaud's Illuminations in 1946. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations. This edition also contains two other series of prose poems, which include two poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varese discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud's writing. Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations--des vertiges, des silences, des nuits. These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up--now here, now there-- unexplored aspects of experience and thought.

A phenomenonally precocious schoolboy, Rimbaud was still a teenager when he became notorious as Europe's most shocking and exhilarating poet. This book sets the two sides of Rimbaud side by side with a translation of his exhilarating poetry and a selection of the letters from the harsh and colourful period of his life as a colonial trader.

Translated, edited and with an Introduction by Wyatt Mason “The definitive translation for our time.” –Edward Hirsch From Dante’s Inferno to Sartre’s No Exit, writers have been fascinated by visions of damnation. Within that rich literature of suffering, Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell–written when the poet was nineteen–provides an astonishing example of the grapple with self. As a companion to Rimbaud’s journey, readers could have no better guide than Wyatt Mason. One of our most talented young translators and critics, Mason’s new version of A Season in Hell renders the music and mystery of Rimbaud’s tale of Hell on Earth with exceptional finesse and power. This bilingual edition includes maps, a helpful chronology of Rimbaud’s life, and the unfinished suite of prose poems, Illuminations. With A Season in Hell, they cement Rimbaud’s reputation as one of the foremost, and most influential, writers in French literature.

Presents a new translation and a revised chronology along with a sketch of the poet's life.

Publisher's description: One of the most written-about literary figures in the past decade, Arthur Rimbaud left few traces when he abandoned poetry at age twenty-one and disappeared into the African desert. Although the dozen biographies devoted to Rimbaud's life depend on one main source for information--his own correspondence--a complete edition of these remarkable letters has never been published in English. Until now. A moving document of decline, Rimbaud's letters begin with the enthusiastic artistic pronouncements of a fifteen-year-old genius, and end with the bitter what-ifs of a man whose life has slipped disastrously away. But whether soapboxing on the essence of art, or struggling under the yoke of self-imposed exile in the desert of his later years, Rimbaud was incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence. As translator and editor Wyatt Mason makes clear in his engaging Introduction, the letters reveal a Rimbaud very different from our expectations. Rimbaud, presented by many biographers as a bohemian wild man, is unveiled as "diligent in his pursuit of his goals ... wildly, soberly ambitious, in poetry, in everything." I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud is the second and final volume in Mason's authoritative presentation of Rimbaud's writings. Called by Edward Hirsch "the definitive translation for our time" Mason's first volume, Rimbaud Complete (Modern Library, 2002), brought Rimbaud's poetry and prose into vivid focus. In I Promise to Be Good, Mason adds the missing epistolary pieces to our picture of Rimbaud. "These letters" he writes, "are proofs in all their variety--of impudence and precocity, of tenderness and rage--for the existence of Arthur Rimbaud." I Promise to Be Good allows English-language readers to see with new eyes one of the most extraordinary poets in history

Features A Season in Hell, one of the great works of modern literature, and many of the verse poems which Rimbaud wrote between March 1870 and August 1872.

This may be the most beautiful book in the world, lighted from within and somehow embodying all forms of literature. Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times