French poetry 101 – Arthur Rimbaud
Apr. 20th, 2007 08:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
foudebassanRimbaud's father was a military officer. He married his mother, but didn't live with her, and only came back once a year to procreate. After five years, and five children, he left them all for good, leaving his wife to raise the children alone.
Rimbaud's mother was from a peasant family, but she was determined to raise her children as officer's children should be raised. They live in a dump, and can't afford the coal to keep warm in winter, but Arthur and his siblings go to the best schools she can afford, go to church, and are taught not to mix up with working class children. Arthur excels, and earns several prices at the Concours Général, the yearly academic competition that gathers the best French pupils. He begins to write, and his Latin verses get to be printed at a local magazine. It is not enough; Rimbaud wants to be the best of poets, which means getting published by the Parnassian literary reviews. He writes to Théodore de Banville, the major Parnassian figure of the time, but his poems – written to the most exact of Parnassian standards – are ignored by the elder poet.
Arthur doesn’t accept this. He runs away from home, finding on the roads the inspiration for poems like Ma Bohème, where a rigorous style and form already leave some place for derision. The first time, he is caught by the police; his mother comes to get him and gives him a very memorable, and very public, beating right in front of the police station. The second time, it is in 1870; he makes it to Paris and witnesses the Commune first hand before coming back home due to an unfortunate shortage of funds. In-between two escapes from the dreary little provincial town and the not inconsiderable maternal authority, he writes, feverishly. His early works are often influenced by other poets, like Les Effarés, where the Hugolian imprint is almost tangible.
In 1871, he writes to Verlaine, and you know how that ended from yesterday’s episode. To impress him, he writes Le Bateau Ivre as he walks and hitch-hikes his way to Paris. It is not an unmitigated success – Verlaine and his friends recognise genius when they see it, but Rimbaud has no table manners, likes to cut people mid-sentence, never combs his hair and generally doesn’t behave like poet should. When Verlaine’s wife kicks the two lovers out, their decision is soon taken – they won’t stay in this prejudiced circle of not-so-talented poets, they will travel.
Rimbaud is then 17.
It is London first, then Brussels. If you read last night's episode, you know one of their drunken quarrels ended with Verlaine's arrest; Rimbaud has no choice but to go back to his mother's home, where he writes Une Saison en Enfer, a poetical autobiography, from which today’s poem is taken.
La vieillerie poétique avait une bonne part dans mon alchimie du verbe.
Je m'habituai à l'hallucination simple : je voyais très franchement une mosquée à la place d'une usine, une école de tambours faite par des anges, des calèches sur les routes du ciel, un salon au fond d'un lac ; les monstres, les mystères ; un titre de vaudeville dressait des épouvantes devant moi.
Puis j'expliquai mes sophismes magiques avec l'hallucination des mots !
Je finis par trouver sacré le désordre de mon esprit. J'étais oisif, en proie à une lourde fièvre : j'enviais la félicité des bêtes, — les chenilles, qui représentent l'innocence des limbes, les taupes, le sommeil de la virginité !
Mon caractère s'aigrissait. Je disais adieu au monde dans d'espèces de romances :
Qu'il vienne, qu'il vienne,
Le temps dont on s'éprenne.
J'ai tant fait patience
Qu'à jamais j'oublie.
Craintes et souffrances
Aux cieux sont parties.
Et la soif malsaine
Obscurcit mes veines.
Qu'il vienne, qu'il vienne,
Le temps dont on s'éprenne.
Telle la prairie
À l'oubli livrée,
Grandie, et fleurie
D'encens et d'ivraies,
Au bourdon farouche
Des sales mouches.
Qu'il vienne, qu'il vienne,
Le temps dont on s'éprenne.
J'aimai le désert, les vergers brûlés, les boutiques fanées, les boissons tiédies. Je me traînais dans les ruelles puantes et, les yeux fermés, je m'offrais au soleil, dieu du feu.
« Général, s'il reste un vieux canon sur tes remparts en ruines, bombarde-nous avec des blocs de terre sèche. Aux glaces des magasins splendides ! dans les salons ! Fais manger sa poussière à la ville. Oxyde les gargouilles. Emplis les boudoirs de poudre de rubis brûlante...»
Oh ! le moucheron enivré à la pissotière de l'auberge, amoureux de la bourrache, et que dissout un rayon !
(Poetical old-fashionedness had a good part in my alchemy of the verb.
I got myself used to the simple hallucination: I saw very frankly a mosk in a factory’s place, a school of drum majors made by angels, horse-carriages on the roads of the sky, a salon in the depths of a lake; monsters, mysteries; a vaudeville title raised horrors in front of me.
And then I explained my magical sophisms with the hallucination of words!
I ended by finding that mind’s disorder was sacred. I was idle, prey to a heavy fever: I envied the felicity of beasts – caterpillars, who represent the innocence of limbo, moles, the sleep of virginity!
My character became more bitter. I bade farewell to the world in sorts of romances:
Let it come, let it come
The time of one’s inclinations
I have so long held patient
That forever I forget
Worry and suffering
Went to heaven
And the unhealthy thirst
Darkens my veins.
Let it come, let it come
The time of one’s inclinations
Like the prairie
Abandoned to oblivion
Heightened, and flowered
With incense and rye grass
To the stubborn drone
Of dirty flies.
Let it come, let it come
The time of one’s inclinations
I loved the desert, the burned orchards, the faded shops, the lukewarmed drinks. I dragged myself in the stinking alleyways and, eyes closed, I offered myself to the sun, the god of fire.
"General, if there is a last canon left on your ruined remparts, bombard us with blocks of dried soil. In the windows of the flamboyant stores! in the salons! Have the city eat its dirt. Oxyd the gargoyle. Fill the boudoirs with scalding rubis powder..."
Oh! the drunken midge at the hostel's bog, in love with the borage, and dissolved by a ray!)
Notes:
• “verb” = biblical term (Genesis, “in the beginning was the Verb”) = mystical power of evocation by language, saying it equals creating it, all that.
• “I” is of course not Rimbaud himself, but the lyrical first person. Or is it?
• For the bits in verse. I’m not sure that’s translatable. It is an archaic use of the subjunctive, this is very evocative of medieval songs (as is the title, and the return of the same refrain).
• “Le temps dont on s’éprenne” means, literally, “the time with whom one falls in love” (as opposed to lust).
• You’ll have noted the scatological allusions…
• …and the transition from poetical prose to verse and back to poetical prose.
Rimbaud despises Catholicism and its petit-bourgeois conformist, hypocritical undertones. When Verlaine comes back to him converted, it is the end of their relationship. He goes to London with another poet, Germain Nouveau, who probably was instrumental in making him write down the Illuminations, the last poems Rimbaud would ever write.
Rimbaud is then 21.
He gives the manuscript to Verlaine at a chance meeting in Stuttgart, and travels further, to "elude boredom". When he's been all around Europe, he finds himself short of funds, and enrols in the army (where he gets almost a year's pay at once) to go to the Dutch colonies in the Pacific. Once there, he deserts, flees, and starts a new life in Africa. He learns several languages, meets a beautiful African woman he falls in love and lives with, and starts a very lucrative import-export business as he smuggles guns on the side, a curious activity for the author of Le Dormeur du val. Material success is not enough, and he writes to his sister (amidst digressions on how horridly expensive life is) that he is bored, bored like no one else in the world could possibly be. When a tumor is discovered in his knee, he travels back to France to get medical care; but he cancer has already expanded, and he dies in Marseilles, aged 37.
Rimbaud fascinates. His 4 year long poetical career was enough to dive into poetry, catch its essence, and proceed to push it to its limits, and then a bit further - with a sovereign disregard for conventions, and an always present irony. No one rivalled this enterprise, and no one could - his is a once-in-history experiment, and he knew it when he stopped writing, knew that any writing would now be futile and redundant. René Char would write "Tu as bien fait de partir, Arthur Rimbaud..." (you were right to leave) - several centuries of tradition end with him, and trying to revive it would make no sense.
It is now time for new inspiration, new poetical forms, and a new movement altogether. Coming soon: Guillaume Apollinaire and the turn of the century (unless you'd rather have a bit of Laforgue first?)
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Date: 2007-04-20 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2007-04-20 07:42 pm (UTC)adn yes i'm bloody well english, i have the pasty white skin to proove it
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Date: 2007-04-20 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2007-04-20 08:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-20 07:54 pm (UTC)He certainly writes by his own rules... He almost lived by his own rules, too, when not under mummy's thumb (his dad was scum, though - and how the hell did that woman get pregnant five times out of five?!)
And I can certainly agree with him on the catholicism issue...
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Date: 2007-04-20 08:23 pm (UTC)Voilà l'oubli réparé:
L'Idole.
Sonnet du Trou du Cul
Obscur et froncé comme un oeillet violet
Il respire, humblement tapi parmi la mousse.
Humide encor d'amour qui suit la fuite douce
Des Fesses blanches jusqu'au coeur de son ourlet.
Des filaments pareils à des larmes de lait
Ont pleuré, sous le vent cruel qui les repousse,
À travers de petits caillots de marne rousse
Pour s'aller perdre où la pente les appelait.
Mon Rêve s'aboucha souvent à sa ventouse ;
Mon âme, du coït matériel jalouse,
En fit son larmier fauve et son nid de sanglots.
C'est l'olive pâmée, et la flûte caline ;
C'est le tube où descend la céleste praline :
Chanaan féminin dans les moiteurs enclos !
There's another one on pricks and a third on arses...
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Date: 2007-04-20 08:35 pm (UTC)Ooh, my...purple prose of the "weeping cock" variety...
Sonnet my arse (pardon the pun :P), that's an ode. And how this has never given you any sort of Snucius (or similarly slashy) plot bunnies, I'll never know...
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Date: 2007-04-20 08:39 pm (UTC)It's a blason, actually (=a poem to a body part of the loved one, usually the eyes or the hair)
My favourite phrase still is "la céleste praline" (do you think they were into scat?)
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Date: 2007-04-20 09:00 pm (UTC)But now...I mean, basic plot bunny -- perverts Lotm's "Lost in a book" challenge, suggests a Snuciusy take on the blason (thank you for the exact name) and the surrounding 'events'. And that's the roughest, off-the-top-of-my-head smutlet.
You corrupt me entirely too easily, you know.
Erm, I'm trying to spare myself the mental images...perhaps rimming under conditions of very poor personal hygiene?
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Date: 2007-04-20 09:11 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2007-04-20 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-20 10:50 pm (UTC)The 'Thank you' goes without saying.
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Date: 2007-04-20 11:01 pm (UTC)