![]() Rimbaud wanted his prose to express a rational derangement of the senses, what Ashbery calls a “crystalline jumble”. Ashbery and Rimbaud embrace abstraction, without compromise, and seek “absolute modernity”, which for Rimbaud was “acknowledging the simultaneity of all of life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second”. Ashbery has been compared to Rimbaud since his first collection was published in 1956, his changes to the original are minimal and highlight Rimbaud’s own vivid imagery. Here Ashbery is faithful to the original text, presents the clearest ordering of the poems, and leaves out the cloudy, unnecessary biography that has dominated past translations. In Illuminations, Rimbaud bests Baudelaire, plants the seeds of surrealism, inspires symbolism, originates free verse in French, describes impossible, and takes us on a metaphorical and autobiographical walk into the future.Īshbery’s translation is a love letter to Rimbaud, and French culture. Camus hailed Rimbaud “a poet of revolt, and the greatest”, and in John Ashbery’s new translation, we finally get the greatest, complete version of Illuminations. London: Quartet Books.In his short life as a poet, Arthur Rimbaud created a new poetry by abandoning poetry. The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud. Thus far, however, none have gone beyond him - in daring or invention. Indeed, one might say that contemporary French poetry owes everything to Rimbaud. Nearly all the modern French poets have been influenced by him. And this more by readers than by writers, I feel. What Rimbaud did for language, and not merely for poetry, is only beginning to be understood.Drunk from the Bitter Truth: The Poems of Anna Margolin by Shirley Kumove (2005).Anna Margolin was greatly influenced by Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud among the Germans, by Else Lasker-Schüler and Rainer Maria Rilke and among the Yiddish poets, by Itsik Manger and Avrom Sutzkever.The poet makes himself a seer by an immense, long, deliberate derangement of all the senses. ![]()
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