![]() ![]() Simply by trying to find the right words and phrases and lines to communicate the sense and tone of Rimbaud’s poetry, he has discovered something a bit like his own. And yet one of the delights of Ashbery’s Rimbaud is how clearly one hears Ashbery’s idiosyncratic intonation in it without ever feeling that he has manipulated Rimbaud’s poetry to make it more his own. Reading those lines of Ashbery’s, or ones written much more recently or even earlier, one would never think to say that his tone has anything of Rimbaud’s about it. Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate. That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpointįor time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned, How curious that the man full of years should turn at last to the writings of the marvelous boy (the epithet more commonly attached to the name of Thomas Chatterton being equally appropriate to Rimbaud). ![]() By contrast Ashbery, of course, is now in his eighties and still writing up a storm. And then, consider how essential it is to Rimbaud’s legend that his meteoric career played itself out by the time he was twenty. As paradoxical as it ought to be that a poet as rude and rebellious as Rimbaud is part of the world’s literary canon, there he is - jostling for position, maybe, with Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, and giving them dirty looks. “Rimbaud hallucinates,” as Jean-Luc Steinmetz said, “and creates an epic.” That the epic is conveyed in shreds and tatters makes it no less epic and all the more contemporary. While it makes all kinds of sense that someone who loves Roussel or Schubert or Martory would love Rimbaud too, the fact remains that Rimbaud hardly needs the sort of rescue operation that they do. Ashbery’s other recently published translations from the French include a very little-known prose piece by Pierre Reverdy and the poems of Pierre Martory, whose work is apparently as unfamiliar in France as it is in the English-speaking world. He has been, rather, as a proponent of “other traditions,” to borrow the title of his 1989-90 Norton Lectures at Harvard, published as a book in 2001, which offered a spirited defense of certain kinds of “minor poetry” through sympathetic readings of such overlooked or cultish figures as John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. For one thing, Ashbery has never been known as a man for underwriting the canon. But it’s surprising that people haven’t been more surprised by John Ashbery’s decision to undertake a translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations. ![]() And they have, so maybe I should think twice before adding more kudos to the pile. He suggests that the seeds of Rimbaud's later development lie in these early poems, which provide convincing paths into subsequent complexities.It’s to be expected that when America’s greatest living poet publishes a translation of one of the greatest and - to borrow a phrase from the titles of old forgotten anthologies - best-loved poets of world modernity, readers would take notice. Cohn also reveals the early poems, which heretofore received little attention, to be rich in poetic humanity. The resulting unified view affords insights into the meaning of many difficult passages, especially in the most hermetic and resistant of the Illuminations. Cohn draws on nondoctrinaire and open-minded approaches of modern depth psychology and philosophy and, most particularly, on the dazzlingly integral cosmic vision of Mallarmé. Robert Greer Cohn begins with an outline of the poet's life, focusing particularly on a childhood and adolescence that produced astoundingly original and frequently exquisite works, the whole body of poetry by a writer who ended his literary creation in his twentieth year.Ĭohn's analysis, combined with a substantial introduction, weaves together the known biographical facts with major clues from the poems to present a coherent portrait of the inner and outwardly imaged world of the young poet. In this proven study on Arthur Rimbaud, the world's leading authority on Stéphane Mallarmé provides a guide to the understanding and appreciation of Rimbaud's entire poetic oeuvre. The standard work on Rimbaud returns to print ![]()
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