A Season In Hell

Product Information

I had seen Rimbaud mentioned in a poem by Bukowski and decided to give him a try. I found him incredibly difficult to read, but when I looked at the French with my wee smattering of memory I have of studying it school, I saw that it just didn’t match up. I’d be reading and think to myself that the chose of words was off or wrong. I’d look at the French and wouldn’t recognize the translation. So when the translator translated side by side several versions you could see his deviations! The translator took poetic liberties writing his own words as if to make Rimbaud more poetic! I cannot fairly judge the writing of Rimbaud because I don’t have the time or energy to sit down with a French dictionary and translate him myself! Ed è questa eccezionale, estrema, eccessiva forza vitale, portata fino alla distruzione, che si ritrova nella sua poesia. Nella prosa e nella poesia, perché ‘Una stagione all’inferno’ è un’opera ambigua, che rimane nel mezzo. He goes on, bringing in line after line that shows how truly miserable and transformed he is. The speaker hates the world and himself so much that he summons “plagues” and stifles himself “with sand and blood”. He’s encouraging his own suffering and that of others. “Misfortune,” something that most people try to avoid at all costs, is this speaker’s “god”.

Ko nozīmē izlasīju? Reiz sen lasīju, lasīju. Tagad pēkšņi atvēru un sapratu. Beigusi baidīties no nesaprašanas un aizrauties ar nepieciešamību pēc paskaidrojumiem, es sajutu un, sajutusi, es sapratu.

Perhaps this is not just some weird wittering after all, given the influence Rimbaud has had on so many. If God would grant me celestial, aerial, calm, prayer – like the ancient saints – the Saints! Strong ones! The anchorites, artists for whom there’s no longer need! Rimbaud gave advance copies of A Season in Hell to his former mentor and lover, Paul Verlaine, and to a few other friends. Snubbed socially and artistically following a scandal that landed Verlaine in prison, Rimbaud burned the remaining copies of the book in a fireplace at his mother’s house. He also burned a sheaf of his unpublished poems. He said he no longer thought about poetry. The boy who had been the talk of Paris at the age of sixteen—“an infant Shakespeare” in the words of novelist Victor Hugo—gave up poetry for a life of wandering and, eventually, running guns to rebel tribes in Africa. This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, scents, sounds, colours, thought attaching to thought and pulling. The poet would define the quantity of the unknown, awakening in the universal soul in his time: he would give more than the formulation of his thought, the measurement of his march towards progress! An enormity become the norm, absorbed by all, he would truly be an enhancer of progress!

The last innocence, and the last timidity. I’ve said it. Not to carry my disgust and betrayals through the world. Ah, I suffer, cry out! I suffer truly. And yet all is permitted me, weighed down with the contempt of the most contemptible hearts.I! I, who called myself magus or angel, exempt from all morality, I’m returned to the soil, with a task to pursue, and wrinkled reality to embrace! A peasant! Quando somos muito fortes, — quem recua? muito alegres, — quem cai no ridículo? Quando somos muito maus, — que fariam de nós? The first lines of this poem also contain an example of a metaphor This is seen through the use of the “feast” to represent a good life in which one has an “appetite” for the next day. It is undeniable that Rimbaud was a master of imagery. Almost every line of this poem has an example that could imprint itself on a reader’s mind take for example: “I made the wild beast’s silent leap to strangle every joy”. But! Who made my tongue so deceitful that it’s guided and safeguarded my laziness till now? Without even using my body to live, and idler than a toad, I’ve lived everywhere. Not a family in Europe I don’t know. – I mean families like mine, who owe it all to the declaration of the Rights of Man. – I’ve known every son of good family!

Este livro evoca também muitas coisas que preferia esquecer. Os poemas tardios precoces de Rimbaud já cheiram ao meu estado de palinódia permanente: Still, now is the eve. Let us receive every influx of strength and true tenderness. And at dawn, armed with an ardent patience, we’ll enter into the splendid cities. Autumn already! – But why regret an eternal sun, if we are engaged in discovering the divine light – far from races that die with the seasons.You'll always be a hyena etc. . . ," yells the devil, who'd crowned me with such pretty poppies. "Deserve death with all your appetites, your selfishness, and all the capital sins!" I managed to erase all human hope from my mind. I made the wild beast’s silent leap to strangle every joy. What did I say about a friendly hand? One real advantage, is that I can smile at old false loves, and blast those lying couples with shame – I’ve seen the hell of women down there: – and it will be granted me to possess truth in a soul and a body.

Varèse: "Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed." On the roads, on winter nights, without shelter, without clothing, without bread, a voice would clutch my frozen heart: ‘Weakness or strength: with you it’s strength. You don’t know where you’re going or why you’re going: go everywhere, react to everything. They won’t kill you any more than if you were a corpse.’ In the morning I had such a lost look, such a dead face, that those who met me perhaps they did not see me. However, it is a well and deliberately edited and revised text. This becomes clear if one compares the final version with the earlier versions. [4]These poets will exist! When woman’s endless servitude is broken, when she lives for and through herself, when man – previously abominable – has granted her freedom, she too will be a poet! Women will discover the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? – She will discover strange things, unfathomable; repulsive, delicious: we will take them to us, we will understand them. Rimbaud did not suddenly abandon verse for poetry in prose. On his first trip to Paris, he had discovered the “little poems in prose” of Charles Baudelaire, which had been posthumously published in 1869. Rimbaud’s own experiments in the genre include “Deserts of Love” (1871). Forty of his later prose pieces, Illuminations (1880, 1886), had been collected after Rimbaud left Europe. Highly experimental, some are closer to the parables of novelists Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges than to anything previously written. Decidedly, we are beyond the world. No more sounds. My sense of touch: gone. Ah, my chateau, my Saxony, my rank of willows! Evenings, dawns, nights, days...How weary I am! The first study for the man that wants to be a poet is true complete knowledge of himself: he looks for his soul; examines it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must develop it! That seems simple: a natural development takes place in every brain: so many egoists proclaim themselves authors: there are plenty of others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! – But the soul must be made monstrous: after the fashion of the comprachicos, yes! Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face.