ARTHUR RIMBAUD
271
returns to Charleville, his break with republican Paris, his break
with Verlaine, and his five years of obstinate struggle to break with
Europe-these ·phases of Rimbaud's life culminate in his flight to
Abyssinia, and each one made its assault on his consciousness of
latent powers. In them exists the first gloss on the text of his
poems; they remain antecedent to every specialized theory of his
conduct or thought.*
The fragmentary appearance and fitful clairvoyance of Rim–
baud's pages then begin to take on a more serious unity than is
commonly suspected. The fear and anguish of adolescence
(Les
Poetes de Sept Ans)
develops into the ironical compassion of his
human sympathies
(Les Chercheuses de Poux
and
Les Effares).
The torrential imagery of
Le Bateau lvre
indicates an outbreak of
consciousness that comes to sudden maturity in
Une Saison en
Enfer
and
Les Illuminations.
The large gaps in event and
1
meaning
that we find so tempting to fill up with the values and necessities
of "our lives" imply a broken but continuously disintegrating and
reconstructive impulse by which the poet attempted to artive at his
new conception of social happiness and human destiny and of
the part poetry was to play in their attainment. "The new day
industrial capitalism, an air in which all that had been holy to
European man decayed," played its part in spurring Rimbaud's
realization of the impasse at which humanity had arrived, but the
air of his own temperament, of his personal obsessions; his social
contempt generated by family discord, and his pathologically
intensified emotions and insight, existed before and after his en–
counter with the corruptions of Second Empire and post-Commune
• There is no critical edition of Rimbaud's complete works; the most convenient
edition of his poems is the
Oeuvres de Arthur Rimbaud,
including the
Poemes
Retrouves,
preface by Claude! and annotations by Paterne-Berrichon (Paris: Mercure
de France). Mr.· Schwartz has now translated
Une Saison en Enfer.
His version shows
many sensitive passages but is often at severe odds with Rimbaud's meaning. Fortu–
nately he is now preparing a corrected version, soon to be issued. Some of the diffi–
culties in the present one are indicated by Justin O'Brien in
The Kenyon Review
(Spring, 1940; pp. 229-232). Both Mr. Schwartz's and Mr. Abel's translations exag–
gerate the
fausse gaucherie
of Rimbaud's style; this results in dissipating its ironic
and passionate quality and thus its critical force. When Mr. Abel stays close to Rim–
baud's meaning he may be cramped and awkward but makes a fair translation. His
versions of
Les Poetes de Sept Ans
and
Le Bateau l vre
are good guides, and even the
untranslatable
Coeur Vole (Coeur Supplicie),
though modified out of its real mean–
ing,
manages to convey some of the lacerating pathos of the original. Elsewhere Mr.
Abel oversimplifies and grows soft in diction, and he has unfortunately omitted the
French originals of the poems. One would like to see a straightforward guide-transla–
tion prepared for English readers along the lines of Roger Fry's versions of Mallarme
that appeared in 1936.
