Illuminations By Arthur Rimbaud; Translated by John Ashbery ’45 | W.W. Norton & Company, 2011
Absolutely Modern | “Perfectly aligned.” This is how Katherine Sanders, reviewer for Words
Without Borders, describes Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) and John Ashbery ’45. Considering their biographies, it may seem like a bizarre statement. Rimbaud had a meteoric career, bursting on to the 19th century Paris literary scene at the age of 16, and then abandoning his craft only five years later. Ashbery is one of the greatest 20th century American poets, and he has won countless awards throughout his long career. The two could not be more different in the arc of literary history, yet they share a common theme—both poets eschewed the literary norms of their day, producing aesthetically similar, extraordinarily progressive work. It is this shared aesthetic—combined with his poetic gift and extensive knowledge of French literature and culture—that makes Mr. Ashbery’s translation of Mr. Rimbaud’s Illuminations so successful. Illuminations, considered a masterpiece of world literature, consists of 43 prose poems. It was published in 1886, shortly before Mr. Rimbaud’s death, although he had no hand in its publication. Like most of Mr. Rimbaud’s work, it is a challenge to read—and a greater challenge to translate. Mr. Rimbaud believed that writing poetry required a “rational disordering of all the senses” and advocated absolute modernity. “Absolute modernity was for him the acknowledging of the simultaneity of all life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second,” wrote Mr. Ashbery in his preface to the translation. Among the many examples of this “fertile destabilization,” Mr. Ashbery continued, “the crystalline jumble of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, like a disordered collection of magic lantern slides, each an ‘intense and rapid dream,’” in his words, “is still emitting pulses. If we are absolutely modern—and we are—it’s because Rimbaud commanded us to be.” Mr. Ashbery’s translation—described by The New York Times as “meticulously faithful yet nimbly inventive”—strikes a balance between being faithful to Rimbaud’s original meaning and preserving the punctuation and sentence structure of the French poetry, while creating flow and musicality in the English language. “Ashbery’s literal approach also keeps Illuminations away from unintended ambiguities, a constant potential pitfall for translations of difficult writers like Rimbaud,” wrote Lydia Davis for the Times. Instead of using critical commentary to analyze Mr. Rimbaud’s poems, Mr. Ashbery chose to use only language dictionaries while translating, allowing himself to interpret the meaning of the poems organically, much like Mr. Rimbaud’s own writing process. Mr. Ashbery’s linguistic resourcefulness is also used to great effect throughout the translation. In the poem, “Children,” for example, he shows his inventiveness at translating “blanchi à la chaux” as “whited with quicklime,” instead of the more mundane choice of “whitewashed” used by other translators. Mr. Ashbery’s skillfully executed translation of Illuminations will no doubt become the definitive version of Mr. Rimbaud’s poems for a new generation of English-speaking readers, introducing them to a poet renowned for his modernist vision and elusive poems.
class notes
Crystal-gray skies. A bizarre pattern of bridges, some of them straight, others convex, still others descending or veering off at angles to the first ones, and these shapes multiplying in the other illuminated circuits of the canal, but all of them so long and delicate that the riverbanks burdened with domes fall away and diminish. Some of these bridges are still lined with hovels. Others support masts, signals, frail parapets. Minor chords meet and leave each other, ropes climb up from the banks. One can make out a red jacket, perhaps other costumes and musical instruments. Are these popular tunes, fragments of concerts offered by the aristocracy, snatches of public hymns? The water is gray and blue, wide as an arm of the sea.—A white ray, falling from the top of the sky, wipes out this bit of theatricality. —From the poem “The Bridges”
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