Œuvres complètes II: Œuvres diverses et lettres 1864/1865-1870 (review)

This important second volume of Rimbaud's Œuvres complètes – the third one published, after vol. 1 (Poésies, reviewed in NCFS 29.1–2) and vol. 4 (Fac-similés, in NCFS 33.1–2) – is consistent with the exhaustive approach of the overall series. Steve Murphy continues his relentless documentation of Rimbaud's entire literary production, here in texts that have sometimes been marginalized, if not altogether omitted, by other editorial ventures. Once again, the result is an important volume that does an excellent job of bringing to the present, and pushing ahead, the best knowledge of Rimbaud's work. Scholarship not coming from any single person, one of this volume's strengths is the extent to which it benefits from contributions from other eminent scholars: such a collaborative approach is particularly useful for projects like this one, with such diverse components.

The task of presenting the poems grouped as "Le Carnet de dix ans" was given to Rimbaud scholar Bruno Claisse, who was more than worthy of the challenge. More known for his incisive studies of the prose poems from Illuminations, Claisse plunged into the schoolboy writings, his philological commentary as strong as his interpretative skills. Claisse does an excellent job; for example, wading through the question of the "faux pensums" (113–15), concluding that the partially legible words atop columns of lists of words are not secret phrases that would suggest the young subversive mind at work (as Suzanne Briet and others have suggested) but rather the beginnings of columns used for memorization of verbs and conjugations (115).

In this discussion – and also elsewhere (e.g. on page 55) – the presentation includes the reproduction of Rimbaud's writing: one of this volume's few weaknesses. The editor's and contributors' best intentions notwithstanding, the quality of the reproductions makes them of little help to the reader, and it would have been preferable to refer to the relevant page in vol. 4 of these Œuvres complètes, in which the high-quality facsimile reproductions better capture the details necessary to make conclusions important for inferring letters from certain lines and curves.

Few scholars have studied closely Rimbaud's Latin writings; among them, DuBellay specialist George Hugo Tucker has distinguished himself most in the last decade. Here, Tucker shows convincingly that, more than the earlier Latin works prefiguring the French verse to follow, "on pourrait même parler d'un recyclage de certains éléments de ces prolégomènes scolaires" (185), and he argues that Rimbaud displays not only a mastery of Latin language and prosody, but of "une subtilité tout à fait remarquable" (186), yielding a "traduction de virtuose" (195). As did Claisse with "Le Carnet de dix ans," Tucker has wisely returned to the original sources – manuscripts or first publications of school-age poems – and thus avoided perpetuating errors, the mistake committed by less conscientious editors.

Denis Hüe finished the work that Danielle Bandelier had begun on "Charles d'Orléans à Louis xi," impressive contributions both. Hüe strays a bit from Rimbaud in the section "Le Moyen Âge au XIX^e siècle, entre académisme et romantisme," going beyond the contextualization necessary in a presentation of Rimbaud's work; but otherwise his analysis of this piece benefits from his historical knowledge and perspective. Murphy retakes the pen, or keyboard, for his re-presentation of Un Cœur sous une soutane, of which he already published a critical edition with facsimile (Charleville-Mézières: Musée-Bibliothèque Arthur Rimbaud, 1991). Murphy corrects certain editorial and interpretative errors, and he does not hesitate to admit an earlier misreading those few times that it occurs. No scholar has devoted more time to Un Cœur sous une soutane...