'This Savage Parade': Recent Translations of Rimbaud

The last six years have seen four new English translations of the works of Rimbaud: Dennis J. Carlile for Xlibris (2001), Martin Sorrell for Oxford World's Classics (2001), Wyatt Mason for The Modern Library (2002), and Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock for Penguin (2004). After a gap of twenty-five years since the last translation of the collected works (Paul Schmidt in 1976), suddenly four come along at once. It is easy to understand the reasons for this surge of activity. Rimbaud's popularity as both poet and rebel figure remains undiminished, and new generations of readers are constantly being introduced to his writings, be it through their study of literature, their interest in popular culture (Dylan, Morrison, Patti Smith, even DiCaprio), or both. Yet these new versions are not simply marketing opportunities. In the case of the three translations reviewed here, each translator is explicitly aware of his predecessors, and each locates the distinctiveness of his own versions both within the canon of Rimbaud translations and within current thinking on the practice of translation. All three editions are bilingual, enabling the reader to compare source text and target text. So what actually distinguishes the translations from one another?

For a start, the contents of each book are different. Sorrell's Collected Poems presents in parallel text all the verse poems (except for the Latin verses and some small fragments), plus Une saison en enfer ('A Season in Hell'), Illuminations, and the short prose pieces Les Déserts de l'amour ('The Deserts of Love') and Proses évangeliques ('Evangelical Prose'). Mason's Rimbaud Complete contains all the above plus a section entitled 'Uncollected Writings', which comprises various pieces of school work, fragments, reconstructions, drafts, variants, and early letters, many of which are translated here for the first time. Although the original texts are not presented parallel to the translations, they are all included in the final section of the book. The publishers emphasise the comprehensive quality of this edition; Mason has also translated nearly all of Rimbaud's correspondence for The Modern Library, published in 2003 as the second volume of Rimbaud Complete, under the title The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud: I Promise To Be Good.¹ By contrast, Harding and Sturrock's Selected Poems and Letters provides a representative selection of both the creative works (in parallel text) and the correspondence (Harding translated the poetry and prose, Sturrock the letters). This includes roughly half of the poems written between 1869 and 1871, a smattering from the Album zutique, half of the final verse poems from 1872 ('Derniers vers'), half of the forty-two prose poems which make up Illuminations, and the entire text of A Season in Hell. The remainder of the book is composed of almost 140 letters, of which the large majority were written after 1875, when Rimbaud had turned his back on poetry. These letters, postmarked Charleville, Paris (nicknamed 'Parmerde'), London, Stuttgart, Bremen, Genoa, Alexandria, Larnaca, Aden, Harar, and Tajura (part of the then French colony of Obock), trace Rimbaud's continued peregrinations and his eventual residence in what is now Ethiopia, where he remained until his death in Marseilles in 1891. The early missives to friends and fellow poets gradually give way to letters to business contacts and regular reports to his family back in France; Sturrock also includes Rimbaud's deposition to a Brussels magistrate after the famous shooting incident of 1873, his 1883 report on the Ogaden, a group of tribes of Somali origin, and his 1887 article on his gun-running expedition to Abyssinia (published in the French-language Cairo newspaper Bosphore égyptien). This deliberate emphasis on Rimbaud's second career reflects the...