Sebastienne Rimbaud's Reviews > Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters

English-language poetry, excepting maybe the contributions of the Beats, has remained largely untouched by the Rimbaud phantasmagoria - interestingly enough, his enfant terrible personality made him more influential among protopunk musicians than poets. However, anyone who's ventured even slightly into the realm of European verse has fallen beneath the vast shadow of Rimbaud.

Considered the greatest of French poets by many, his verses were made even more remarkable by the dangerous philosophy of the poète voyant that nearly destroyed his sanity and his life, and the fact that he stopped writing entirely before he was twenty. He is, in many people's eyes, a pseudo-religious figure, the patron saint or patron demon of French letters, the beginning and end of modern poetry.

Well, I'm certainly not going to argue with that. On to the book.

This is, unfortunately, the definitive English translation of Rimbaud, "corrected" a handful of decades after the original printing, removing such stupid mistakes as "que chante le coq gaulois" rendered in English as "the Gallic cock grows." - the intended meaning, of course, being crows. Considering that the publishers found it necessary to drag in a whole other man to fix the translator's mistakes, it doesn't really give you confidence as to the quality of the translation, eh? Though I'm willing to give Fowlie the benefit of the doubt and assume that most of the changes were due to new versions of Rimbaud manuscripts cropping up and recently uncovered knowledge changing the way we interpret him.

The translation was originally intended, I believe, for people who read a little French but need some extra help. It doesn't stand up as well on its own, and if you think you can manage it in the original French, by all means, give it a try, but Rimbaud is, even in the crudest of translations (and Fowlie's work is, admittedly, far from the worst one could do), a transcendent, visionary genius. His poems are as dangerous and soul-warping as they were 115 years ago. I would suggest that people with mental problems (such as myself - after reading this I promptly changed my surname to Rimbaud and ran around the country ruining my life in the name of achieving poetic transcendence - not that I regretted it much, but still, in and out of rehab and mental institutions is no way to go through life, son) and/or poets with no remaining survival instincts stay away from Rimbaud. Or, no, rather, do, and immediately - the world needs new Rimbauds, now more so than ever.

As for everyone else, Rimbaud is best read with knowledge of the man - the boy, rather - behind the words. I would suggest first purchasing a biography or two as a companion piece and perhaps watching the film Total Eclipse, with David Thewlis as Rimbaud's lover Paul Verlaine and Leonardo diCaprio doing a surprisingly good job portraying the avant-garde poet himself.