Illuminations (New Directions Paperbook, No. 56)

There was a time a couple decades back when I enjoyed reading Rimbaud... A Season in Hell, for example. Having just read his Illuminations for the first time, I can't say I'm as impressed as I first was many years ago.

The mark of an extraordinary writer to me has always had something to do with whether the writer's genre was enhanced by the writer. This is a tall order, I know, but the very best writers change the way that their genre is perceived. Rimbaud's prose poems challenged the traditonal style of the Romantics who wrote before him. He brought a sharp, new incandescence, a flaring literary reality, a breakthrough perception to poetry expressed by his point of view. His stirring soul is seared by his epiphanies expressed in simple, clean and gleaming imagery. At times, he reminded me of Blake and Yeats. But his poetry is so original and personal and inventive that the genre metamorphosed by his unique literary perspective. Rimbaud believed that the poet must deliberately become an antagonist and work to place one's sensibilities into constant upheaveal in order to write poetry that is truly revelatory. His life was lived to the hilt as he traveled worldwide with Paul Verlaine and traded adventure incessantly. His destitution, lust for life and piquant sensibilities abound in the light and shadow of his poetry. The genre is indebted to the invention, passion and beauty expressed by this tormented soul who simply couldn't get enough of life.

I've read many translations of Illuminations but this is probably my favorite. I had given my copy to a girlfriend about 20 years ago so I hadn't looked at it in awhile. After reading the John Ashbery translation recently I decided to get a new copy of this one. I've always though that Illuminations were Rimbaud's finest work. They are highly imaginative and have inspired artists and poets ever since they were first published. In college I had one professor who had joined the Surrealist group in the fifties and taught creative writing and comparative literature. He taught a class in Surrealism and I'm pretty sure we started out with Rimbaud and this was the translation he recommended.A hare stopped in the clover and swaying flower bells , and said a prayer to the rainbow, through the spider's web.

I've been loving this version of Rimbaud's Illuminations. It's not just this particular translation of the text that makes it enjoyable, but it's also the fact that the original French and English translation are laid out side-by-side to allow for easy switching between them. I'm not a native French speaker, so I love that I can fine tune my French by reading the original text and seeing immediately how it is interpreted in English.I would definitely recommend this version to any non-French speaking Rimbaud fans!

Rimbaud's poetry isn't quite easy to decipher, but it's very intense and unique. I'm in love with the cover art of this particular edition, it's so mesmerizing. This book is beautifully made, binding, cover, pages and all, it may be a little more pricey than other translations but I think it's worth it. Rimbaud isn't for everyone so I recommend reading some of his poems online before purchasing.

Its a good book, and if your a fan of Rimbaud's poetry you will enjoy this book. The way that New Directions displays Rimbaud's poetry is by displaying the original French poetry one side, and on the opposite side is the translated English of the poetry.

Rimbaud is Rimbaud, condition is so,so

i got this cause of the Ray Johnson cover. Love it.

Looked at in one way, you could say that 'Illuminations' describes the curve from Still Fresh to Jaded. As a collection of prose poems, you could say it is the better and more acute for that. But the price of his jading was the loss of Arthur Rimbaud to poetry (prose and otherwise). 'Illuminations' was his final body of work.I admire Rimbaud's sophisticated editing technique - what you might call the radical re-organization of material in order to create a variety of different and sometimes strikingly original images, feelings and effects. I think that he was the first to do this so consciously, so thoroughly and so well. As Louise Varèse points out in her Introduction to this volume, Rimbaud was a fully-fledged surrealist decades before the term was even invented. That he had method is unquestionable, and I think that his intent was also completely genuine. This makes his loss to poetry, at the age of twenty, all the more painful. But perhaps not for him. There is more than one suggestion in 'Illuminations' that by the end, he was becoming fed up with it:'I want this hardened arm to stop dragging a cherished image.'It strikes me that his final interventions into the text are not written in the voice of the poet at all. They are written in the voice of the post-poet that he had already become.It is always popular to point out the paradoxes in Arthur's personality, and here is another one to add to the list: He was as much a backwards looking romantic, in love with social and cultural tradition, as he was a forwards looking radical. In fact, like the Roman deity, he could look both backwards and forwards at the same time. This quality makes his work something of a crossroads in European culture - the point at which the old passes into the new. In my view, Rimbaud's modernity lies more in the form that he gave to his writing, than in the substance of what he wrote about. And taken as a whole, 'Illuminations' is a good example of thisI also like the white-blue quality of Arthur's poetic vision, by which I mean his poetic vision at its highest level. He does not always fly at this level, but when he does, it provides his work with its most purely visionary moments. And those moments are just about as pure and just about as high as it is possible to get. They also tend to be brief, and you have to keep an eye out for them, as thanks to the thoroughness of his editing, they have been distributed across the body of his work.You kind of experience Rimbaud as much as you read him. For a complete introduction to his sensibility, you need to read 'Illuminations', 'The Drunken Boat' and 'Une Saison en Enfer'. That last is his worst, in my view, but it still contains its points of interest and of subsequent (or future) influence. I only wish there were more of them. I don't think that he was in a happy place when he wrote it, and nor do I think that he particularly wanted to write it. It reads more like something that he felt obliged to write. This can make it something of a weary trudge for both reader and writer alike. Of the others, 'The Drunken Boat' is a visionary masterpiece of a very curious and even unique kind. While 'Illuminations', I feel, gives you the broadest picture of the different facets which made up Rimbaud's personality. It is a lot more like him, as he probably was, most of the time.Note: This review relates to the New Directions paperback edition of 'Illuminations', translated by Louise Varèse.

Genius

Uno dei motivi che mi ha spinto all'acquisto del libro è stato proprio la copertina, ben scelta a rappresentazione del contenuto dai toni onirici.

The translations in this book are very bad which make the poems and books barely understandable. Fortunately I learned some French growing up so I was able to get by.

Classic