A mesmerizing remnant haunts the barren sand and stone streets of Abyssinian Harar, an unrelenting centrifugal force that pulls into itself those drawn to conflagration, to total surrender, as though we might know-in an instant of silence-all Rimbaud made himself forget, all he denied when he turned his back on writing and lived beyond it, in exile. Or the writer not writing is completely disengaged, a ghostly anarchist traversing Rimbaud's desert mountains and plateaus, a purveyor of mule team commerce seldom in reach of a human voice and never the accents of home, a gun-running, slave-trading mentor to wild boys, for the fire that consumes itself leaves more than ashes. The writer not writing is a wholly guilty party, like someone who through anger or terrible neglect has killed off his own life's mate, counterpart, reason to live. This passing reference is further elaborated upon in another essay devoted to the writer’s intimate relationship with his / her craft and to the life-sustaining power of writing: You can be like Rimbaud and stop actually writing the words, but you can't stop wanting to write, needing to you can't stop leaning toward language” (“Why She Writes”). After evoking her perception of all literary writers as “part of a guild of outcasts,” she tackles the difficulty of conciliating a mundane, everyday life with the demands of her craft and goes on to recall Rimbaud as one of those writers who decided to give up writing but who probably fought all his life against the irrepressible urge to get back to it: “et writing will not desist. 2 Rimbaud also occasionally crops up in some of her essays on language and on the craft of writing. Such pieces as The Drunken Boat, Illuminations and A Season in Hell were most important to her, “especially as was writing in short forms at one point,” she says. Rimbaud’s abiding influence is one she is quite willing to acknowledge. As such, she is one of those writers whose ear could not fail to be attuned to the poetic virtuosities of Rimbaud-albeit in an English version like the one contributed by Fowlie in 1966. 2 Private correspondence with Jayne Anne Phillips (11 th February 2012).ĢJayne Anne Phillips grew up as a teenager in the turmoil of the sixties and published her first stories in the early 1970s.Some may deplore that Wallace Fowlie subsequently rendered Rimbaud a poor service by presenting him to posterity in the shadow of an iconic pop singer 1 and revaluing his work in the context of a discursive economy that neglected the true value of his poetry, and Rimbaud’s literary influence on American writers has admittedly not received the same level of critical attention as that generated by his connection with the likes of Jim Morrison, Patti Smith or Bob Dylan, to name but a few. Ever since a certain Jim Morrison wrote to an obscure academic to thank him for translating Rimbaud’s poetry into English and making it accessible to young Americans, it seems that Rimbaud has not lost his hold upon the American imagination. 1 Almost thirty years later Wallace Fowlie published a comparative study of Rimbaud and Morrison ( Ri (.)ġIf only because of his rebellious temper and reputation as the enfant terrible of French poetry, Arthur Rimbaud was bound to touch off a resonant chord in the American imagination of the 1960s.It offers an alternative vision extending the parameters of literary translation by showing that such translation is itself a form of experimental creative writing. Translating Rimbaud’s Illuminations is a critique of the assumptions which currently underlie our thinking on literary translation. Published as a sequel to the author’s Translating Baudelaire (UEP, 2000), it will become part of the canon. In addition, it also provides some fascinating ‘hands on’ translation work of a very practical kind. In the expanding field of translation studies, a brilliant and demanding book such as this has a valuable place. It also provides a reassessment of Rimbaud’s creative impulses and specifically his prose poems, the Illuminations.
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