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  Ciaran Carson

  IN THE LIGHT OF

  after Illuminations

  by Arthur Rimbaud

  Contents

  Note to Reader

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  INTRO

  Vigil (from Veillées)

  ACT ONE

  As I Roved Out (Aube)

  After Me … (Après le Déluge)

  Snow (Fleurs)

  Cities (Villes)

  Seer (Mystique)

  Poles Apart (Métropolitain)

  Phases of the Moon (Phrases)

  Fée (Fairy)

  Demotic Nocturne (Nocturne vulgaire)

  La Bête (Bottom)

  Lives (Vies)

  INTERLUDE

  Tale (Conte)

  ACT TWO

  Invisible Cities (Les Ponts)

  On the Road (Enfance)

  What Goes Round (Ornières)

  Curtain Raiser (Parade)

  Cities (Villes)

  Être Belle (Being beauteous)

  The Twilight of History (Soir historique)

  The Point (Promontoire)

  High Society (Scènes)

  Antic (Antique)

  Twenty Years A-Growing (Jeunesse)

  CODA

  Genius (Génie)

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Ciaran Carson

  Copyright

  for Colin Graham

  Author’s Note

  1

  There are many enigmas surrounding the life and work of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), not least in the matter of the background, origin and composition of the Illuminations, a possibly unfinished collection of forty prose poems and two in free verse. The manuscripts, so far as we know, are undated, without any indication as to how the poems should be ordered; but it is generally thought that they were written sporadically between 1872 and 1875, in various locations, including Paris, London and Belgium, and that some of them may (or may not) constitute Rimbaud’s last poetic work. What we do know is that the manuscripts were once in the possession of Rimbaud’s erstwhile lover, the poet Paul Verlaine, and that the majority of the poems were first published in 1886 by the Symbolist review La Vogue, which referred to their author as ‘the late Arthur Rimbaud’ and ‘the equivocal and glorious deceased’. It seems Verlaine had written to Rimbaud, then in Africa; receiving no reply, he assumed he was dead. Later in 1886 La Vogue published the Illuminations in volume form, with a preface by Verlaine in which he explained: ‘Le mot Illuminations est anglais et veut dire gravures colorées— coloured plates’, though it is unclear whether Rimbaud himself chose the title. If he did, it might conform to his eccentric or playful use of ‘English’ titles for the poems ‘Being Beauteous’, ‘Bottom’ and ‘Fairy’, for ‘Illuminations’ is not, as Verlaine states, an English word meaning ‘coloured plates’.

  The only definition for ‘illumination’ in the Oxford English Dictionary which resembles Verlaine’s is ‘formerly, also, the colouring of maps or prints’, as in ‘1678 E. Phillips New World of Words (ed. 4), a laying of colours upon Maps or Printed Pictures; so as to give the greater light, as it were, and beauty to them’. This is not quite ‘illumination’ in the English sense of decorating letters in a text (enluminure in French), which might lie at the back of Verlaine’s ‘coloured plates’; but illuminations can also be a show of festive lights, or, appropriately for Rimbaud, divine or poetic inspiration. In his famous ‘lettre du voyant’, Rimbaud declared: ‘One must, I say, be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer through a long, prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses.’ However we gloss the title Illuminations, the poems flit within the inward eye like brightly-coloured magic lantern slides, pictures from a marvellous book, visions of another world, scenes from an avant-garde film. Rimbaud was avant-garde before the Avant-garde; a surrealist before Surrealism; and, environmentalist avant la lettre, his critique of industrial society in some of these poems is still relevant today. In all those senses he was indeed a seer.

  2

  In 1998 I published The Alexandrine Plan, translations or adaptations of sonnets by Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Mallarmé. My concern in that book was not so much to give a ‘literal’ meaning of what the poems might be saying, as to reproduce the original metre in English, and see what interpretations might emerge from those constraints, both of rhyme and the twelve syllables of the classical French alexandrine. Shortly afterwards I thought I might attempt a translation of some of the poems in Illuminations; but, try as I might, I could not arrive at any form of words that did justice to the originals, to my understanding of what they might imply or mean, or to my sense of their music. What I did seemed inert, flabby, prosaic, and too close to whatever English translations I had consulted to augment my passable French. I could find no edge to the matter. I retired defeated and forgot about the whole brief affair.

  Then, on 3 April 2012 (Shrove Tuesday, as it happened), I received an email from Colin Graham of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, asking if I might be interested in doing versions of seven of the prose poems from Illuminations, which would then be worked on by graphic designers for an exhibition in the new ‘Illuminations’ gallery at Maynooth. I had not done any kind of poetry for some time, and the invitation seemed serendipitous. On Spy Wednesday I had a kind of illumination of my own: rather than translate the prose poems as prose poems, I could perhaps adapt them to an Alexandrine format of twelve-syllable rhyming couplets —Rimbaud crossed with Racine, as it were. I set to the next day, Holy Thursday, and somehow within a week I had arrived at twenty-two such versions. I spent the next few weeks tweaking and tinkering, and added three prose versions to frame what had now become a book: not the book that is Rimbaud’s Illuminations, but another, taken from that book.

  At first, it seemed perverse to translate prose poems into verse: but the more I worked the more it became apparent that many passages in Rimbaud’s musical prose could be read as verse, with a prosody of their own, scanned, rhymed, alliterated. One could see incipient sonnets embedded therein; and it happened that several of my versions came out as fourteen lines. So I began to think of the project as a restoration, or renovation, rather than a complete makeover. In any event these versions are not conventional translations. The constraints of rhyme and metre led me to cut, interpolate, and interpret. There are instances where I have added to or taken away from the original. I have sometimes twisted Rimbaud’s words. And Rimbaud’s words, of course, twisted mine. Examining his French, I had also to examine my English, learning other aspects of it, sometimes relearning it, for one can never fully know a language, which is always bigger than any of us. As Walter Benjamin has it in ‘The Task of the Translator’ (one of a number of essays collected under the English title Illuminations), ‘[The translator] must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language.’ One’s ‘own’ language begins to seem another.

  So in translation one necessarily becomes Another. First-person, third-person, noun and verb, become confused: Je est un autre, ‘I is another’, as Rimbaud has it. I began by wanting to obey the constraints of the twelve syllables of the alexandrine, but that proved impossible: the line, under the pressure of Rimbaud’s sometimes elaborate and often elliptical syntax, began to lengthen or contract in places, and thus became even more hybrid than what I had
envisaged. I was not too put out by this failure to abide by my own rule: the prose poems seemed to want that variation of pace and rhythm; written in different voices, different keys as it were, they vary considerably in their linguistic strategies. The strain of the verse form grafted on to Rimbaud’s prose led to hybrid: translation as mutation. Having said all that, I have ‘translated’ as closely to my understanding of the original as I could, when I could. The result of my deliberations follows. Or rather, it has gone before, since this Author’s Note, like all such introductions, has been written after the event.

  INTRO

  Vigil (from Veillées)

  Once more the lighting returns to the central beam, the rooftree. From the two far ends of the room —nondescript stage sets —harmonic elevations merge or mingle. The wall facing the spectator is a ‘succession psychologique’ of cross sections, friezes, atmospheric bands and geological happenstance. Intense and rapid dream of sentimental groups of beings, of every possible character, under every possible appearance.

  ACT ONE

  As I Roved Out (Aube)

  I embraced the summer dawn. All was still before

  the palaces, their waters dead forevermore.

  Shade after shadow lingered on the woodland road.

  I woke quick, live, warm clouds of breath as on I strode.

  Gemstones eyed my passing. Wings arose without sound.

  My first adventure happened on a path I found

  already littered with pale glints, wherein a flower

  spoke her name to me. I blinked. It was no known hour.

  I laughed to see the Wasserfall dishevelling itself

  in shocks among the pines; climbing shelf by rocky shelf,

  I recognized the goddess at the silvered peak.

  Voilà! Veil after veil I lifted from her, not to speak

  of how my arms were fluttering as I did so.

  I did it in the lane. And boldly did I go

  across the plain where I betrayed her to the cock.

  She fled to the city under the steeple clock,

  and beggar-like I tailed her on the marble quays.

  Far up the road, beneath a grove of laurel trees,

  I wound her in those recollected veils, and realized,

  just a little, something of her massive shape and size.

  Then dawn and child, finding themselves in the wood,

  sank deep down into it. On waking it was noon.

  After Me … (Après le Déluge)

  Once the notion of ‘The Flood’ had dwindled away

  a hare halted in sweet hay where the harebells sway

  and said its prayer to the rainbow through a spider’s web.

  And oh! the precious stones were hiding, or had ebbed,

  what flowers there were already pivoting to look.

  A dirty main street: stalls being set up, boats hauled crook

  by hook towards the sea, delineated wave on wave

  as in an old engraving. Blood flowed in the nave

  of Bluebeard’s Castle, from dark slaughterhouses flowed,

  every window blanched by God’s Seal. Blood and milk flowed.

  Beavers busied themselves building. Tall tasses steamed

  in coffee houses. In the mansion, rain still streamed

  down the windows, children dressed in mourning black

  gazed at engaging images. A door clacked;

  and in the village square a child whirled his arms about,

  understood by weathervane, steeple-cock and rainspout.

  Madame Blank established a piano in the Alps.

  A thousand First Communion Masses packed the apse.

  Caravans embarked. L’Hôtel Splendide was built

  on icy chaos, polar night and snowy milt.

  Ever afterward, the Moon heard jackals cackling

  in the Wastes of Thyme, and eclogues of clogs clacking

  in the orchard. Then in the fluorescing violet

  forest, the fair nymph Eucharis revealed that it

  was spring. Pond, overflow! Foam, overwhelm the bridge,

  and slather through the woods! Lightning and thunder, rage!

  Black draperies and church organs, rise and roll through rain,

  and summon up the former Deluge once again!

  For since it has evaporated — oh, the precious stones

  being buried, and the flowers fully blown! —

  it’s such a bore! And the Queen, the Witch, the Sorceress

  who fans her embers in an earthen crock, will ne’er confess,

  nor tell that which she’s always known,

  which is that which we’ll never know.

  Snow (Fleurs)

  From a golden staircase — among the silken cords

  on gauze of grey, plush velvets lush as greensward,

  discs of crystal blackening like bronze when struck

  by noon — I see the foxglove open on a ruck

  of carpet wrought with silver filigree of eyes

  and tresses. Pieces of yellow gold strewn slantwise

  over agate, tall piers of pernambuco wood

  supporting domes of emerald in the interlude

  of bouquets of white satin sporting on ruby sprays,

  surround the water-rose’s delicate display.

  And like a god with huge blue eyes and arms of snow

  the sea and sky pull towards the marble terraces

  great crowds of white roses rising in crescendo

  as forever young forever strong they grow and grow.

  Cities (Villes)

  Some cities, for whose populations are revealed

  these Alleghenies and these Lebanons of dream!

  See how the chalets built of wood and crystal move

  along on blind pulleys and invisible grooves.

  Copper palm trees, and colossuses, surround

  the ancient craters from which Vulcan tunes resound.

  The Festival of Bawd rings out above the red

  canals which hang behind the chalets overhead.

  Carillons in full cry tumble down the gorges.

  Guilds of giant choristers rush through, gorgeous

  in their oriflammes and vestments dazzling with the light

  that falls upon the mountain peaks of celestite.

  From platforms among precipices Rolands blare

  their trumpets of bravura through the limpid air.

  On hotel roofs and gangways over the abyss

  heat-waves shimmer banners of aurora borealis.

  The lapsed apotheoses join the Alpine fields

  where seraph centauresses wander unconcealed

  among the avalanches. On a level way

  above the highest peak, a great sea troubled by

  th’eternal birth of Venus, packed with Orpheonic craft

  and bubbly pearls and babbling conches fore and aft,

  the waters darkening sporadically with deadly blows.

  Bunches of flowers thick as guns or goblets bellow below.

  Trains of Mabs in opaline and russet dresses

  climb the steep ravines where fall the silver tresses

  of a waterfall and stags with brambly antlers sit

  up to their hocks in it to suckle at Diana’s tit.

  Bacchantes of the suburbs sob their Bacchic song,

  the moon responds with lightning shocks and howls along.

  Venus appears in the ironmaster’s forge.

  Sheaves of campaniles blow forth music from the core:

  music of the peoples. From castles built of bone

  come undreamed-of melodies hitherto unknown.

  All the legends break loose as moose throughout the streets.

  The paradise of storm subsides into defeat.

  Savage ceaseless beings dance the Festival of Dark.

  And once upon a time I flew down happy as a lark

  into a bustling Baghdad boulevard, where throngs

  gave out the joy of fresh-discovered work in song

 
against a thickly woven breeze, and they were powerless

  to elude the fabled phantoms of Parnassus

  where they were destined to have met. What helping hand,

  what happy hour will give me back that Otherland

  whence come all my slumbers and my dreams,

  my stirrings howsoever slight, and everything is what it seems?

  Seer (Mystique)

  On the slant of a slope, angels wheel their robes of wool

  and spin in ceremony on fields of emerald and steel.

  Flames leap from the meadow grasses to the top

  of the hill-breast. To the left, the leaf-mould’s been cropped

  by war horses, trodden by homicides. Pandemonium

  their parabola. Behind the right-hand ridge, the datum

  line of Orients and progress. And while the band

  at the top of the scene is a frieze of the sea meeting sand —