Rimbaud Complete

December 17, 2001
There have been no fully satisfactory translations of the brilliant modernist forerunner Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891): the rather flat Wallace Fowlie version (Univ. of Chicago) is the most reliable, while the error-ridden Penguin volume by Oliver Bernard and the wildly improvisational try by U.S. poet Paul Schmidt (HarperPerennial) take riskier poetic licenses, with uneven results. After Graham Robb's coarse and insensitive, yet energetic and well-received biography of the poet last year (Norton), more attention is being drawn to Rimbaud's actual writings. Mason is a translator of Pierre Michon (Masters and Servants) and Dante's Vita Nuova, and is senior editor of artkrush.com ("a Website about art," says their banner). He offers a tremendous amount of Rimbaudiana, including "schoolwork," essays and drafts, miscellaneous poems and Rimbaud's two longest works, A Season in Hell
and Illuminations. The poems, unfortunately, are inexactly rendered, extending what Rimbaud wrote merely to force a rhyme (Rimbaud's couplet "My hunger, Anne, Anne/ Flee on your mule" is extended by Mason to "Flee on your mule if you can," for example), and sometimes mistranslated altogether. In the famous opening of A Season in Hell, "Bad Blood," Mason renders the French verb injurier
as "to hurt" rather than "to insult" at the point when the poet has beauty across his knees. Fragmentary drafts of unpublished material, complete with crossings out, are included, along with a small-type appendix of all the poems in French, but Mason's versions do not surpass previous efforts. (Mar. 26)Forecast:Rimbaud purists will remain with Fowlie, who offers a selection of letters and French versions of the poems (which the Bernard has but Schmidt lacks). For those in search of a "complete" poet's version, Schmidt is still the choice. Yet the Modern Library imprimatur should bring readers to Mason's work, and Mason is preparing a companion volume of Rimbaud's letters for Counterpoint.

November 1, 2001
A brand-new translation and the only complete one.

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2002
Rimbaud, the almost unbelievably gifted enfant terrible of nineteenth-century French poetry, goes in and out of poetic fashion regularly. Often his biography overwhelms his poems: stealing the older poet Paul Verlaine from his wife for a drug-and-drink-addled affair, all the while creating poems that would alter the course of French literature, only to give up literature at 19 and become a commercial traveler and gunrunner (see Graham Robb's excellent "Rimbaud," 2000). He would be merely an oddity were it not that his poems are indeed splendid, including such nonpareil prose poems as the great sequences "Illuminations" and "A Season in Hell." This useful volume includes all of the poetry as well as various letters that spell out Rimbaud's aesthetic. The translation is literal, to a fault when, too often, it becomes wooden. Furthermore, Mason generally keeps Rimbaud's rhyme schemes and other poetic devices but, inexplicably, not always. Still, the French originals appear in a big appendix, assuring that, despite its shortcomings, this is an important introduction of Rimbaud to another generation of readers. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)