A Season In Hell

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Poco tempo fa, M.me Verlaine è andata a cercare suo marito tentando di riportarlo indietro. Verlaine ha replicato che era troppo tardi, che non potevano tornare a vivere insieme e che in ogni caso non era più il suo uomo. ‘La vita matrimoniale mi fa orrore!’ gridò ‘Ci amiamo come due tigri!’ E, così dicendo, si era denudato il petto di fronte alla moglie: era pieno di lividi e di ferite fatte con la lama di un coltello dal suo amico Rimbaud. Queste due creature avevano l’abitudine di lottare e ferirsi l’un l’altra come animali selvatici in quanto solo così potevano avere dopo il piacere di fare di nuovo la pace. » Sometimes I see limitless beaches in the sky covered by white nations full of joy. A great golden vessel, above me, waves its multicoloured flags in the morning breeze. I’ve created all the feasts, all the triumphs, all the dramas. I’ve tried to invent new flowers; new stars, new flesh, new languages. I believed I’d gained supernatural powers. Ah well! I must bury my imagination and my memories! Sweet glory as an artist and story-teller swept away! Arthur Rimbaud: Une Saison en Enfer/Eine Zeit in der Hölle, Reclam, Stuttgart 1970; afterword by W. Dürrson, S. 106. Fowlie: "Long ago, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where everyone's heart was generous, and where all wines flowed."

Meanwhile, let us demand new things from the poets - ideas and forms. All the clever ones will think they can easily satisfy this demand: that’s not so! .....

A Felt lyric says "you're reading from A Season in Hell but you don't know what it's about" but there's no shame in that when academics can't quite agree on its subject either. The prose poem is loosely divided into nine parts, of varying length. They differ markedly in tone and narrative comprehensibility.

My health was threatened. Terror arrived. I fell into a slumber for several days, and, waking, continued in saddest dream. I was ripe for death, and by a perilous road my weakness led me to the confines of the world and Cimmeria, land of shadows and whirlwinds. In the last line, he describes spring and how it brought to him “the dreadful laugh of the idiot”. He seems to be going mad, losing touch with the things that could be positive in his life, and laughing at the coming of spring. It’s likely that with its transformations he realizes, more than anyone else, that the seasons change nothing. He’s still miserable.O divine Spouse, my Lord, do not refuse the confession of the most sorrowful of your servants. I am lost. I am drunk. I am impure. What a life! Bernard Mathieu describes A Season in Hell as "a terribly enigmatic poem", and a "brilliantly near-hysterical quarrel between the poet and his 'other'." [1] :p.1 He identifies two voices at work in the surreal narrative: "the two separate parts of Rimbaud's schizoid personality—the 'I' who is a seer/poet and the 'I' who is the incredibly hard-nosed widow Rimbaud's peasant son. One voice is wildly in love with the miracle of light and childhood, the other finds all these literary shenanigans rather damnable and 'idiotic'." [1] :pp.1–2 A Season in Hell & Illuminations is a journey in which Arthur Rimbaud serves as poet, visionary and madman. Rimbaud's journey, the words and images he uses, is evocative and always speaks to me (even in translation). This doesn't mean I fully understand how Rimbaud's poetry should be interpreted or how each person should approach the poems. Still, there is no doubt that they are powerful. While I'm more drawn to A Season in Hell, I've read both parts multiple times and find something different each time.

So, just recently, when I found myself on the brink of the final squawk! it dawned on me to look again for the key to that ancient party where I might find my appetite once more.I’m not a prisoner of my reason. I said: ‘God, I want freedom in salvation: how to pursue it? Frivolous tastes have quit me. No need for self-sacrifice or divine love any more. I don’t regret the age of sensitive hearts. Each has his reason, scorn, pity: I retain my place at the summit of this angelic ladder of good sense. Fire! Fire at me! Here! Or I’ll surrender – Cowards! – I’ll kill myself! I’ll hurl myself under the horses’ hooves! The second delirium, “Alchemy of the Word,” presents the speaker’s dream of what poetry could be. He has made experiments with sounds, very much as an alchemist might experiment with elements. He has assigned a color to each vowel in an effort to create a whole new language for poetry. Now he dreams of a shape for each consonant and offers carefully crafted verses about a new age and a new relation between nature and humans. At the center is a new Tower of Babel and the song of a new age sung from its heights. The verses here are pure lyric, not the alexandrines of “The Drunken Boat” and many of Rimbaud’s other major poems. However, all this is folly, he says, like the vanity of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Stamattina devo aver appoggiato il piede sbagliato sullo scendiletto. Altrimenti non si spiegherebbe perché la mia testa abbia associato una tazza di latte coi cereali (la crusca, detesto la crusca) ad Arthur Rimbaud. Non si spiegherebbe perché sono entrata in punta di piedi nella stanza-studiolo, ho aperto l’anta dell’armadio-libreria con un timore quasi reverenziale e ho tirato giù dallo scaffale il volume grosso e blu che giace lì da tempo immemore. In copertina, lo scatto in bianco e nero del nostro diciassettenne terribile, gli occhi grigietti, l’espressione tra assorta e beffarda. I became opera: I saw that all living things were doomed, to bliss: that's not living; it's just a way to waste what we have, a drain. Morality is a weakness of mind." (p21) Ce texte est magique, ensorcelé, maudit, magnifique, pervers, exquis de délicatesse et de naïveté, envoûtant du pêché d’innocence et du crime de simplicité d’esprit. Il est un délire sans fin mais sans commencement non plus sur l’impossibilité dans laquelle Rimbaud se trouvait de simplement se poser dans une des boîtes cubiques qui sont sensées être l’habitat de chacun de nous dans une société moderne. Et qu’aurait-il souffert s’il avait connu les boîtes cubiques de nos temps modernes avec Internet, Netflix and Google intégrés et branchés directement sur nos cerveaux par WIFI mental expérimental et connecté pour toujours et irréversible ? However, it is a well and deliberately edited and revised text. This becomes clear if one compares the final version with the earlier versions. [4]Morning ( Matin) – this short section serves as a conclusion, where the narrator claims to have "finished my account of my hell," and "can no longer even talk". Tedium’s no longer my love. Rage, debaucheries, madness, all of whose joys and disasters I know – my whole burden’s laid down. Let us appreciate without dizziness the extent of my innocence. You’re a hyena still...’ the demon cries who crowned me with such delightful poppies. ‘Win death with all your appetites; your egotism, all the deadly sins.’