The Illuminations - Softcover

Rimbaud, Arthur

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890650366 ISBN 13: 9781890650360

Publisher: Omnidawn, 2009

Synopsis

With perfect pitch for contemporary audiences, this new translation offers all the immediacy, hallucinatory surrealism, and wit that secured Arthur Rimbaud's esteemed position. As a major poet renowned for his strangely seductive power and innocence, Rimbaud was a dangerous and exhilarating force whose break with literary forms and conventions is aptly displayed in this volume. Published with the French on facing pages and an insightful afterword, this compilation plunges into the heart of Rimbaud's mysterious, revelatory beauty. This is a lucid and lively translation of a seminal work that remains essential and relevant to this day.

About this title

About the Author

Arthur Rimbaud is considered the most outrageous and iconoclastic 19th-century poet of French symbolism and one of the originators of free verse. Donald Revell is a professor of English and the director of creative writing at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas. The winner of numerous awards, he is a former fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim foundations, the former editor-in-chief of Denver Quarterly, and a two-time poetry fellow with the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the poetry editor of Colorado Review, the author of Invisible Green, and the translator of Rimbaud's A Season in Hell. He lives in Las Vegas.

Review

“What a blessing to be given Donald Revell's revelling again in the work of Rimbaud, this time in The Illuminations, Rimbaud's ecstatic vision of life on earth and its end. His "further gospel" (following that of Jesus of Nazareth) proclaims not hope, but happiness. And all in Revell's brilliantly buoyant natural language, and, as in A Season in Hell, the gift of his risky and devoted Translator's Afterword.” (Jean Valentine)

“Finally, a translation that brings Rimbaud, entire and vital, into English. In his masterful and acutely intuitive treatment of this classic, Donald Revell has caught the immediacy of tone and the jarring, often downright alarming juxtapositions and word choices that make Rimbaud's work still so unnervingly modern. Revell has made these familiar poems no longer familiar, but strange and raw—what a pleasure to be able to discover them all over again!” (Cole Swensen)

“Divided as it still is among its several collectors, the manuscript of Illuminations, ‘a sheaf of loose, unnumbered sheets,’ (Félix Fénéon) was not exactly a book, and may not actually have been called Illuminations, or The Illuminations, but that is another story. In this new translation, Donald Revell becomes neo-alchemical transpositions of Arthur Rimbaud. He fancifully exhibits dreams and hallucinations, new elliptical ultrasounds ending ‘with angels of fire and ice.’ Revell’s dedicated translation presents these astonishing prose poems ‘bedecked with flags and flowers’.” (Norma Cole)

Edition details

• Publisher: Omnidawn
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1890650366
• ISBN 13: 9781890650360
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120