Arthur Rimbaud: The Poems

The meteoric and turbulent poetic career of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was crammed into four teenage years, in which he wrote some wonderful short poems and two masterpieces, `The Illuminations’ and `A Seaon in Hell’. At nineteen he then turned his back on the literary life and left France, eventually travelling to Aden, Ethiopia and Somalia, while working as a trader.

 

Oliver Bernard’s `Rimbaud’ was first published in the Penguin Poets series in 1962. This newly revised edition of his superb presentation adds the Latin verse which Rimbaud wrote as school exercises. The poems are presented in bilingual form with Bernard’s lively and accurate prose versions below the French. Together with an illuminating introduction and the inclusion of a selection of Rimbaud’s letters, this is the most helpful edition of Rimbaud’s astonishing body of work for English-language readers and students of French poetry.

 

Oliver Bernard’s translations were described in a `Times’ review by Robert Nye as `quite outstanding… so intrinsically poetic that it comes as no surprise to find that Bernard writes original verse himself.’ Anvil has published his poetry, `Verse &c.’ (2001) and his `Apollinaire: Selected Poems’ (new ed. 2004). He has lived in Norfolk for over 30 years.

Arthur Rimbaud: Rimbaud was born at Charleville in northern France in 1854. He was already a poet by the age of fifteen. In 1871 he began his stormy affair with Paul Verlaine, travelling with him to London in 1872. He gave up writing poetry after completing A Season in Hell at the age of nineteen. After travelling widely in Europe, he left for Aden via Cyprus and Egypt and worked there as a trader and gun-runner. He died in Marseilles in 1891 from complications after a tumour had resulted in a leg amputation.

Oliver Bernard: Born in 1925, Oliver Bernard is a poet and translator who has lived in Norfolk for over thirty years. His publications include Poems (1983), Apollinaire: Selected Poems (Penguin, 1965; Anvil, 1986 and 2004) and Verse &c. (2001), also published by Anvil. He has worked as an advisory teacher of drama. A volume of autobiography, Getting Over It (1991), described his Soho days in the company of poets and artists in the mid twentieth century.