Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition - Softcover

Rimbaud, Jean Nicholas Arthur

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226719774 ISBN 13: 9780226719771

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2005

Synopsis

The enfant terrible of French letters, Jean-Nicholas-Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) was a defiant and precocious youth who wrote some of the most remarkable prose and poetry of the nineteenth century, all before leaving the world of verse by the age of twenty-one. More than a century after his death, the young rebel-poet continues to appeal to modern readers as much for his turbulent life as for his poetry; his stormy affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine and his nomadic adventures in eastern Africa are as iconic as his hallucinatory poems and symbolist prose.

The first translation of the poet's complete works when it was published in 1966, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters introduced a new generation of Americans to the alienated genius—among them the Doors's lead singer Jim Morrison, who wrote to translator Wallace Fowlie to thank him for rendering the poems accessible to those who "don't read French that easily." Forty years later, the book remains the only side-by-side bilingual edition of Rimbaud's complete poetic works.

Thoroughly revising Fowlie's edition, Seth Whidden has made changes on virtually every page, correcting errors, reordering poems, adding previously omitted versions of poems and some letters, and updating the text to reflect current scholarship; left in place are Fowlie's literal and respectful translations of Rimbaud's complex and nontraditional verse. Whidden also provides a foreword that considers the heritage of Fowlie's edition and adds a bibliography that acknowledges relevant books that have appeared since the original publication. On its fortieth anniversary, Rimbaud remains the most authoritative—and now, completely up-to-date—edition of the young master's entire poetic ouvre.

About this title

About the Author:

Seth Whidden is professor of French at the University of Oxford and editor of Nineteenth-Century French Studies. He is the author of Leaving Parnassus: The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud and Authority in Crisis in French Literature, 1850–1880. For ten years he served as coeditor of Parade savage, the scholarly journal of Rimbaud studies.

Review:

"This handsome edition, which makes France's most remarkable poet readily available in the U.S., may well be a literary landmark comparable to Baudelaire's introduction of Edgar Allan Poe in France a century earlier." - Anna Balakian, New York Times Book Review"

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0226719774
• ISBN 13: 9780226719771
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496