A Season in Hell and The Illuminations

"To each being, several other lives seemed due." --Arthur Rimbaud Having closely studied and admired the visionary masterpieces of 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud for years, Christopher Bakka has translated them for himself. Born from a desire to deeply engage with the original French texts and to apprehend, as clearly as is possible, the words that Rimbaud wrote, these translations of A Season in Hell and The Illuminations are free from the wildly creative liberties in diction and syntax that make most translations of Rimbaud unreliable. Pure translation, is, of course, impossible, especially where poetry is concerned; devoted readers of Rimbaud, therefore, are encouraged to engage with the music and ambiguity of the poet's original French, presented here en face.

About the Author :
Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was a visionary French poet from Charleville who dreamed of reinventing love and changing life with his poetry. At the age of sixteen, he traveled to Paris at the invitation of poet Paul Verlaine, ten years his senior, and exploded onto the literary scene with The Drunken Boat. In the ensuing years, Rimbaud further confirmed his place in literature with the spiritual autobiography A Season in Hell (the only work Rimbaud had printed himself) and forty-four scintillating prose texts that were later published as The Illuminations. As notorious for his life as he was for his poetry, Rimbaud had a productive but tumultuous relationship with Verlaine, who shot him in the wrist in Brussels. After abandoning literature at the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud enlisted in the Dutch colonial army in order to travel Java, deserting four months later and returning to France. In 1878, he traveled to Cyprus and worked as a foreman at a stone quarry. Two years later, he was living and working in Aden, Yemen, and then in Harar, Ethiopia, for an export agency. In 1885, he negotiated an arms deal with Menelik, the King of Shoa. A great walker all his life, Rimbaud developed a tumor in his right knee and soon returned to France in excruciating pain. His condition worsened, requiring doctors to amputate his right leg. Rimbaud died at the Hôpital de Conception in Marseille in 1891 at the age of thirty-seven; his body was returned to Charleville and buried in the Charleville-Mézières cemetery. Rimbaud's life and work have inspired countless writers, artists, and musicians, including the French Symbolists, the Beat generation, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Jim Morrison.