The collapse of idols inundates the sunny uplands where seraphic centauresses sport among avalanches. From footbridges over the abyss and from the roofs of inns thunderbolts fly like flags. On platforms over chasms, latter-day Rolands trumpet their bravado. Guilds of gigantic singers gather together in all their finery, haloed like mountaintops. Ringed by colossi and copper palm trees, old craters roar tunefully in fires. What cities! And these are the humans for whom the dream Alleghenies and Lebanons first arose! Chalets of crystal and timber move along invisible trails. Life./ -Was that it, then?/ -And the dream grows cold”), in perfect keeping with the protean, inestimably influential original, making this among the finest of its English translations yet produced. His phrasing is rich and fluid (“The soft perfume of the stars and of the sky and of everything drifts down from the hilltop”) or crisp and strident (“Unsought air and unsought world. What distinguishes Revell’s work is its exquisite, carefully modulated musicality. Revell’s version is no more or less accessible than previous translations, and dips into the contemporary idiom are thankfully infrequent and unobtrusive. Revell lives in the desert south of Las Vegas with his wife, poet Claudia Keelan, and their children Benjamin Brecht and Lucie Ming. Former editor-in-chief of Denver Quarterly, he now serves as poetry editor of Colorado Review. His books of essays include Invisible Green: Selected Prose, published by Omnidawn. He has also translated The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems by Guillame Apollinaire, and Alcools: Poems by Guillame Apollinaire, both published by Wesleyan University Press. Donald Revell’s previous translations include A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud (Omnidawn 2007), which won the PEN USA Translation Award. Additionally, he has twice been granted fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Twice winner of the PEN Center USA Award for Poetry, he has also won the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations.
Thief of Strings is his tenth poetry collection, published by Alice James. Though brilliant, during his life his peers regarded him as perverse, unsophisticated, and youthfully arrogant, and he died virtually indifferent to his own work.ĭonald Revell is Professor of English & Director of Creative Writing programs at UNLV. His poetry was subconsciously inspired and highly suggestive his persona was caustic and unstable.
Rimbaud illuminations poems free#
His poem “Voyelles” invoked synesthesia, marking him as a founder of French symbolism, and his Une Saison en Enfer ( A Season in Hell) is considered one of the first works of free verse. 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.”Ī volatile and peripatetic poet, the prodigy Arthur Rimbaud wrote all of his poetry in a space of less than five years. In this new translation, Donald Revell becomes neo-alchemical transpositions of Arthur Rimbaud. This lucid and lively translation of a seminal work will show current readers of English all the ways that Rimbaud’s incandescence remains essential and relevant today.ĭivided 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. Published with the French on facing pages and with an insightful afterward by the translator, Donald Revell plunges readers into the heart of Rimbaud’s mysterious, revelatory beauty.
Rimbaud was a dangerous and exhilarating force whose break with literary forms and conventions changed forever the way poems would be read and written. With perfect pitch for contemporary readers, Donald Revell’s new translation of The Illuminations offers all the immediacy, hallucinatory surreality, and wit of the intimate particularity that secured Rimbaud’s position as a major poet renowned for his strangely seductive power and innocence.
Description Translated by Donald Revell French on facing pages
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