Rimbaud Complete (Modern Library Classics) by Arthur Rimbaud Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Rimbaud Complete (Modern Library Classics)
Book Review: Skip the Introduction
Summary: 5 Stars
Much of the introduction is about Rimbaud's life and the conflicting stories, as well as translation and why he translated Rimbaud the way he did. My advice is to you is to buy the book and skip Mason's Introduction altogether... and go straight to the actual poems. This book offers the most complete version of Rimbaud that I've found. I own other versions of Illuminations and A Season in Hell. I truly enjoyed reading Rimbaud's earlier poems letters. They show his boldness... his progression into a visionary poet... and his excitement towards writing.Mason's translations of the Illuminations and A Season in Hell are quite solid... and they alone make this book worth purchasing.
Book Review: rimbaud rocks!
Summary: 5 Stars
mason takes liberty with the texts, but i dig it. to really understand rimbaud you need to read him in french, but if you can't, the next best thing is to read fowlie's book and then this one. then read henry miller.Book Review: Damnation in the form of a rainbow
Summary: 4 Stars
Having been an avid reader (and admirer) of Rimbaud for the past 6 years, I have to say that I prefer these translations to Fowlie's and countless others. I'd like to qualify that statement by frankly admitting that I do not like the translator. His introduction is arrogant, prickly, and self promoting. Mason seems bent on convincing us that every image ever created of Rimbaud, the passionate and vicious young poet from Charleville, are all simply projections and fantasies. While I've obviously seen this from many translators concerning many figures, Mason pulls it off with more pretentiousness than usual. "I don't want the reader to come away with his or her own Rimbaud," he says. As if that were possible:as if it were not part of the creative process to take away our own impressions of a poet or artist. Truth be told, there is very little ambiguity as regards the interpretation of Rimbaud's life: it was a vicious search for the absolute through any means necessary, sadly abandoned through poetic burn out. Mason's form of analytical pomposity is nothing other than the desire to destroy the passion inherent in Rimbaud's life and works by casting doubt on his memory and talent. That said, the translations are catastrophic and deserving of praise, "The Drunken Boat" in particular. The poems speak for themselves. In short, listen to Rimbaud, not Mason.Book Review: At first sceptical...
Summary: 5 Stars
At first I was sceptical of this translation. Mason sometimes veers wildly from the original French. However, the Introduction to the volume is so well-reasoned that I became convinced that this is a very fine, thoughtful piece of work. It may not be the literal French, but it is almost as close to Rimbaud's French as the English idiom can be. I also highly recommend the Treharne translations of A Season in Hell and Illuminations, although it is currently out of print.Book Review: Prosy or clunky, and not as faithful as it might be
Summary: 2 Stars
First, it ought to said that, as poetry in English, this translation of Rimbaud fails utterly. Mason indicates in the introduction that he attempts to walk the line between literal and 'poetic' translation. If by this he means that he neither resorts to the kind of inanity with which Paul Schmidt destroyed Rimbaud for late 20th-century Americans, nor to the faithful but poetically unsatisfying Fowlie edition, then he's telling at least a version of the truth. But who could not, with fluent French and enough time, translate French works faithfully into prose? And yet because he is comparatively a novice writer in English of the analogous sort of poetry to that which Rimbaud wrote in French, the concessions and compromises he must make are just terrible as regards both the literal and technical aspects of the poems. Concerning the early (verse) poems, it becomes quickly clear that the translator has no skill as a versifier. Translating requires a resourcefulness bred of technical experience. I don't know if Mason writes original poems, but if so they must be of a very modern sort, which is to say contemporary (as opposed to Modernist) free verse. Of course few people now have good ears for versification, but to those who do--to those who wish a translation to convey something of the greatness, at least, of the original--the technical performance sounds woefully like that of a beginner. His rhymes are forced, his syntax is wrenched for rhymes that aren't particularly good in the first place, and his meter is extremely slack if it exists at all. This is particularly a problem as the greatness of Rimbaud's 40-some-odd early poems derives in large part from his technical genius. To take at random only one of many examples, in his translation of "Les Corbeaux," Mason translates what in English means roughly "Strange army with [your] harsh cries,/Cold winds are ravaging your nests" as "Strange armies with cries that crack/ Cold nests that winds attack." This contains the sort of forcing of rhymes that an adept poet would know to avoid. Mason has added highly unnatural demonstrative pronouns to these two very short phrases in order to get a rhyme whose first element "crack" is way off. The result is an ugly fragment. Of course crows' cries might be described as cracking, but not in this poem. The same translation ends with "Alas" which is no where in the original, and is again inserted for rhyme's sake. Falling as it does at the end of the last line, it makes the poem sound glib and world-weary. In French, the poem is certainly not glib and not exactly world-weary in the way that "Alas," as the poem's final word, makes it sound. I could go on for a page with problems I find in just this one poem. The text is filled--filled--with such clunkiness, and it makes for bad poetry _and_ bad translation of meaning. If Mason were a good, resourceful poetic translator, he would not be quite so baffled by the formal constraints. Perhaps he should have rendered a prose translation. Surely he should have worked harder at it. But I guess few are the people who know how to translate poems, and even fewer are those who can spy a bad translation.