Fleeing the Mother Tongue

Jeremy Harding

Rimbaud Complete edited by Wyatt Mason
Scribner, 656 pp, £20.00, November 2003, ISBN 0 7432 3950 4
Collected Poems by Arthur Rimbaud, edited by Martin Sorrell
Oxford, 337 pp, £8.99, June 2001, ISBN 0 19 283344 8
L'Art de Rimbaud by Michel Murat
Corti, 492 pp, €23.00, October 2002, ISBN 2 7143 0796 5
Arthur Rimbaud by Jean-Jacques Lefrère
Fayard, 1242 pp, €44.50, May 2001, ISBN 2 213 60691 9
Arthur Rimbaud: Presence of an Enigma by Jean-Luc Steinmetz, edited by Jon Graham
Welcome Rain, 464 pp, US $20.00, May 2002, ISBN 1 56649 251 3
Rimbaud by Graham Robb
Picador, 552 pp, £8.99, September 2001, ISBN 0 330 48803 1

Arthur Rimbaud, the boy who gave it all up for something different, is a legend, both as a poet and a renouncer of poetry. He had finished with literature before the age of 21. By the time his work began to appear in the 1880s, to great acclaim, he had become a trader and a minor explorer in inhospitable country, working for a French company in Aden which sent him across the Red Sea to run a branch of the business – coffee, hides and ivory for the most part – in the town of Harar, between the Ogaden and the highlands of Abyssinia. He looked back at his earlier life as a poet with some unease. This transition from the adventure of language to adventure proper is crucial to the legend.

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Vol. 25 No. 19 · 9 October 2003 » Jeremy Harding » Fleeing the Mother Tongue (print version)
Pages 24-27 | 5416 words

Letters

From Christopher Prendergast

It's a pity that Jeremy Harding (LRB, 9 October) did not pick up on Mark Treharne's superlative 1998 translations of Rimbaud's Illuminations and Saison en enfer. Treharne would have proved useful, too, on a point of textual scholarship raised by Harding. In respect of the prose poem 'Villes 1', he reports that André Guyaux (who is currently revising the Pléiade Rimbaud) has 'announced a "correct reading"' of a scarcely legible moment in the manuscript (standard practice in French editions and English translations has been to leave an unhelpful blank), which Guyaux gives as 'Brahmas'. That this should be 'announced' as news is news to me. Treharne has 'Brahmas' in his facing-page French text, translates it as 'Brahmins' and in a note says: 'The word is hard to decipher in the manuscript. Rather than leave a blank I have hazarded a reading congruent with the other Indian terms (rupee, nabob) in the text.'

Finally, Harding is quite right to describe Graham Robb's biography as 'dazzling', but, as he gently acknowledges, being dazzled can also amount to being blinded. Demystifying the Rimbaud myth by putting him in soberly assessed context is one thing. Putting him in his place is another thing altogether.

Christopher Prendergast
Danish Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Copenhagen

Jeremy Harding writes: In trying to say something about the parallax effect and the jumpy perspectives of the so-called 'urban' Illuminations in the LRB several years ago, I wrote that 'Mark Treharne's superb English versions … catch these shifts and transections exactly' (30 July 1998). Treharne's translations were good when they appeared and they look good now. As for those 'Brahmas', Prendergast is right to say that they're not news. I meant by 'announced' to suggest that the excellent Guyaux can deliver his views with an Olympian authority: 'pronounced' would have been more like it. Yet Guyaux is also patient and courteous in exposition, especially on this point, about which he wrote at length in Poétique du fragment (1985). But if the word really is 'Brahmas', as he and Treharne agree, why translate it as 'Brahmins'? Perhaps because it's 'the minor officials' of the 'ministries' who are in question here, and it seems to make more sense to liken them to officiating figures – Brahmins – than to the deity proper: Brahma. But the Illuminations rarely work in this helpful way, and I wonder if the better translation mightn't be 'Brahmas'? That they are 'Brahmas' in the plural, rather than the one 'Brahma', ought not to be a worry: in other Illuminations, as Guyaux points out, we find Queen Mabs, Rolands, Sodoms, all in the plural. Besides, French has a word for Brahmin: 'brahmane'. It occurs in 'Vies' I: 'le brahmane qui m'expliqua les Proverbes', which Treharne translates as 'the Brahmin who once explained the Proverbs to me'.