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London Review of Books

Fleeing the Mother Tongue subscriber-only content

Jeremy Harding

  • Rimbaud Complete edited by Wyatt Mason
  • Collected Poems by Arthur Rimbaud, edited by Martin Sorrell
  • L'Art de Rimbaud by Michel Murat
  • Arthur Rimbaud by Jean-Jacques Lefrère
  • Arthur Rimbaud: Presence of an Enigma by Jean-Luc Steinmetz, edited by Jon Graham
  • Rimbaud by Graham Robb

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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Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the LRB. His versions of Rimbaud’s poetry are published by Penguin along with John Sturrock’s translation of the letters.