Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

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Notes

Edgell Rickword translated this section into straight prose in his biography: ‘A bird's song stops you and makes you flush. There is a bog with a nest of white beasts, a little carriage abandoned in the coppice, or which runs down the path, enribboned. On the road, through the edge of the wood, one can see a troupe of little players in their costumes … In the end, when one is hungry and thirsty, he says, there is someone who drives you away’ (1974b: 120). Cleverly, Rickword edits out the clock and cathedral as being unlikely to have been encountered on the ‘real’ walk. His version is less nightmarish, more accurate with ‘coppice’ and ‘bog’, and more charming with ‘little players’; but then he is less interested in Freudianising these experiences, more in setting them up as real bids for freedom: ‘A country walk meant, originally, a temporary freedom from his mother and all that she implied’ (120).

‘No doubt the earliest readers of Fantômas shuddered delightedly at the thought that dire acts were being committed in the next street or one they walked along to work every day, its sober façades a seeming denial of fantastic goings-on behind them’ (Ashbery, 2004a: 189).