Ambitious Kid |
CNN - 10.02.02 Rimbaud's student writings: 'Ambitious kid' 'You Romans envy us this unassailable empire' By HILLEL ITALIE NEW YORK (AP) --Determined to win a school contest, the young poet imagined himself a descendant of the Great Jugurtha, ancient Numidian king and scourge of imperialists. For when Rome decided to meddle In Jugurtha's affairs and bit by bit take hold Of my country, I was fully aware, and heard The rattling of threatening chains, and resolved To resist Rome, knowing the pain of a wounded soul! O sublime countrymen! Warriors! Holy brethren! The poem, titled "A Very Big Baby Was Born," was written in six hours and won first prize. Its creator was not from the Middle East, but from France. He was Arthur Rimbaud, and this and other school compositions written by him are being published for the first time in English. "There's some work that certainly deserves to be seen," says Wyatt Mason, translator of "Rimbaud Complete," a release from the Modern Library that includes seven newly translated pieces. Rimbaud, France's great "poet maudit" ("cursed poet"), remains an obsession to both scholars and general readers, a cultural ancestor to Jack Kerouac and other artist-rebels. Several Rimbaud biographies have appeared in the past decade, including one that likened the poet to rock star Jim Morrison. Leonardo DiCaprio portrayed Rimbaud in the 1995 film "Total Eclipse." And France's National Library in 1998 purchased a long-lost manuscript of Rimbaud's classic "A Season in Hell" for more than $500,000. Although historians seem to have analyzed Rimbaud's every breath, many of his school writings have remained inaccessible to English readers. Mason blames it on "ignorance." "People assume because they're school assignments, they can't have poetic interest: 'It's his early stuff.' 'They have to have limitations.' 'They were written for a certain audience,"' Mason says. The short life Rimbaud, the son of an army captain, was born in the small town of Charlesville in 1854. By his early teens he was writing poetry and sending it to Paul Verlaine and other prominent writers, adjusting his style to resemble that of the person he was addressing. "He was always writing with an audience in mind," Mason says. "This was a wildly ambitious kid who was attempting to curry favor with the poetic establishment, to barter his way out of obscurity into Parisian centrality." Writing with combustible passion, Rimbaud created such essential French verse as "A Season in Hell" and "The Drunken Boat" and was called "The Young Shakespeare" by Victor Hugo. But he soon quit and no examples of his work exist from beyond his early 20s. In 1874, Rimbaud packed his bags and began a journey that took him to major European capitals -- London, Vienna and Brussels among them. Six years later, he left for Aden, on the Arabian peninsula, and did not return to France until 1891, alone and sick. He died in a Marseille hospital that year at age 37 after doctors had amputated his leg. The work, in progress Mason believes Rimbaud's student writings offer invaluable insight into his work process. He was a champion of academic contests -- Mason calls him a "clearinghouse for prize winning" -- and he turned the most pedestrian assignment into a creative experiment. As he later demonstrated to the world, Rimbaud had a gift for communicating rebellion, struggle, oppression. An example is the essay "Appolonius the Greek Speaks of Marcus Cicero," in which Rimbaud imagines a Greek's response to the famed Roman orator. Appolonius taunts his opponent, countering the might of Rome with the artistic power of his own country: "All of Greece has been overrun by Rome; it consoles itself, perhaps, over its loss of liberty, with the thought that though its might holds no dominion over the earth, its genius still does. You Romans envy us this unassailable empire; you would see us dethroned from dominion over the kingdom of words that you might appropriate the one thing you do not own." If his poem about Jugurtha indicates that Rimbaud would have understood contemporary Middle East politics, the poem "Jamque novus" ("The New Year had already begun") shows him anticipating the modern musical practice of "sampling." Rimbaud's school assignment was to write a poem in Latin based on a standard of French verse: Jean Reboul of Nimes' "L'Ange et L'Enfant" ("Angel and Child"). Rimbaud used this lesson as the basis of his first published poem, "The Orphans' New Year's Gift." '"Jamque' is about a mother whose child dies and is whisked off to heaven by an angel. 'Orphans' treats the inverse: children whose mother has died as well. The two were composed around the same time. Just as 'Jamque novus' draws on an earlier poem for its source, 'Orphans' draws on 'Jamque,"' Mason says. "Rimbaud is learning through imitation. He is also learning to imitate as a means of making poems; 'Orphans' has lines sprinkled throughout it that are lifted from Hugo and Francois Coppee." In "Invocation to Venus," Rimbaud's assignment was to translate several lines from the Roman writer Lucretius. His work brought him yet another academic prize. But in the early 1920s, a French scholar discovered that Rimbaud's translation was nearly identical to one that had been published a few months earlier. Rimbaud simply added a couple of lines and made what Mason calls "tasteful improvements." "This practice of borrowing ... is everywhere apparent in Rimbaud's work," Mason says. "It is a technique we can see him using in all the school exercises, and then continuing to use. "His later poems, rather than merely borrowing from the contemporary poets, include stolen snippets of folk songs as well. It's an early example of collage. As T.S. Eliot said, 'Good poets borrow, great poets steal."'
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