DISCOVERIES

I Promise

to Be Good

The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud

Translated, edited and with

an introduction by Wyatt Mason

Modern Library: 358 pp., $24.95

Perhaps, in the chaos of world events, you have somehow failed to follow the vicious squabbling in academia over the life and works of Arthur Rimbaud, the French writer who gave up poetry at age 19 (after five good years) and died in 1891 at the untimely age of 37. Perhaps you know him only by myth: Bad boy rebel poet, possibly gay but probably bisexual, lover of the lesser poet Paul Verlaine, survivor of literary and romantic scenes worthy of Norman Mailer. All of Rimbaud’s translators and biographers (and there have been four biographies since 1997) purport to save him from the others; the beret-wearing, absinthe-drinking reckless hordes who have filled in the paucity of information with their own lusty imaginings (academic careers have been built on far, far less). Wyatt Mason, in a word, detests all that; he shows us, in his straightforward translations of these letters from the second half of Rimbaud’s life (ages 19 to 37), a man dedicated to factual information, a simple but elegant describer of the foreign lands -- primarily the African desert -- from Alexandria to Abyssinia, that he lived and worked in as geographer, photographer, coffee merchant and gun-runner. Most of the letters are to his mother and sister Isabelle back in France, and there is a soul-numbing similarity throughout: requests for books and elaborate mailing instructions, pleas for money and reports on how much he plans to earn in Africa, and descriptions of the arguments over jobs and money that seemed to make up the sum total of Rimbaud’s personal interactions in Africa. A few, like the “Report on the Ogadine” of 1883, are stunningly clear and carefully written, even creative -- like this letter fragment from 1875 to his sister: “I am in a lovely valley that leads to Lac Majeur and old Italy. I slept in the heart of Tessin in a lonely barn where a bony cow was ruminating and willing to relinquish some of its straw” -- but most are pretty pedestrian. Still, some readers, like myself, will prefer these later writings to the petulant, dismissive, arrogant efforts of his teenage years -- the poems and letters that made his reputation/myth. A man who gives up poetry to look at the world with a disciplined eye, who sleeps outdoors for the last 20 years of his life -- now there’s a writer you can sink your teeth into.

*

From Absinthe

to Abyssinia

Selected Miscellaneous,

Obscure and Previously

Untranslated Works of

Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud

Translated by Mark Spitzer

Creative Arts: 168 pp., $14.95

Mark Spitzer is as certain as Wyatt Mason that he knows the real Rimbaud; with great confidence he assures us that he “relied on possibilities that had been overlooked by prior translators, but were no doubt intended by Rimbaud.” Spitzer takes more liberties in his translations than does Wyatt; sometimes they read more smoothly, because the phrasing is not so literally tied to the original French grammar. For example, here is part of Mason’s translation of “Report on the Ogadine”: “Its climate is therefore hotter than Harrar. It would seem to have two rainy seasons; one in October, and the other in March. The rain is general then, but fairly light.” Compare with Spitzer’s: “Its climate is therefore hotter than Harrar’s. It seems to have two rainy seasons: one in October and the other in March when the rains are frequent, but light.” As might be divined from his book’s title, Spitzer also seems less squeamish about the myth surrounding the man; he includes fascinating statements made in 1873 to the police by Verlaine and Rimbaud after an episode in which Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist. In an 1888 letter to Ugo Ferrandi, an Italian explorer Rimbaud sometimes traveled with, the ex-pat includes a P.S. -- “It is unnecessary to speak of my departure to anyone” -- which Mason does not, for some reason, include in his translation of the same letter. The enduring lesson, it seems, is that if you are really crazy about a writer and must depend on translations, you’d better read all of them until you hear that writer’s voice in your head, in some language that only the two of you share.