Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)
Translated by Edris Iravi
Fairy
For Hélène the ornamental saps conspired — in virgin shadows and impossible brightnesses, within the astral silence. The ardour of summer was entrusted to mute birds, and indolence required by a token of priceless mourning, through the inlets of dead loves and sunken perfumes.
— After the moment of the woodcutters’ air, with the murmur of the torrent beneath the ruin of the woods, with the ringing of cattle echoing through the valleys, and the cries of the steppes. —
For the childhood of Hélène shivered the furs and the shadows — and the breasts of the poor, and the legends of the sky.
And her eyes and her dance — still superior to precious gleams, to cold influences, to the pleasure of setting and of the unique hour.
Barbarian
Long after the days and the seasons, and the beings and the lands,
The flag of bleeding meat upon the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers; (they do not exist.)
Recovered from the old fanfares of heroism — which still assail our hearts and heads — far from the ancient assassins —
Oh! the flag of bleeding meat upon the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers; (they do not exist.)
Sweetnesses!
The braziers, raining amid gusts of frost — Sweetnesses! — the fires in the rainfall of the diamond wind, flung forth by the heart of the earth eternally charred for us. — O world! —
(Far from the old refuges and the old flames one hears, one feels,)
The braziers and the foams. The music, revolving of abysses and the clash of ice against the stars.
O sweetnesses, O world, O music! And there — the forms, the sweats, the hair and the eyes, floating. And the white, boiling tears — O sweetnesses! — and the feminine voice reaching to the depths of volcanoes and arctic caves…
The flag…
Historic Evening
On some evening, for instance, when the naïve tourist, withdrawn from our economic horrors, finds himself there — the hand of a master stirs the harpsichord of the meadows; they play cards at the bottom of the pond, that mirror evoking queens and sweethearts; there are saints, veils, and threads of harmony, and legendary chromaticisms over the sunset.
He shivers at the passing of the hunts and the hordes. The comedy drips upon the grassy stage. And the confusion of the poor and the weak upon such stupid plains! Before his enslaved vision — Germany scaffolds itself towards moons; the Tartar deserts grow bright — ancient revolts swarm in the heart of the Celestial Empire1; through the stairways and thrones of kings — a small, pale, and flat world, Africa and the West, begins to rise. Then comes a ballet of seas and familiar nights, a chemistry without value, and impossible melodies.
The same bourgeois magic at every point where the trunk sets us down! The most basic physicist feels it is no longer possible to submit to this personal atmosphere, this mist of physical remorse, whose very perception is already an affliction.
No! — The time of the furnace, of the lifted seas, of underground conflagrations, of the planet carried away, and the consequent exterminations — certainties so faintly, so slyly suggested in the Bible and by the Norns2 — that it will be given to the serious being to watch over. — Yet it will not be a matter of legend!
Vulgar Nocturne
A breath opens operatic breaches in the partitions — scrambles the pivoting of the gnawed roofs — scatters the boundaries of hearths — eclipses the windows. — Along the vine, leaning my foot against a gargoyle — I descended into this carriage, whose era is fairly indicated by the convex mirrors, the bulging panels, and the contoured sofas. Hearse of my sleep, isolated, shepherd’s house of my foolishness, the vehicle swerves across the grass of the erased main road: and in a flaw at the top of the right mirror spun the pale lunar figures — leaves, breasts; — a very dark green and blue invade the image. Horses unharnessed near a patch of gravel.
— Here will one whistle for the storm, and the Sudoms — and the Solyms — and the ferocious beasts and the armies,
— (Postilion and dream-beasts, will they resume beneath the most suffocating groves, to plunge me up to the eyes in the source of silk?)
— And send us, whipped through the lapping waters and spilled drinks, to roll upon the barking of mastiffs…
A breath scatters the boundaries of the hearth.
Dawn
I have kissed the summer dawn.
Nothing yet stirred upon the fronts of the palaces. The water lay dead. The shadowy camps did not leave the forest road. I walked, awakening the warm and lively breaths, and the gemstones looked on, and the wings rose without a sound.
The first encounter was, in the path already filled with fresh and pale gleams, a flower that told me its name.
I laughed at the blond waterfall that tumbled through the firs: at the silvered summit I recognised the goddess.
Then I lifted the veils, one by one. Along the avenue, flinging my arms. Across the plain, where I revealed her to the cock. In the great city she fled among the steeples and domes, and running like a beggar along the marble quays, I pursued her.
At the top of the road, near a grove of laurels, I enclosed her with her gathered veils, and I felt a little of her immense body. The dawn and the child fell to the foot of the wood.
Upon waking it was noon.
Mystical
On the slope of the embankment, the angels turn their woollen robes in the meadows of steel and emerald. From the fields of flames they leap to the top of the hillock. To the left, the soil of the ridge is trampled by all homicides and all battles, and all disastrous noises trace their curve. Behind the right-hand ridge lies the line of the east, of progress.
And while the band at the top of the canvas is formed of the whirling and bounding murmur of seashells of the seas and human nights,
The flowered sweetness of the stars, of the sky, and of all else descends before the embankment, like a basket — against our faces — and makes the abyss beneath it fragrant and blue.
Royalty
One fine morning, among a very gentle people, a man and a magnificent woman cried out in the public square:
“My friends, I want her to be queen!”
“I want to be queen!”
She laughed and trembled. He spoke to the friends of revelation, of a completed trial. They swooned against one another.
Indeed, they were kings for a whole morning, when the crimson hangings were lifted on the houses, and all afternoon, as they advanced toward the palm gardens.
Phrases
When the world is reduced to a single black wood for our four astonished eyes — to a beach for two faithful children — to a musical house for our clear sympathy — I will find you.
Let there be here below only a solitary old man, calm and beautiful, surrounded by “unspeakable luxury” — and I am at your knees.
Let me have realised all your memories — let me be the one who knows how to bind you — I will suffocate you.
□
When we are very strong — who recoils? Very merry, who falls into ridicule? When we are very wicked, what would one do with us?
Adorn yourselves, dance, laugh — I can never send Love through the window.
□
— Comrade of mine, beggar girl, monstrous child! How indifferent you are, to these wretched women and their schemes, and to my embarrassments. Cling to us with your impossible voice, your voice! The only flatterer of this vile despair.
Metropolitan
From the indigo strait to the seas of Ossian3, upon the pink and orange sand washed by the wine-coloured sky, boulevards of crystal rise and intersect, immediately inhabited by young, poor families feeding themselves at the fruit stalls. Nothing rich. — The city!
From the asphalt desert flee straight, in rout, with the bands of mist tiered in dreadful strips against the sky that bends back, recedes, and descends, formed of the blackest, most sinister smoke the grieving Ocean can produce, the helmets, the wheels, the boats, the haunches. — The battle!
Raise your head: this arched wooden bridge; the last kitchen gardens of Samaria4; these painted masks beneath the lantern whipped by the cold night; the foolish water-nymph in her noisy dress at the river’s edge; these luminous skulls among the pea plants — and the other phantasmagorias — The countryside.
Roads lined with railings and walls, barely containing their groves, and the atrocious flowers one might call hearts and sisters, Damascus languishing with longing — possessions of fairy-like ultra-Rhenish, Japanese, Guaraní5 aristocracies, still capable of receiving the music of the ancients — and there are inns that will never open again — there are princesses, and, if you are not too overwhelmed, the study of the stars. — The sky.
The morning when, with Her, you struggled among these shards of snow, the green lips, the ice, the black flags and blue rays, and the purple scents of the polar sun — your strength.
Ruts
To the right, the summer dawn awakens the leaves, the vapours, and the sounds of this corner of the park, while the embankments to the left hold, in their violet shadow, the thousand swift ruts of the wet road. A parade of fairyland. Indeed: chariots laden with gilded wooden animals, masts, and colourful canvases, at the full gallop of twenty spotted circus horses, and the children, and the men, upon their most astonishing beasts; — twenty vehicles, humped, festooned, and flowered like ancient or fairy-tale carriages, full of children dressed for a suburban pastoral. — Even coffins under their night canopies, bearing plumes of ebony, flying at the trot of the great blue and black mares.
Édith 