Oraison du Soir
Je vis assis, tel qu'un ange aux mains d'un barbier,
Empoignant une chope à fortes cannelures,
L'hypogastre et le col cambrés, une Gambier
Aux dents, sous l'air gonflé d'impalpables voilures.
Tels que les excréments chauds d'un vieux colombier,
Mille Rêves en moi font de douces brûlures :
Puis par instants mon coeur triste est comme un aubier
Qu'ensanglante l'or jeune et sombre des coulures.
Puis, quand j'ai ravalé mes rêves avec soin,
Je me tourne, ayant bu trente ou quarante chopes,
Et me recueille, pour lâcher l'âcre besoin :
Doux comme le Seigneur du cèdre et des hysopes,
Je pisse vers les cieux bruns, très haut et très loin
Avec l'assentiment des grands héliotropes.
*
Evening Prayer
I spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair
Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs
My neck and gut both bent, while in the air
A weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs.
Like steaming dung within an old dovecote
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:
From time to time my heart is like some oak
Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.
And then, when I have swallowed down my Dreams
In thirty, forty mugs of beer, I turn
To satisfy a need I can't ignore,
And like the Lord of Hyssop and of Myrrh
I piss into the skies, a soaring stream
That consecrates a patch of flowering fern.
～Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works. Translated from the French by Paul Schmidt. Harper Colophon, 1976.
+++
Sensation
Par les soirs bleus d'été, j'irai dans les sentiers,
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue :
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.
Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien :
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la Nature, -- heureux comme avec une femme.
*
Through blue summer nights, I will pass along paths,
Getting pricked by wheat, trampling short grass:
Dreaming, I will feel coolness underfoot,
Will let breezes bathe my bare head.
Not a word, not a thought:
Boundless love will surge through my soul,
And I will wander far away, a vagabond,
In Nature, -- as happily as with a woman.
～"Sensation," by Arthur Rimbaud, March 1870. From Rimbaud Complete, translated and edited by Wyatt Mason and published by Scribner (2003).
1 comment:
Ten quotations by Arthur Rimbaud:
#1 “Weakness or strength: there you are, it’s strength. You do not know where you are going, nor why you are going; enter anywhere; reply to anything.”
#2 “I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
#3 “I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.”
#4 “A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed–and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!”
#5 “True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.”
#6 “The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought.”
#7 “But I’ve just noticed that my mind is asleep.”
#8 “I’m now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I’m working at turning myself into a seer. You won’t understand any of this, and I’m almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It’s really not my fault.”
#9 “My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?”
#10 “A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn’t he?”
(via http://www.rebellesociety.com/2013/05/28/a-thousand-dreams-within-me-softy-burn/)
Post a Comment