Arthur Rimbaud

L’hiver, nous irons dans un petit wagon rose
Avec des coussins bleus.
Nous serons bien. Un nid de baisers fous repose
Dans chaque coin moelleux.-
…..
Tu fermeras l’oeil, pour ne point voir, par la glace,
Grimacer les ombres des soirs,
Ces monstruosités hargneuses, populace
De démons noirs et de loups noirs.
…..
Puis tu te sentiras la joue égratignée
Un petit baiser, comme une folle araignée,
Te courra par le cou
…..
Et tu me diras : “Cherche !”, en inclinant la

I
On n’est pas sérieux, quand on a dix-sept ans.
– Un beau soir, foin des bocks et de la limonade,
Des cafés tapageurs aux lustres éclatants!
– On va sous les tilleuls verts de la promenade.

Les tilleuls sentent bon dans les bons soirs de juin!
L’air est parfois si doux, qu’on ferme la paupière;
Le vent chargé de bruits – la ville n’est pas loin
A des parfums de vigne et des parfums de

I

When you are seventeen you aren’t really serious.
– One fine evening, you’ve had enough of beer and lemonade,
And the rowdy cafes with their dazzling lights!
– You go walking beneath the green lime trees of the promenade.

The lime trees smell good on fine evenings in June!
The air is so soft sometimes, you close your eyelids;
The wind, full of sounds, – the town’s not far away –
Carries odours of vines, and

On the blue summer evenings, I shall go down the paths,
Getting pricked by the corn, crushing the short grass
In a dream I shall feel its coolness on my feet.
I shall let the wind bathe my bare head.
—
I shall not speak, I shall think about nothing
But endless love will mount in my soul;
And I shall travel far, very far, like a gipsy,
Through the countryside – as happy as if I

I

Le Soleil, le foyer de tendresse et de vie,
Verse l’amour brûlant à la terre ravie,
Et, quand on est couché sur la vallée, on sent
Que la terre est nubile et déborde de sang;
Que son immense sein, soulevé par une âme,
Est d’amour comme Dieu, de chair comme la femme,
Et qu’il renferme, gros de sève et de rayons,
Le grand fourmillement de tous les embryons!

Et tout croît, et tout monte!

spacespacespacespacespacespace- O Vénus, ô

Idle youth
Enslaved to everything,
By being too sensitive
I have wasted my life.
Ah! Let the time come
When hearts are enamoured.
I said to myself: let be,
And let no one see you:
Do without the promise
Of higher joys.
Let nothing delay you,
Majestic retirement.
I have endured so long
That I have forgotten everything;
Fear and suffering
Have flown to the skies.
And morbid thirst
Darkens my veins.
Thus the meadow
Given over to oblivion,
Grown up, and flowering
With frankincense and tares
To the wild buzzing
Of

Very late, when he feels his stomach churn,
Brother Milotus, one eye on the skylight
Whence the sun, bright as a scoured stewpan,
Darts a megrim at him and dizzies his sight,
Moves his priest’s belly under the sheets.

He struggles beneath the grey blanket
And gets out, his knees to his trebling belly,
Flustered like an old man who has swallowed a pinch of snuff,
Because he has to tuck up his nightshirt in armfuls round

The poor omnibus driver under the tin canopy,
warming a huge chilblain inside his glove,
follows his heavy omnibus along the left bank,
and from his inflated groin thrusts away the moneybag.
And while [in the] soft shadow
where there are policemen,
the respectable interior of the bus looks at the moon
in the deep sky rocking
among its green cotton wool,
in spite of the Edict
and the still delicate hour,
and the fact that the bus is
returning to

My sad heart slobbers at the poop
my heart covered with tobacco-spit
They spew streams of soup at it
My sad heart drools at the poop
Under the jeerings of the soldiers
who break out laughing
my sad heart drools at the poop
my heart covered with tobacco-spit.
Ithypallic and soldierish
Their jeerings have depraved it
In the rudder you see frescoes
Ithypallic and soldierish
O, abracadabratic waves
Take my heart, let it be washed!
Ithypallic and soldierish
their jeerings have depraved it.
When they

I

The Sun, the hearth of affection and life,
Pours burning love on the delighted earth,
And when you lie down in the valley, you can smell
How the earth is nubile and very full-blooded;
How its huge breast, heaved up by a soul,
Is, like God, made of love, and, like woman, of flesh,
And that it contains, big with sap and with sunlight,
The vast pullulation of all embryos!

And everything grows, and everything rises!

– O

A Prince was vexed at having devoted himself
only to the perfection of ordinary generosities.
He foresaw astonishing revolutions of love
and suspected his women of being able to do better
than their habitual acquiescence embellished by heaven
and luxury.
He wanted to see the truth, the hour of essential desire
and gratification.
Whether this was an aberration of piety or not,
that is what he wanted. Enough worldly power, at least, he had.
All the women

Raking, raking, his amorous thoughts
underneath his chaste robe of black,
happy, his hand gloved,
one day as he went along, fearsomely sweet,
yellow, dribbling piety from his toothless mouth,
One day as he went along,
‘Let us Pray’, – a Wicked One seized him
roughly by his saintly ear and
snapped frightful words at him,

tearing off the chaste robe of black
wrapped about his moist skin.
Punishment! – His clothes were unbuttoned;
and, the long chaplet of pardoned
sins

Far away from birds and herds and village girls,
I was drinking, kneeling down in some heather
Surrounded by soft hazel copses,
In an afternoon mist, warm and green.
What can I have been drinking in that young Oise,
Voiceless elms, flowerless turf, overcast sky.
What did I draw from the gourd of the wine ?
Some golden liquor, pale, which causes sweating.
Such as I was, I should have made a poor inn-sign.
Then the storm changed

Bluish roofs and white doors
As on nocturnal Sundays,
At the town’s end,
the road without Sound is white,
and it is night.
The street has strange houses
With shutters of angels.
But look how he runs towards a Boundary-stone,
evil and shivering, A dark cherub who staggers,
Having eaten too many jububes.
He does a cack : then disappears :
But his cursed cack appears,
Under the holy empty moon,
A slight cesspool of dirty blood !
Louis Ratisbonne.
Original French
L’angelot maudit
Toits bleuâtres

The ancient beasts bred even on the run,
their glans encrusted with blood and excrement.
Our forefathers displayed their members proudly
by the fold of the sheath and the grain of the scrotum.
In the middle ages, for a female, angel or sow,
a fellow whose gear was substantial was needed;
and even a Kleber, judging by his breeches –
which exaggerate, perhaps, a little –
can’t have lacked resources.
Besides, man is equal to the proudest mammal;
we

Skies the gray of crystal.
A strange design of bridges,
some straight, some arched,
others descending at oblique angles to the first;
and these figures recurring
in other lighted circuits of the canal,
but all so long and light that the banks,
laden with domes, sink and shrink.
A few of these bridges
are still covered with hovels,
others support polls,
signals, frail parapets.
Minor chords cross
each other and disappear;
ropes rise from the shore.
One can make out a red coat,
possibly other

My poor heart dribbles at the stern
My heart covered with caporal
They squirt upon it jets of soup
My poor heart dribbles at the stern
Under the gibes of the whole crew
Which burst out in a single laugh,
My poor heart dribbles at the stern
My heart covered with caporal.

Ithypallic, erkish, lewd,
Their gibes have corrupted it.
In the wheelhouse you can see graffiti
Ithypallic, erkish, lewd.
O abracadantic waves
Take my heart that it may be cleansed!
Ithypallic, erkish,

It’s a board carved wooden cupboard;
the ancient dark-coloured oak
has taken on that pleasant air
that old people have; the cupboard is open,
and gives off from its kindly shadows
inviting aromas like a breath of old wine;
full to overflowing, it’s a jumble of quaint old things:
fragrant yellowed linen,
rags of women’s or children’s clothes, faded laces,
grandmothers’ kerchiefs embroidered with griffins;
– here you could find lockets,
and locks of white or blonde hair,
portraits and dried

Those who say Gord Struth; those who say Swelp Me
pensioned soldiers and sailors, the wreckage of Empire
are nothing, nothing at all, compared with the warriors of Excise
who slash the blue frontiers with their great axe-blows.
Pipes in their teeth, blades in their hands, deep, unruffled,
when darkness noses at the woods like a cow’s muzzle, off they go,
leading their dogs, to hold their nocturnal and terrible revels!
They report the

As I was floating down unconcerned Rivers
I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers:
Gaudy Redskins had taken them for targets
Nailing them naked to coloured stakes.

I cared nothing for all my crews,
Carrying Flemish wheat or English cottons.
When, along with my haulers those uproars were done with
The Rivers let me sail downstream where I pleased.

Into the ferocious tide-rips
Last winter, more absorbed than the minds of children,
I ran! And the

At centre, the Emperor, blue-yellow, in apotheosis,
Gallops off, ramrod straight, on his fine gee-gee,
Very happy – since everything he sees is rosy,
Fierce as Zeus, and as gentle as a Daddy is:
The brave Infantrymen taking a nap, in vain,
Under the gilded drums and scarlet cannon,
Rise politely. One puts his tunic back on,
And, turns to the Chief, stunned by the big name!
On the right, another, leaning on his rifle butt,
Feeling the

I
The room is full of shadow; you can hear, indistinctly, the sad soft whispering
of two children.
Their foreheads lean forward, still heavy with dreams, beneath the long white
bed-curtain
which shudders and rises… Outside the birds crowd together, chilled;
their wings are benumbed under the grey tints of the skies; and the New Year,
with her train of mist, trailing the folds of her snowy garment,
smiles through her tears, and shivering, sings…

II
But

She was very much half-dressed
And big indiscreet trees
Threw out their leaves against the pane
Cunningly, and close, quite close.

Sitting half naked in my big chair,
She clasped her hands.
Her small and so delicate feet
Trembled with pleasure on the floor.

– The colour of wax, I watched
A little wild ray of light
Flutter on her smiling lips
And on her breast, – an insect on the rose-bush.

– I kissed her delicate ankles.
She laughed softly

We are your Grand-Parents, the Grown-Ups!
Covered with the cold sweats of the moon and the greensward.
Our dry wines had heart in them!
In the sunshine where there is no deception,
what does man need? To drink.
Myself: To die among barbarous rivers.
We re your Grand-Parents of the fields.
The water lies at the foot of the willows:
see the flow of the moat round the damp castle.
Let us go down to our storerooms;
afterwards, cider