I’m always pleased to see a book of poetry penetrate public consciousness, even if it’s only the latest saccharine desert from Billy Collins or (worse – much, much worse) a collection by Jewel (I’m not universally condemning celebrity collections, mainly because I am curious about James Franco’s new chapbook).
John Ashberry’s translations of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations seemed to make that leap (translations seem to do better; I recall Pinsky’s translation of The Inferno and Heaney’s Beowulf similarly succeeding).
You can clearly see how Rimbaud’s final work would appeal to Ashberry. The poetic connections Rimbaud makes are a nice, fairly direct line to Ashberry’s wild, imaginative urban musings. And, more generally, isn’t Rimbaud also the quintessential beautiful young poet? You don’t have to be a gay man to have a crush on a figure like that (heaven knows, when we were all playing at being subversive poets in high school, we had crushes on him – crushes that in no way interfered with a straight teenage boy’s indefatigable skirt chasing).
Rimbaud, of course, wrote prose poems and Ashberry loves enjambment and sometimes I feel like Ashberry struggles with knowing how he should think about that. Or am I projecting something? I know little about Ashberry beyond a few favorite books and could easily be mistaken in this, which is only a feeling anyway, because, if I tried to explain it further, how would I put into words that struggle? After all, the line ends where the line ends, right? Not much room for translator innovation unless one were to decide to just throw away part of what’s on the page.
While Illuminations is not Fleurs de Mal and Rimbaud no Baudelaire, I sometimes get a tickle at the back of my brain, a voice asking if Rimbaud has been neutered somewhat? Gentled slightly? Of course, this is where the sad level of my French is frustrating that I can’t be sure of anything.
And there is a ‘but.’
But, Ashberry is certainly capturing the oft ignored delicacy that is also part of Rimbaud’s poetry. It is easy to get caught up in the idea of Rimbaud, l’enfant terible. But that idea almost always comes at the expense of Rimbaud, the actual poet (in fact, I suspect it has more to do with the Thewlis/DiCaprio movie, Total Eclipse, than it ever had with people reading his poetry). Here is where you can see the particular genius of Ashberry’s choice to translate Illuminations.
Another thing that Ashberry does very well is getting across that wonderful cocktail of the urban and rural environments that suffuses Illuminations. Ashberry is so deeply connected to the biggest urban environment in America, New York City, that it was surprising to see his deft touch here.
He does an amazing job of bringing out the simplicity of Illuminations, somehow finding simply constructed words and phrasings, avoiding falling into the trap of baroque language. Which isn’t to say that Ashberry can’t get a little cute, but it’s not a major quibble, though I do wonder why he translated ‘vagabonds‘ as ‘drifters.’ It seems an unnecessary insertion of the translator into the translation.
I hadn’t read Rimbaud in years. Maybe a decade. I don’t necessarily keep perfect track of these things.
As I noted earlier, it’s easy to confuse the idea of Rimbaud with the poet himself. Illuminations is not Baudelaire. And understanding that also let me see a truer line between the two iconic/iconoclastic French fathers of modernism. Baudelaire, formally, was not very daring. Rimbaud is (though he didn’t invent the prose poem), but lacks the great boiling anger of his predecessor.
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