moonshapedhole's review against another edition
"If I still long for Europe's waters, it's only for / One cold black puddle where a child crouches / Sadly at its brink and releases a boat, / Fragile as a May butterfly, into the fragrant dusk."
bgg57's review against another edition
5.0
Rimbaud stopped writing poetry by the time he turned twenty-one, yet reading his oeuvre from beginning to end one can watch an entire career develop. The early poems, dealing mostly with nature-worship, erotic love, political satire, or the horrors of war and poverty, tend to be more conventional in form (a lot of sonnets!), yet are still personal and distinctive in their point of view; later his works grow more and more sophisticated—dreamlike, frequently opaque, but always vivid and evocative. Their influence is noticeable everywhere, from the Beats and New York poets to rock poets such as Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison.
Wyatt’s translation is adequate as far as I can tell, and it's largely a pleasure to read, but poetry is not really translatable, and these poems especially provide a good argument for learning French. Much of the rhyming and word-play is lost in translation, and when the original text is ambiguous the translator sometimes has to make a difficult decision, limiting himself to but one out of several possible meanings. Occasionally the translation seemed awkward, but my French is not good enough for me to tell whether that awkwardness was in the original text. Every once in a while the translator uses an anachronistic expression (e.g., “a bag of blow,” “keeping it real,” “cover songs,” “number crunching”) that momentarily jars the reader out of the sense of being transported back to the time and place from which Rimbaud was writing.
It is useful having the original French texts available in this volume for comparison to the translations, but I wish the English and French texts had been printed on facing pages to save constant turning back and forth. I think that arrangement was deliberately avoided, though, so that the translated versions could be allowed as much as possible to speak for themselves without the constant distraction and interruption of going back and forth between texts.
Wyatt’s translation is adequate as far as I can tell, and it's largely a pleasure to read, but poetry is not really translatable, and these poems especially provide a good argument for learning French. Much of the rhyming and word-play is lost in translation, and when the original text is ambiguous the translator sometimes has to make a difficult decision, limiting himself to but one out of several possible meanings. Occasionally the translation seemed awkward, but my French is not good enough for me to tell whether that awkwardness was in the original text. Every once in a while the translator uses an anachronistic expression (e.g., “a bag of blow,” “keeping it real,” “cover songs,” “number crunching”) that momentarily jars the reader out of the sense of being transported back to the time and place from which Rimbaud was writing.
It is useful having the original French texts available in this volume for comparison to the translations, but I wish the English and French texts had been printed on facing pages to save constant turning back and forth. I think that arrangement was deliberately avoided, though, so that the translated versions could be allowed as much as possible to speak for themselves without the constant distraction and interruption of going back and forth between texts.
faerieontheshelf's review against another edition
5.0
Arthur Rimbaud is one of my favourite poets and that’s that
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