Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (Charleville, October 20, 1854-Marseille, November 10, 1891) known as Arthur Rimbaud was a French symbolist poet, famous for his transgressive poetry and surreal themes that influenced modern literature and arts such as decadence, the prefiguration of surrealism and the beat generation. He was born in Charleville, he began to write Parnazionist poems and later symbolist poems at the young age of sixteen, which he published in newspapers. He left home for Paris in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War and the crisis affecting his country.
She had a disastrous adulterous love affair with the French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, with whom she later went to England; where they lived poorly; she returns to France some time later, from this experience she writes the only work that was published by himself: A season in hell.
During his late teens and early adulthood he began most of his literary output, then stopped writing altogether at the age of 20, after assembling one of his major works, Illuminations: prose poetry, with the exception of Marina and Movement, written in free verse and was one of the first Europeans to use it along with Jules Laforgue, Gustave Kahn and Stéphane Mallarmé.
He converted to Catholicism and saw Verlaine for the last time in 1875 in Germany, when he had already given up literature. After that; he continued to travel throughout the European continent. In the summer of 1876, he enlisted as a soldier in the Dutch colonial army in order to travel to the island of Java, only to automatically desert thereafter; he returned to France by ship. He then traveled to Cyprus, and in 1880 finally settled in Aden, Yemen, as a clerk of some importance at the Bardey Agency.
In 1884 he quit his job and became a self-employed merchant in Harrar, Ethiopia where he made a small fortune as an arms dealer.
Rimbaud died in Marseilles on November 10, 1891, after returning to Europe due to a carcinoma on the right knee that had degenerated from synovitis, the first diagnosis of which had been arthritis and the first treatment was useless.
Biography
Childhood
His father, Frédéric Rimbaud, an infantry captain, was born in Dole on October 7, 1814, while his mother, Vitalie Cuif, was originally from Roche, where she came into the world on March 10, 1825. Both married on February 8, 1853, moving to an apartment on Rue Napoleon in Charleville, department of the Ardennes. Due to the father's work, the couple only saw each other on rare occasions or on dates of great importance, such as the birth of their five children: Jean Nicolas Frédéric, on November 2, 1853, Jean Nicolas Arthur, on October 20 of 1854, Victorine Pauline Vitalie, on June 4, 1857 (who died a month after birth), Jeanne Rosalie Vitalie, on June 15, 1858 and Frédérique Marie Isabelle, on June 1, 1860. After the birth of the latter, Captain Rimbaud abandoned his family and never returned to Charleville.
The mother declared herself a widow and in 1861 moved with her children to 73 Bourbon Street, in a blue-collar neighborhood of the city. In October of the same year, little Arthur entered the Rossat school, where he obtained his first recognitions. A rigid figure, obsessive with responsibility and vigilant in the education of her children, Vitalie Rimbaud transformed the family climate into a suffocating one for the children. At the end of 1862, they moved again, but this time to a bourgeois neighborhood, at number 13 rue d'Orléans. In 1865, Arthur enters the Charleville municipal college, where he quickly stands out as a brilliant and gifted student; he gets prizes in literature, languages and other subjects. He composes poems, elegies and dialogues in fluent Latin. But, as he says in his poem "The seven-year-old poets", already from that age he was full of internal conflicts and feelings of rebellion.
In July 1869, he entered an academic contest for Latin composition with the theme "Yugurta", which he won easily. The director of his school said of him then: "Nothing ordinary germinates from that head, it will be an evil genius or a good genius." Having already obtained all possible recognition from him at the age of 15, the boy finally feels freed from all the pressures his mother had subjected him to in his earliest childhood.
Towards poetry
In 1870, during his rhetoric classes, the schoolboy befriended his teacher, Georges Izambard, who was six years older. Izambard lends him books, such as Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, which the young Rimbaud reads without his mother. It is also around this time that he edited his first poem, "Los aguinaldos de los huérfanos", which appeared in the magazine Revue pour Tous in January 1870.
His poetic orientation at this time is that of the Parnassians, who at that time published all their texts in the literary magazine El Parnaso Contemporáneo. On May 24, 1870, Arthur, now fifteen years old, writes a letter to the maximum leader of Parnassianism, Théodore de Banville, saying that he is eighteen years old and conveying his desires, "to become a Parnassian or nothing" and to have his texts published. To this he attaches three poems: «Ophelia», «On the blue summer evenings...» and «Credo in unam». Banville responds affectionately to his letter, but he never published Rimbaud's poems in Contemporary Parnassus .
Then he begins to dream of going to Paris and getting a taste of the revolutionary spirit of the Parisian people; because in his home he was bored to death and the problems with his mother increased day by day, mostly because of the rebellious attitude that Rimbaud took, such as when he went out to the streets of Charleville carrying signs of "Due to God".
Rimbaud's theory of the voyant (seer) is developed in two letters (May 13, 1871 to Izambard and May 15, 1871 to Demeny), long before meeting Verlaine, settling in in Paris and start writing his most recognized works. The poet's suffering and disorder ("Imagine a man grafting and cultivating warts on his face"), or what was indicated to be transformed into a seer, was never in vain...
Adolescence and runaways
During the school holidays of 1870, on August 29, Arthur, now fifteen years old, manages to escape from his mother's surveillance and flees with the sole intention of going to Paris. But when they arrive at the train station in the capital, they discover that he did not have a ticket. These were times of civil war in France, Prussian troops were preparing to besiege Paris and the movements in favor of the proclamation of the French Third Republic were growing strongly, so the authorities were inflexible. Arthur ended up detained in Mazas prison.
From his cell, Arthur wrote to Georges Izambard in Douai, asking him to help him pay off the debt. The professor does so and also pays for the trip to Douai, offering him his house until he could return home to his mother.
Rimbaud leaves for Douai on September 8. Hesitating for a long time whether to return to Charleville, he stayed there for three weeks, during which time Rimbaud met the poet Paul Demeny, an old friend of Izambard's and director of a publishing house. This immediately attracted the attention of the young poet, who left Demeny a sheaf of loose sheets where he had copied fifteen of his poems, in the hope that they might be published.
Izambard, who had warned Vitalie Rimbaud of her son's presence in Douai, received the reply: "Catch him, let him come immediately!" To calm her down a bit, Izambard decides to personally accompany Rimbaud to Charleville. Once they arrive, Vitalie Rimbaud begins to beat his son and reproaches, disguised as thanks, at Izambard.
On October 6, Rimbaud went on the run again. Paris being under a state of siege, he decided to go to Charleroi. Wanting to become a local reporter there, he unsuccessfully tries to get the Journal de Charleroi to hire him as an editor. Then, hoping to meet Izambard, he heads first to Brussels and then to Douai, where his teacher arrives a few days later to send Rimbaud back under police escort, on Vitalie Rimbaud's orders. This occurred on November 1, 1870.
Due to the political problems France was going through at the time, the school Rimbaud attended postponed the reopening of classes from October 1870 until April 1871. In February 1871, Rimbaud escaped again in the direction of the French capital. The political situation in the country prompted Rimbaud to try to contact the revolutionaries Jules Vallès and Eugène Vermersch, although he also sought out the most important poets of the time. On this visit he meets the famous cartoonist André Gill.
Rimbaud returns to Charleville just before the Paris Commune began, although some testimonies say that he was still in Paris when it began; however, there is insufficient evidence to attest to this. What can be assured is that the Commune had a strong effect on the young poet, since he wrote several poems related to the subject, such as "The Parisian orgy", "The poor in the church", and "Those who watch ».
During this stage the poet's writing, little by little, begins to evolve. He begins to criticize romantic and Parnassian poetry and praise the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, whom he even calls "a god, the king of poets." In his letters sent to Demeny on May 15, 1871 and to Izambard on May 13 of the same year, popularly called "Letters from the seer", he finally expounded his famous theory on poetry under his motto "I am another". In them he indicates that the poet must become a "seer", and that the only way to achieve this is by a "long, immense and rational disorder of all the senses". According to Rimbaud, the poet must experience everything, suffer everything, in order to become an "alchemist" of words and find the maximum perfection in poetry. The letter he sent to Izambard was in fact the trigger for their friendship to end, when Izambard believed that the enigmatic poem that Rimbaud used to expose his point of view, "The Tormented Heart", was just an incomprehensible joke.
Relationship with Paul Verlaine
Rimbaud was persuaded by his friend Charles Bretagne to write a letter to Paul Verlaine, an eminent Symbolist poet, after receiving no response from other authors. The young man sent Verlaine two letters containing several of his poems, which included «The first communions» and «The drunken boat». Verlaine was intrigued by Rimbaud's talent and responded by saying: “Come, dear great soul. We are waiting for you, we love you." Along with the epistle he sent a train ticket to Paris.The poet arrived around September 15, 1871 at Verlaine's invitation and went to live with him and his wife, Mathilde Mauté, who was seventeen years old and pregnant. Since then Rimbaud has not returned to school. In later recordings, Verlaine referred to him as "a young man with the head of a child, an adolescent body still growing, and whose voice had highs and lows, as if it were about to break".
After his arrival in the French capital, he was well received by all the great literary figures, whom over time he got to know personally. Victor Hugo himself came to call him "Child Shakespeare". After living with Verlaine for a while, he moved in with Charles Cros, then with André Gill, and even lived for a few days with Théodore de Banville.
By March 1872, Rimbaud's provocations, who was already seventeen, began to cause him problems. The young poet led the wild, dissolute life of a vagabond, drunk on absinthe and hashish. He thus scandalized the Parisian literary elite, outraged in particular by his behavior, the true archetype of the enfant terrible . Throughout this period he continued to write his hard-hitting and visionary modern verse. However, the incident with Étienne Carjat, an eminent photographer of the time, was the straw that broke the camel's back: Rimbaud, in a completely drunken state, injured the photographer with a metal rod. To save his friend and reassure the community, Verlaine sent Rimbaud back to Charleville.
Rimbaud waits a few months at home and then returns to Paris. At that time he began a stormy love relationship with Verlaine, which led them to London in September 1872, thus leaving Verlaine his wife and young son (whom he used to mistreat extremely during fits of anger caused by alcohol). Both lived in considerable poverty in Bloomsbury and Camden Town, where they survived by teaching French and a small allowance from Verlaine's mother. Rimbaud spent his days in the British Museum, where "heating, lighting, quills and ink were free".
However, Rimbaud's attitude, who used to mock and humiliate Verlaine, and Verlaine's indolence towards anything but Rimbaud himself, caused their relationship to deteriorate. At the beginning of July 1873 Verlaine could take no more and fled in despair to Brussels, leaving behind a stunned Rimbaud penniless. A day later, Verlaine sent Rimbaud a letter telling him that he would try to reconcile with his wife and that if she did not accept him, he was going to kill himself. Rimbaud immediately left for Brussels and met Verlaine and his mother there. But after several arguments, a drunken, unbalanced Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist, though he later showed utter and desperate repentance.
Checking his wound, Rimbaud didn't think it was serious, so he let Verlaine and his mother take him to be bandaged and then to the train station to return to Charleville. Verlaine begged him not to go, but Rimbaud was adamant. He then began to behave irrationally again and Rimbaud, fearing for his life, called the police. Verlaine was arrested and subjected to a humiliating forensic examination after embarrassing correspondence and allegations by Verlaine's wife regarding the nature of the friendship between the two men were considered. The judge was merciless and, despite the fact that Rimbaud withdrew the complaint, Verlaine was sentenced to two years in prison.
Rimbaud returned to Charleville and secluded himself on the family farm to write the only work he would publish himself, A Season in Hell, widely recognized as one of the pioneering works of modern symbolism, and where he includes a description of that "little couple", his life with Verlaine - his "mad virgin", and the "infernal husband" -. In 1874 he returned to London in the company of the poet Germain Nouveau and finished writing his controversial Illuminations , which include the first two poems in free verse.
His Later Life (1873-1891)
Rimbaud and Verlaine met for the last time in 1875, in Germany, after he had regained his freedom and during his momentary conversion to Catholicism. Of this meeting, Rimbaud recounted in a letter that after talking for a few hours "we had already renounced his God" and that Verlaine stayed for two and a half days before returning to Paris. Prior to his departure, Rimbaud commissioned Verlaine for his manuscripts of The Illuminations, but by then Rimbaud had already given up writing and opted for a stable working life, already bored with his previous savage existence, according to some claimed, or because he had decided to become wealthy and independent so he could later be a poet and man of letters free from financial hardship, others speculate.[citation needed]
He continued to travel extensively in Europe, mostly on foot. In the summer of 1876, he enlisted as a soldier in the Dutch colonial army to travel to Java (Indonesia), where he promptly deserted, after which he returned to France by ship. He then traveled to Cyprus, and in 1880 he finally settled in Aden (Yemen), as an employee of some importance at the Bardey Agency. There he had several native mistresses and for a time lived with an Ethiopian.
Loneliness is a bad thing. For my part, I'm sorry I didn't marry and have a family. But now I am doomed to err, tied to a distant company, and day by day I lose the memory of the weather and the way to live and even the language of Europe. What do these comings and goings serve, these fatigues and these adventures in places of strange races, and these tongues that fill the memory, and these pains without name, if one day, after a few years, I cannot rest in a place that I like more or less, and find a family, and have at least a child to spend the rest of my life educing it according to my ideas, giving it the most complete instruction that can be given I can disappear in the middle of these tribes without anyone knowing. Arthur Rimbaud, letter to his friends. Harar, May 6, 1883.
In 1884 he quit that job and became a self-employed merchant in Harrar, present-day Ethiopia. He made a small fortune as an arms dealer, until he developed an ailment in his right knee that was first diagnosed as arthritis, whose treatment did not work, and then as a synovitis which degenerated into carcinoma. This ailment forced him to return to France on May 9, 1891, where days later his leg was amputated.
Finally, six months later, on November 10, 1891, he died in Marseilles (France) at the age of thirty-seven.
Death reaches great steps (...) He stays awake and his life ends with a continual dream, while he says strange things very sweetly, with a voice I would have loved if I didn't break my heart. What he says is dreams, but they're not the same as when he had a fever. It will be said, and I believe it, that it does expressly. As he murmurs these things, the nun has asked me in a very low voice: Do you think he has lost consciousness again? But he understood the question and reddened; and when the nun left, he said to me, "Do you think I'm crazy, do you believe it? It is an almost immaterial being and his thought escapes from his sorrow. Sometimes he asks the doctors if they see the extraordinary things he perceives, and he speaks to them and tells them with sweetness their impressions, in terms that I could not reproduce; the doctors look at him in the eyes and say among them: -It is singular. There are in Arthur's case some things they don't understand. Isabelle Rimbaud to her mother, Vitalie.
Influence
His influence on modern literature, music, and art is wide-ranging, including later French poets, especially within the Surrealist group. Notable artists inspired by Rimbaud's work include André Bretón, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, William S. Burroughs, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jim Jarmusch, Hugo Pratt, Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos, Klaus Kinski, Bruce Chatwin, Jim Morrison, and Richard Hell. His influence on the beat poets is also perceived. Mexican poetry of the XX century has been quite attracted by Rimbaud's poetry.
Among the biographies of Rimbaud, those by Jean-Marie Carre, Life of Rimbaud, and the one by Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud, stand out. The critical works that have received the best reception are those of Michel Butor and Yves Bonnefoy, a poet strongly influenced by Rimbaud.
Rimbaud also influenced decadentism. For Rimbaud, "the poet must become a seer through a reasoned disorder of the senses." It is about "recording the ineffable" and for this "a verbal alchemy is necessary that, born from a hallucination of the senses, expresses itself as a hallucination of words"; at the same time, "those verbal inventions will have the power to change lives."
Cinema
Her sentimental relationship with Verlaine in Paris and London was made into a film in 1995, in a film entitled Total Eclipse (translated in Spain as Vidas al límite), directed by the Polish Agnieszka Holland, with the interpretations of Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Rimbaud and David Thewlis in that of Verlaine. The script for the film was written by Christopher Hampton based on some texts by both poets.
Work
Complete works
After various partial and "not very careful" editions, in October 2016 Ediciones Atalanta published all the literary work of the French poet in bilingual format by the translator Mauro Armiño.
- Rimbaud, Arthur (2016, 2022). Mauro Armiño, ed. Complete Bilingual Work (Second Edition). Vilaür: Atalanta Editions. ISBN 978-84-945231-0-6.
Miscellaneous work
- Poetry (1863-1869).
- Letters from the seer (1871).
- A season in hell (1873).
- Lighting (1874).
- Full letters (1870-1891).
Most known poems
- The drunken ship
- Vocals
- My bohemia
- The tormented heart
- Ofelia
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