Arthur Rimbaud

Publisher's description: One of the most written-about literary figures in the past decade, Arthur Rimbaud left few traces when he abandoned poetry at age twenty-one and disappeared into the African desert. Although the dozen biographies devoted to Rimbaud's life depend on one main source for information--his own correspondence--a complete edition of these remarkable letters has never been published in English. Until now. A moving document of decline, Rimbaud's letters begin with the enthusiastic artistic pronouncements of a fifteen-year-old genius, and end with the bitter what-ifs of a man whose life has slipped disastrously away. But whether soapboxing on the essence of art, or struggling under the yoke of self-imposed exile in the desert of his later years, Rimbaud was incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence. As translator and editor Wyatt Mason makes clear in his engaging Introduction, the letters reveal a Rimbaud very different from our expectations. Rimbaud, presented by many biographers as a bohemian wild man, is unveiled as "diligent in his pursuit of his goals ... wildly, soberly ambitious, in poetry, in everything." I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud is the second and final volume in Mason's authoritative presentation of Rimbaud's writings. Called by Edward Hirsch "the definitive translation for our time" Mason's first volume, Rimbaud Complete (Modern Library, 2002), brought Rimbaud's poetry and prose into vivid focus. In I Promise to Be Good, Mason adds the missing epistolary pieces to our picture of Rimbaud. "These letters" he writes, "are proofs in all their variety--of impudence and precocity, of tenderness and rage--for the existence of Arthur Rimbaud." I Promise to Be Good allows English-language readers to see with new eyes one of the most extraordinary poets in history.

Rimbaud, born in 1854, started to write at an early age. By 17 he had written his most famous poem, 'The Drunken Boat'. He then embarked on a turbulent homosexual relationship with the poet Verlaine, from which came some of their most original work, including A Season in Hell and Illuminations. Rimbaud rejected writing at the age of 20. After years of travelling and gun-running in Africa, he died in 1891, aged 37.

v. 1 : La tentation de Saint Antoine Madame Bovary Salammbô v. 2: L'éducation sentimentale. Trois contes Bouvard et Pécuchet.

"While a student at Vassar College in the early 1930s, New York poet Muriel Rukeyser translated Rimbaud's seminal poems Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell) and 'Voyelles' (Vowels), and reworked them again once she had left college and returned to New York. After deep research into various incomplete drafts, a complete draft of A Season in Hell was uncovered among Rukeyser's papers at the Library of Congress, including her translator's note, and correspondence with film scholar Jay Leyda, who included Rukeyser's translation of 'Voyelles' in his own translation of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's The Film Sense (1942). This edition establishes the place of this early translation project in Muriel Rukeyser's career as a poet and translator, and reproduces excerpts from Rukeyser's unpublished translation of A Season in Hell, as well as multiple versions of her translations of shorter Rimbaud pieces such as 'Voyelles.'"--Supplied by publisher.