Pacific Index

A Season in Hell & The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud

“A while back, if I remember right, my life was one long party where all hearts were open wide, where all wines kept flowing” – excerpt from the poem, A Season in Hell, from A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud. 

Approaching what would be a semester in hell, I checked this book out from the Tran Library. Upon my first seeing and handling it, I wondered whether the aged and weathered copy would wither away in my backpack. The en face translation, by Louise Varese, of the “Billy the Kid of poetry” notorious collection of autobiographical aphorisms and short poems, as well as the longer twenty-five stanza poem The Drunken Boat, is perhaps the most substantial around of Rimbaud translations. 

The impact of Rimbaud’s poetry is impossible to overstate. Perhaps the entirety of Western poetry after he hung up the pen in 1874 at the age of 20, is entirely indebted to him; his vision, technique, and utter control of language. His penchant for hashish, absinthe, the taboo subjects of his writing, and his very turbulent and, for the time, obscene romance with older literary compatriot, Paul Verlaine, turned him to something of an enfant-terrible of the late 19th Century literary scene. In between multiple returns from Paris to his family’s farm in north-western France, trips to London and Brussels with Verlaine, and their subsequent violent feuds (in one of which Rimbaud was shot in the wrist by his lover), he wrote A Season in Hell. In the brief collection, he once again reinvented himself. In the different modes, he consistently examined his personal identity, the collective soul of Europe, the passage of time, the subservient spirit of the Frenchman dating back to the subjugation of the Gauls by the Romans in Antiquity, and how French Colonialism was something of a consolation prize for centuries of weakness, among other hefty themes. 

How he wrote about his own writing, and the vocation of a writer from his disillusionment, is nothing if not incredibly poignant and intricate. A Season in Hell is, in simple terms, a diary of the damned. Every line offloads insight into the preoccupations and artistic inspirations of someone entirely sick with the one thing that they live for, writing. It is an intense and intimate recounting of a private flagellation, and through that, the search for a spiritual resolution through artistry. It encompasses a sustained and devastating investigation of the self, Christianity, Imperialism, and alternative modes of perception and feelings through multiple spiritual, physical, and poetic options, frequently pushed forward and set ablaze by his memorable imagery. Through his sentences, one is privy to a conscious forward push of language to the point of entire disintegration, leading to a crescendo where verbal crisis and interior trauma are balanced. 

It was not surprising in the slightest, then, that he later abandoned writing at the age of 21 after this book’s publication. As well, he abandoned France, and left for those very dark and distant shores he wrote about; perhaps seeing some way to separate himself from his despair. He traveled throughout Europe, and later enlisted in the Dutch Army and fought in a colonial war in Sumatra. Afterwards he spent time working as a laborer in the Near East, Egypt, Java, and a coffee company official in Ethiopia, only to return to France by way of Marseille searching for treatment for a tumor in his knee. 

Unknown to him, a cancer had spread through his leg and the doctor he visited was forced to amputate it. He later died in some hole in Marseille. It was not until a few years after his death that his writing would be revered.