29 June 2013

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud [Literary Kicks]

from Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, tr. Wallace Fowlie:

Venus Anadyomene

As from a green zinc coffin, a woman’s

Head with brown hair heavily pomaded

Emerges slowly and stupidly from an old bathtub,

With bald patches rather badly hidden;

Then the fat gray neck, broad shoulder-blades

Sticking out; a short back which curves in and bulges,

Then the roundness of the buttocks seems to take off;

The fat under the skin appears in slabs:

The spine is a bit red; and the whole thing has a smell

Strangely horrible; you notice especially

Odd details you’d have to see with a magnifying glass . . .

The buttocks bear two engraved words: CLARA VENUS;

— And that whole body moves and extends its broad rump

Hideously beautiful with an ulcer on the anus.

from Novel

Night in June! Seventeen years old! — We are overcome by it all.

The sap is champagne and goes to our head . . .

We talked a lot and feel a kiss on our lips

Trembling there like a small insect . . .

III

Our wild heart moves through novels like Robinsoe Crusoe,

— When, in the light of a pale street lamp,

A girl goes by attractive and charming

Under the shadow of her father’s terrible collar . . .

A Dream for Winter

To ††† Her

In the winter, we will leave in a small pink railway carriage

With blue cushions.

We will be comfortable. A nest of mad kisses lies

In each soft corner.

You will close your eyes, in order not to see, through the glass,

The evening shadows making faces,

Those snarling monstrosities, a populace

Of black demons and black wolves.

Then you will feel your cheek scratched . . .

A little kiss, like a mad spider,

Will run around your neck . . .

And you will say to me: “Get it!”, as you bend your neck;

— And we will take a long time to find that creature

— Which travels a great deal . . .

Seven-year-old Poets

And the Mother, closing the exercise book,

Went off satisfied and very proud, without seeing,

In the blue eyes and under his brow covered with bumps

The soul of her child given over to repugnance.

All day he sweated obedience; very

Intelligent; yet dark twitchings, a few traits,

Seemed to testify in him to bitter hypocrisy.

In the shadow of the corridors with their moldy hangings,

Passing through he stuck out his tongue, his two fists

In his groin, and in his closed eyes saw spots.

A door opened on to evening: by the lamp

You saw him up there moaning on the stairway,

Under a flood of daylight falling from the roof. In summer

Especially, overcome, stupefied he was bent

On shutting himself up in the coolness of the outhouse:

There he meditated, peacefully, opening his nostrils.

When washed from the day’s odors, the small garden

Behind the house, in winter, lit up with the moon,

As he lay at the foot of a wall, buried in clay,

And rubbed his dizzy eyes to bring about visions,

He listened to the mangy espaliers as they seemed to swarm.

Pity! only those children were his friends

Who, sickly, bare-headed, with eyes weeping on their cheeks,

Hiding thin fingers yellow and black with mud

Under worn-out clothes stinking of diarrhea and old,

Talked with the gentleness of idiots!

And if she caught him in actions of filthy pity,

His mother was horrified. The deep tenderness

Of the child forced itself on her surprise.

That was appropriate. She had the blue glance, — that lies!

At seven, he wrote novels about life

In the great desert, where exiled Freedom shines,

Forests, suns, rios, plains! — He was helped

With illustrated newspapers where, blushing, he saw

Spanish and Italian girls laugh.

When the daughter of the workers next door came,

— Eight years old, — brown eyes, wild, in a calico dress,

The little brute, and when in a corner,

She had jumped on his back, shaking her long hair,

And he was under her, he bit her buttocks,

For she never wore panties;

— And, bruised by her fists and heels,

Took back the taste of her flesh to his room.

He feared the grey December Sundays,

When, his hair greased, on a mahogany stool,

He read a Bible with cabbage-green edges.

Dreams oppressed him every night in his small room.

He did not love God; but the men whom, in the brown evening,

Swarthy, in jackets, he saw going home to their quarters,

Where town criers, with three drum rolls

Make the crowds laugh and roar over edicts.

— He dreamed of an amorous pasture, where shining

Swells, natural perfumes, golden puberties

Move calmly and take flight!

And as he especially savored dark things,

When, in his bare room with closed shutters,

High and blue, sourly covered with humidity,

He read his ceaselessly meditated novel,

Full of heavy ocherous skies and soaked forests,

Of fresh flowers opened in the astral woods,

Dizziness, crumblings, routs and pity!

— While the noise of the neighborhood went on

Down below — alone, and lying on pieces of unbleached

Canvas, and violently announcing a sail!

The Hands of Jeanne-Marie

Jeanne-Marie has strong hands,

Dark hands the summer tanned,

Hands pale like dead hands.

— Are they the hands of Juana?

Did they get their dark cream color

On pools of voluptuousness?

Have they dipped into moons

In ponds of serenity?

Have they drunk from barbaric skies,

Calm on charming knees?

Have they rolled cigars

Or traded in diamonds?

On the burning feet of Madonnas

Have they tossed golden flowers?

It is the black blood of belladonnas

That bursts and sleeps in their palms.

Are they hands driving the diptera

With which the blueness of dawn

Buzzes, toward the nectars?

Hands decanting poisons?

Oh! what Dream has held them

In pandiculations?

An extraordinary dream of Asias,

Of Khenghavars or Zions?

— These hands have not sold oranges,

Nor turned brown at the feet of the gods;

These hands have not washed the diapers

Of heavy babies without eyes.

(They are not hands of a cousin

Or of working women with large foreheads

Burned, in woods stinking of a factory,

By a sun drunk on tar)

They are benders of backbones

Hands that do no harm

More fatal than machines,

Stronger than a horse!

Stirring like furnaces,

And shaking off all their tremblings

Their flesh sings Marseillaises

And never Eleisons!

(They would strangle your necks, o evil

Women, they would crush your hands

Noblewomen, your infamous hands

Full of white and carmine

The beauty of those loving hands

Turns the heads of ewes!

On their savory finger-joints

The great sun places a ruby!)

A stain of populace

Turns them brown like a breast of yesterday:

The back of these Hands are the places

Where every proud Rebel kissed them!

They have paled, marvelous,

Under the great sun full of love

On the bronze of machine-guns,

Throughout insurgent Paris!

Ah! sometimes, o sacred Hands,

At your wrists, Hands where tremble our

Never sobered lips,

Cries out a chain of clear links!

And it is a strange Tremor

In our beings, when, at times

They want to remove your sunburn, Hands of an angel,

By making your fingers bleed!

Evening Prayer

I live seated, like an angel in the hands of a barber,

In my fist a strongly fluted mug,

My stomach and neck curved, a Gambier pipe

In my teeth, under the air swollen with impalpable veils of smoke.

Like the warm excrement of an old pigeonhouse,

A Thousand Dreams gently burn inside me:

And at moments my sad heart is like sap-wood

Which the young dark gold of its sweating covers with blood.

Then, when I have carefully swallowed my dreams,

I turn, having drunk thirty or forty mugs,

And collect myself, to relieve the bitter need:

Sweetly as the Lord of the cedar and of hyssops,

I piss toward the dark skies very high and very far,
With the consent of the large heliotropes.