―from "Alchemy of the Word"
--from "Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud" By Bruce Duffy
What? – Eternity.
It’s the sun, free
To flow with the sea.
Let whispers confess
Of the empty night
Of the day’s excess.
From the common urge
Here you diverge
To fly as you feel.
Embers of satin,
Duty breathes down
With no ‘at last’ spoken.
No entreaty here.
Science and patience,
Torture is real.
What? – Eternity.
It’s the sun, free
To flow with the sea.
列下兩夲看不太懂的詩集:
法 韓波 (Rimbaud) "在地獄裏一季" (莫渝譯 ,高雄:大舞台書苑 ,1978)
Rimbaud "彩畫集" (王道乾譯, 台北:麥田, 2005)
Rimbaud Arthur (Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud) (1854-91). Few poets can have acquired so high a reputation as Arthur Rimbaud on the basis of so slender an œuvre and so brief a career. From the moment his legendary Illuminations saw print in 1886, the sheer inventiveness of his writings, seemingly indissociable from the eventfulness of his life, has been the subject of fervent and noisy debate, to the extent that the strict data of biography and literary production are now engulfed in innumerable theories and conflicting interpretations. Rimbaud remains the outstanding example in French literature of a meteoric talent giving rise to enduring controversy.
A crude summary of his life reduces it to two stretches of relatively steady existence on either side of the eruptive creative adventure at its centre. A model schoolboy, Rimbaud seemed content to please his mother by gaining annual prizes at his college in Charleville (in the Ardennes), until his early satirical verse began to voice his hatred of an environment he saw as totally debilitating, with abrasive attacks on the sanctity of bourgeois routine in ‘A la musique’, on Christianity in ‘Les Premières Communions’, and on orthodox notions of the beautiful in ‘Vénus Anadyomène’, a sonnet about a hag stepping from her bath-tub. Disruptions to local life due to the Prussian invasion of mid-1870 coincided with symptomatic episodes when the teenager repeatedly ran away from home; it is thought he may have witnessed the brief apogee of the Paris Commune in the spring of 1871. The period of his late teens (c.1870-c.1874) saw the abrupt flowering of a unique talent as, like a gambler whose daring never fails, Rimbaud moved in the space of a few months from structured verse through progressively more liberated verse (the poems known as ‘Derniers vers’) and on to the prose poem, of which he would become one of the first masters. In September 1871, still not yet 17, he had tucked into his pocket an astonishing poem, ‘Le Bateau ivre’—a maritime allegory of the visionary process—and taken leave of Charleville, journeying to Paris to take the literary establishment by storm. Almost at once he entered on a turbulent erotic relationship with Verlaine, and travelled with him to London, the backdrop to several of the dream-like scenarios elaborated in Illuminations. After a violent break with Verlaine, Rimbaud spent some years drifting through casual jobs in northern and southern Europe, having by now effectively abandoned literature. By the end of the decade he had also abandoned Europe, pursuing a mercantile career in the obscure regions of Abyssinia, and only returning to his homeland because of illness. He died in Marseille in 1891, aged 37.
The terms of the Rimbaud legend were dictated by Verlaine, who first dubbed him a poète maudit and published Illuminations without their author's knowledge as the relics of a genius who had touched perfection and then moved on to the alternative ascesis of day-to-day existence. This narrative of striving and renunciation is consistent with the confessional themes of Une saison en enfer, completed in the summer of 1873, where the writer describes ecstatic visions which he later relinquishes because of the physical torment they entail. A plausible interpretation of the chapter ‘L'Alchimie du verbe’, when read in conjunction with two earlier texts which had excitedly announced the new visionary approach, the so-called ‘Lettres du voyant’ of May 1871, is that Rimbaud induced actual states of voyance by way of drugs and alcohol and then transliterated his experiences into an image-laden idiom embodying ‘l'hallucination des mots’. The 40-odd prose pieces of the Illuminations cycle amount to a phantasmagorical documentation of the creative process, one which charts the itinerary of a consciousness visited by chimerical spectacles, by turns monstrous and ravishing and seemingly inseparable from the literary tropes wherein they find expression. Cryptic allusions to apocalyptic omens and ineffable harmonies, and the hint that ‘illumination’ is a transcendental (and thus extra-literary) event, have laid such texts open to religious readings which cast their author in the role of an unorthodox prophet. Other readings stress the virtuosity of a poetic discourse which marries baffling enigma to thrilling suggestion, and at a stroke transforms the reading experience from one of intellectual construal to one of emotional participation. ‘J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage’, the poet warns us, although recent research indicates that many of his impenetrable formulations embody empirical references to contemporary society. Yet to acknowledge that Rimbaud's mature work echoes the lexical and cultural codes of his age is not necessarily to reduce all he wrote to mimetic explicitness and a univocal legibility. The irreducible strength of Rimbaud's ‘alchemy of the word’ remains its sheer rhetorical confidence, the inimitable assertiveness, the beguiling violence, of its imagery and tone.
- Y. Bonnefoy, Rimbaud par lui-même (1961)
- R. G. Cohn, The Poetry of Rimbaud (1973)
- A. Kittang, Discours et jeu: essai d'analyse des textes d'Arthur Rimbaud (1975)
- A. Borer (ed.), L'Œuvre-Vie d'Arthur Rimbaud (1991)
藍波的這本詩當然有漢譯 譬如說王乾元的
'Illuminations'
By ARTHUR RIMBAUD; translated by JOHN ASHBERY
Reviewed by LYDIA DAVIS
Rimbaud’s Wise Music
By LYDIA DAVIS
Published: June 9, 2011
ILLUMINATIONS
Related
Up Front: Lydia Davis (June 12, 2011)
The Pleasures and Perils of Creative Translation (June 12, 2011)

Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis
Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 in Charleville, in the northeast of France close to the Belgian border, to a sour-tempered, repressively pious mother and a mostly absent soldier father who disappeared for good when Rimbaud was 6. He excelled in school, reading voraciously and retentively and regularly carrying off most of his grade’s year-end academic prizes. Early poems were written not just in French but sometimes in Latin and Greek and included a 60-line ode, dedicated (and sent) to Napoleon III’s young son, and a fanciful rendering of a math assignment.
He had announced in a letter written when he was only 16 that he intended to create an entirely new kind of poetry, written in an entirely new language, through a “rational derangement of all the senses,” and when, not yet 17, he made his first successful escape to Paris, financed by the older poet Paul Verlaine, he came prepared to change the world, or at least literature. He was immediately a colorful figure: the filthy, lice-infested, intermittently bewitching young rebel with large hands and feet, whose mission required scandalizing the conventional-minded and defying moral codes not only through his verse but through his rude, self-destructive and anarchical behavior; the brilliantly skillful and versatile poet not only of the occasional sentimental subject (orphans receiving gifts on New Year’s Day) but also of lovely scatological verse; the child-faced young innovator whose literary development evolved from poem to poem at lightning speed.
In Paris, he became close friends and soon lovers — openly gay behavior being very much a part of his project of self-exploration and defiance of society — with Verlaine, whose own poetry Rimbaud had already admired from a distance, with its transgression of traditional formal constraints including, shockingly, bridging the caesura in the alexandrine line. (Although this line occurred in Verlaine’s third book, Rimbaud may well also have been familiar with the first, “Poèmes saturniens,” or “Poems Under Saturn,” which was published in 1866 and has recently appeared in a deftly rhymed and metered new translation by Karl Kirchwey that offers it for the first time in English as an integral volume.) Their stormy relationship, which extended into Belgium and England and lasted a surprising length of time, was richly productive literarily on both sides.
Rimbaud has therefore been the perfect subject, for 120 years now, of sanctification, vilification, multiple rival exegeses, obfuscation, memoirs that rely on often faulty recollection — all of which has generated, of course, many times the few hundred pages left by the poet himself in the form of letters, juvenilia, some 80 poems, including the 100-line “Drunken Boat,” written when he was still 16, and the nine-section confessional and self-condemnatory prose sequence “A Season in Hell,” besides what was close to his last work, the sequence of mostly prose poems called “Illuminations.”
If the dating of all the poems in this last work cannot be verified precisely, neither can their proper order or the circumstances leading up to their publication. The rather unreliable Verlaine tells us that after he was released from prison in 1875 — he had shot Rimbaud in the arm in a Brussels hotel room — the younger poet handed him a pile of loose pages and asked him to find a publisher. After passing through several hands, the poems appeared in the magazine La Vogue 10 years later, in 1886, having been prepared for publication by Félix Fénéon (journalist, publisher and author of the bizarre collection of police-blotter-generated newspaper fillers published as “Novels in Three Lines” by New York Review Books in 2007).
Asked many years later, Fénéon could not remember whether the order was his own or whether he had preserved the order in which he received them — although, since he did not receive them directly from Rimbaud, that order was not necessarily the author’s. The work was greeted at the time with some laudatory reviews, though not many copies were bought.
Formally, “Illuminations” — the title may refer to engraved illustrations, to epiphanies or flashes of insight, or to the productions of the poet-seer who has transformed himself into pure light — consists of 43 poems ranging from a few lines to works of several sections covering multiple pages; some are in large blocks of type, some in paragraphs so brief they are virtually two-line stanzas. (At least once, a single comma at the end of the paragraph magically turns it into a strophe.) Only three poems have broken lines.
Despite the uncertainty of its dates of composition, “Illuminations” is quite clearly written after Rimbaud’s most defiant and scurrilous phase had passed. It does not contain the explicit playful or lyrical obscenity of earlier times, but rather a subtler incandescent or ecstatic range of congruous and incongruous, urban and pastoral imagery, and historical and mythological reference often grounded in near-recognizable autobiographical narrative. A wealth of images — mineral, industrial, theatrical, royal, natural and nostalgic — often develop by leaps of immediate personal association rather than by sequential or narrative logic, employing the techniques of Surrealism decades before it existed as a movement. The poems shift in tone and register from the matter of fact to the highly rhetorical (“O world!”), the statements from the simple (“the hand of the countryside on my shoulder”) to the more abstruse (“He is affection and the present since he opened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer”), while always departing from and returning to a concrete, sensory world. The more narrative poems — faux-reminiscences, exhortations, modern fairy tales — are punctuated by verse consisting almost solely of exclamatory lists of sentence fragments, what sound like celebrations of repeated amazement, contributing to create what John Ashbery, in his brief but enlightening preface to his new translation, calls “the crystalline jumble of Rimbaud’s ‘Illuminations,’ like a disordered collection of magic lantern slides, each an ‘intense and rapid dream,’ in his words.”
Ashbery has said he first read Rimbaud when he was 16, and he clearly took to heart the young poet’s declaration that “you must be absolutely modern” — absolute modernity being, as Ashbery says in his preface, “the acknowledging of the simultaneity of all of life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second.” When Rimbaud’s mother asked of “A Season in Hell,” “What does it mean?” — a question still asked of Rimbaud’s poetry, and of Ashbery’s, too — Rimbaud would say only, “It means what it says, literally and in every sense.”
If Rimbaud anticipated the Surrealists by decades, Ashbery is said to have gone beyond them and defied even their rules and logic. Yet though nearly 150 years have intervened since Rimbaud’s first declaration of independence, many readers in our own age, too, still prefer a coherence of imagery, a sameness of tone, a readable sequential message, even, ultimately, what amounts to a prose narrative broken into lines. Enough others, however, find the “crystalline jumble” intellectually and emotionally revitalizing and say, Yes, please do interrupt the reverie you have created for us to allow an intrusion of Popeye!
Besides his early absorption of Rimbaud’s work, Ashbery brings to this translation a long and deep familiarity with French life, language and culture, particularly artistic and literary culture, and the experience of having translated many other French works over the years — by Pierre Reverdy, Raymond Roussel, Max Jacob, Pierre Martory (as well as at least one detective novel, as the amusingly renamed Jonas Berry). These translations are part of a larger body of Ashbery’s work that has served to offer us — his largely monolingual Anglophone readership — access to poets of another culture, either foreign or earlier in time. (Notable, for instance, is his keenly investigatory, instructive and engrossing “Other Traditions,” the six Norton Lectures that open our eyes to the work of such luminaries as John Clare and Laura Riding.) In tandem, then, with his own 20-plus books of poetry (not to mention his teaching and his critical writings on the visual arts), Ashbery has extended his generous explicating intelligence to the work of many others, most recently in “Illuminations.”
In a meticulously faithful yet nimbly inventive translation, Ashbery’s approach has been to stay close to the original, following the line of the sentence, retaining the order of ideas and images, reproducing even eccentric or inconsistent punctuation. He shifts away from the closest translation only where necessary, and there is plenty of room within this close adherence for vibrant and less obvious English word choices. One of the pleasures of the translation, for instance, is the concise, mildly archaic Anglo-Saxon vocabulary he occasionally deploys — “hued” for teinte and “clad” for revêtus, “chattels” for possessions — or a more particular or flavorful English for a more general or blander French: “lush” for riches, “hum of summer” for rumeur de l’été, “trembling” for mouvantes.
Even a simple problem reveals his skill. In one section of the poem “Childhood,” there occurs the following portrayal of would-be tranquillity: “I rest my elbows on the table, the lamp illuminates these newspapers that I’m a fool for rereading, these books of no interest.” The two words sans intérêt (“without interest”) allow for surprisingly many solutions, as one can see from a quick sampling of previous translations. Yet these other choices are either less rhythmical than the French — “uninteresting,” “empty of interest” — or they do not retain the subtlety of the French: “mediocre,” “boring,” “idiotic.” Ashbery’s “books of no interest” is quietly matter-of-fact and dismissive, like the French, rhythmically satisfying and placed, like the original, at the end of the sentence.
It takes one sort of linguistic sensitivity to stay close to the original in a pleasing way; another to bring a certain inventiveness to one’s choices without being unfaithful. Ashbery’s ingenuity is evident at many moments in the book, and an especially lovely example occurs in the same poem: he has translated Qu’on me loue enfin ce tombeau, blanchi à la chaux as “Let someone finally rent me this tomb, whited with quicklime.” Here, his “whited with quicklime” (rather than “whitewashed,” the choice of all the other translations I found) at once exploits the possibilities of assonance and introduces the echo of the King James “whited sepulcher” without betraying the meaning of the original.
Some of the translations in this book have appeared previously in literary journals one by one over the past two years or so — evidently done slowly over time, as translations ought to be, especially of poems, and especially of these poems, given their extreme compression, their tonal and stylistic shifts, their liberating importance in the history of poetry. We are fortunate that John Ashbery has turned his attention to a text he knows so well, and brought to it such care and imaginative resourcefulness.
【 #一起走的修復之路|#創作側記 】 這裡是夢想城鄉! 得知有機會一起在當代藝術館展覽以後,真的很感謝也很興奮!今年初,我們著手準備作品。 希望觀眾們能透過作品,感受人的美麗、悲傷、快樂、痛苦、輕盈或沈重,感受每個人獨特的靈魂。不只是「貧窮經驗者」而已,而是更多更多,一個一個的「人」的樣貌。 生活在底層的人的歷史,聚集交會在台北這座城市,留下的深深淺淺的刻痕,我們試著在作品中描述與捕捉。 - 把一個一個收藏學員作品的箱子打開。 每個箱子裡都裝著一位學員的歷年創作。作品被一件一件拿出來,我們一件一件慢慢地看。 在閱讀作品時,好像也重新走了一遍每個人的生命,尋著脈絡延伸下去,看著那些筆觸、痕跡,彷彿回到正在創作的時刻。 在某年某月,華哥畫下了他在散步的場景,「路平好天。」視力模糊的他,有力的寫下那些字句。某年某月,我們回顧著少年時代,那時候,藍波哥留下「大霸尖山」的創作,「現在封山,沒辦法爬囉!」他帶著炫耀的笑意說:「但我有爬過。」 還有,很多大劉在家裡完成後,驕傲的帶到想鄉給我們看的作品,螃蟹、花卉、臉譜,畫在信封上、畫在不知道從哪裡撿來的木板上、甚至畫在便當盒上。大劉總是笑笑的,說一些其實聽不太懂的話,他的創作讓我們有機會用另一個視角認識他。還有,玲琴姐剪下雜誌的圖片,回憶家庭與母親。又過了一段時間,她開始採集植物,陰乾,黏貼在自己的創作上,大自然用各種方式支撐著她,她用大自然做為媒材來創作。 還有還有,小潘的海洋。海洋與眼淚貫穿他的創作,隱約形成一個軸線,在那裡我們得以瞥見了他細膩的一面。還有OA的三折頁小書、維安伯伯用簡單的線條畫下當船員時的記憶、蘇大哥寫實又充滿細節的人像與風景畫、惠姐直白有力道又可愛的女生畫像、雄哥用充滿童趣的風格描寫兒時記憶⋯⋯好多好多,每個人的個性與故事,都被作品承載著。 想要好好呈現大家這十年來留下的痕跡,我們反覆閱讀作品,篩選了兩三次,才留下目前的創作們。 - 與作品篩選同步進行的,是非常大量的紀錄文件。 閱讀著各種課後記錄、作品故事記錄、訪問記錄、聊天記錄、會議記錄,我們擷取了約200個句子,是大家長長的生命旅途中,非常短而細小的切片,卻也是真實而具有力道的punch line。在布展時,邀請學員們現身,一筆一畫,將那些或許是自己說過、或許是身邊的人說過 ——也或許,說的人已經不在了—— 的句子們,寫在牆上。 選好作品與文字後,也曾一度糾結於要怎麼呈現大家的創作。 美術館的場域質地,讓我們有種可以更玩耍一點、更放心的以詩意的方式處理這些作品的感覺,不一定要什麼都講得很清楚。於是,放下要把故事說完的糾結、放下有條有理,有因有果的呈現,也稍微放下要做議題的責任感,讓更多的留白出現,讓作品們彼此輝映交織,產生可以玩味的有趣。 乍看之下是眾聲喧嘩,細看又會發現每個人細細的軸線,不過也沒辦法看得很清楚,在模糊之中,留下反射自己的空間。 希望《一起走的修復之路》會是一件值得反覆閱讀的作品。有每個人的獨特,但大家的共同存在,又創造了新的東西。 喧嘩是豐富的感覺,好像同時聽到好多人發出聲音。在整個展區中,好像也是我們這邊聲音特別吵雜(在記者會時也是哈哈),有很多不同人的聲音混在一起,有大聲有小聲,用不同的音調情緒、不同的狀態講自己的故事,為整個展覽增加了具有夢想城鄉個性的、眾聲喧嘩的、顏色繽紛的感覺。 期待大家空出時間,到展場來看看作品本人,也聽聽那是怎樣的喧嘩之聲。 by 台灣夢想城鄉營造協會 亮亮 ⬀⬀⬁⬂⬃⬂⬀⬃⬂⬀⬁⬂⬃⬂⬀⬁⬂⬀⬀⬁⬂⬃⬂⬀⬃⬂⬀⬁⬂⬃⬂⬀⬁⬂ 《#貧窮人的台北:#轉運站》 Poor People’s Taipei: Transfer Station 展覽地點|台北當代藝術館 MoCA Taipei 實驗展場 MoCA Studio 開展時間|04 / 27 - 06 / 16(週一休館)10AM - 6PM
。。。。
王偉忠專訪傅佩榮教授
這個時代需要老子
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【這個時代需要"老子"】專訪 傅佩榮|欸!我說到哪裡了?2024.04.30


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