The meteoric and turbulent poetic career of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was crammed into four teenage years, in which he wrote some wonderful short poems and two masterpieces, `The Illuminations’ and `A Seaon in Hell’. At nineteen he then turned his back on the literary life and left France, eventually travelling to Aden, Ethiopia and Somalia, while working as a trader.
Oliver Bernard’s `Rimbaud’ was first published in the Penguin Poets series in 1962. This newly revised edition of his superb presentation adds the Latin verse which Rimbaud wrote as school exercises. The poems are presented in bilingual form with Bernard’s lively and accurate prose versions below the French. Together with an illuminating introduction and the inclusion of a selection of Rimbaud’s letters, this is the most helpful edition of Rimbaud’s astonishing body of work for English-language readers and students of French poetry.
Oliver Bernard’s translations were described in a `Times’ review by Robert Nye as `quite outstanding… so intrinsically poetic that it comes as no surprise to find that Bernard writes original verse himself.’ Anvil has published his poetry, `Verse &c.’ (2001) and his `Apollinaire: Selected Poems’ (new ed. 2004). He has lived in Norfolk for over 30 years.
