Rimbaud's Après le deluge (After the Deluge)藍波的『水劫後』

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) 雅塞.藍波 was 18 when he composed the famous suite of  42 incomplete prose poems and free verse called Les Illuminations ( or colored plates) written in 1873-1875 and published later in 1886 by his patron and for a short time lover, a contemporary poet called Paul Verlaine, the leader of the Symbolists, at a time when he was in Abyssia. He however took no part in its publication. He composed these poems shortly after he wrote to Verlaine upon the recommendations of a friend, was taken in by Verlaine (who began a short but torrid affair with Rimbaud, abandoned his young wife and went to live in Bloomsbury and Camden Town in London, surviving as teachers) quarrelled, left for Charleville, Ardennes in northeastern France, where he originally came from.

Rimbaud's father was a professional soldier who rose from the ranks to become captain and won the Legion of Honour for his bravery in the French conquest of Algeria but he was seldom home and his mother was a very strict Catholic anxious for his son's academic success, the type who would make Rimbaud recite 100 lines of Latin verse without any mistakes on pains of having no dinner. Rimbaud was however quite intelligent and was consistently first in his class as a high school student excelling in all subjects except mathematics and the sciences.  

This prose poem shows the unbridled imagination of a young man. Here we find power, imagination and the youthful rebellion against what was then considered to be the established rules of good writing. He writes spontaneously, freely and follows only the bent of this imagination about life in a small town in the Alps with its shops, cafés, abattoirs, river boats, cathedrals, it mournings, its colored windows, its countryside, its skies, its flowers, its spring storms, its sudden showers, lightning and thunder. He portrays the scene after a storm.  In this poem, he merely presented a series of images and uses words more for their suggestive power than their literal meaning. This method of writing poetry greatly influenced later French poetry. He wrote in Lettre du voyant: "it's necessary to be a voyant, make one a voyant. The poet makes himself a voyant by a long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses. All the forms of love, suffering and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even. He will have to make his inventions smelt, touched and heard. A language must be found. Morever, every word being an idea, the time of a universal language will come." All his life, Rimbaud was a restless traveller and adventurer, both physically and in his spirit. After he ceased to write poetry, he became a quarry owner, the colonial worker supervisor, mercenary, arms merchant, coffee exporter, explorer etc. The poet reduces himself into a giant all seeing "eye" which sees what both passes before his eyes in the external world and what passes within his own mind, his own heart and his own body with minimal "description" of its subjective emotional qualities. He merely presents. He does not describe his emotions and his feelings.  

The roots of the poetic movements called Symbolism ( a literary movement in 1880s France spearheaded by Paul Verlaine emphasizing the need to restore to the word its own qualities as words,  preferring to go beyond by the words themselves by suggestion rather than subjective attribution of the type of feeling intended to be portrayed by the use of emotional labels like  adjectives and adverbs save those strictly "neutral" adjectives of color, size, quantity etc and including amongst its ranks poets such as Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, Gérard de Nerval, Stéphane Mallarmé) at the end of 19th century and Imagism ( a literary movement amongst English-Irish-American poets in early 20th century, roughly 1907 to 1930 which emphasized clarity, not fuzziness, directness instead of circumlocution and minimal use of rhetorical devices led by Ezra Pound and including poets such as T E Hulme and Amy Lowell)  and even Dadaism in early 20th century could be traced to this poem and its predecessor Charles Baudelaire, whom Rimbaud read as a child.  Rimbaud is a poet of freedom, of protests and of revolt.  One of the most famous poems written by Rimbaud was Le Bateau Ivre (The Drunken Boat) written when he was still 16!  

Part of the fragments of this prose poem were later turned into songs by Benjamin Britten,  performed at the Cultural Centre on Saturday night by the HKPO under David Atherton and sung by his daughter Elizabeth Atherton. What follows is the first of his Illuminations with my  translations.

Les Illuminations 1  Après le deluge

   Aussitôt après que l'idée du Déluge se fut rassise,

Un liévre s'arrêta dans les sainfoins et les clochettes mouvantes et dit sa prière à l'arc-en-ciel à travers la toile de l'araignée.

  Oh! les pierres préciuses qui se cachaient,--les fleurs qui regardaient déjà.

Dans la grande rue sale les étals se dressèrent, et l'on tira les barques vers la mer étagée là-haut comme sur les gravures.

   Le sang coula, chez Barbe-Bleue, --aux abattoirs, -- dan les cirques, oú le sceau de Dieu blêmit les fenêtres. Le sang et le lait coulèrent.

   Les castons bâtirent. Les "mazagrans" fumèrent dans les estaminets

   Dans la grande masion de vitres encore ruisselante les enfants en deuil regardèrent les merveilleuses images.

   Une porte claqua, et sur la place du hameau, l'enfant tourna ses bras, compris des girouettes et des coqs des clothers de partout, sous l'eclatante giboulée. Madame *** établit un piano dans les Alpes. La messe et les premières communions se célebrèrent aux cent mille autels de la cathédrale.

  Les caravanes partirent. Et le Splendide Hôtel fut bâti dans le chaos de glaces et de nuit du pôle.

  Depuis lors, la lune entendit les chacals plaulant par les déserts de thym,- et les élglogues en sabots grognant dans le verger. Puis, dans la futaie violette, bourgeonnante, Eucharis me dit que c'était le printemps.

  -Sourds, étang, -Ecume, roule sur le pont, et par-dessus les bois; -draps noris et orgues, -éclairs et tonnere, - montez et roulez; -Eaux et tristesses, montez et relevez les Déluges.

   Car depuis qu'ils se sont dissipés, -oh les pierres précieuses s'enfouissant, et les fleurs ouvertes ! -c'est un ennui! et la Reine, la Sorcière qui allume sa braise dans le pot de terre, ne voudra jamais nous raconter ce qu'elle sait, et que nous ignorons.

The Illuminations 1 After the Deluge

  Once the idea of the deluge sat down, 

A hare stopped at the honeysuckles and the moving little bells and said its prayer to the rainbow through the painting like spider web .

  Oh, the precious stones were hiding themselves, --the flowers were already looking.

In the dirty main street the stalls were set up and the boats up there were pulled towards the sea piled up there like on the engravings.

  Blood flowed, at Blue Beard's, --at the slaughterhouses, --in the circuses, where the seal of God bleached the windows. Blood and milk flowed.

  The beavers were building. The "Coffee goblets" were steaming in the café-bars.

  In the big mansion with still dripping windowpanes, the children in mourning were watching the wonderful pictures.

  A door slammed, and at the village square, the child was turning his arms, like weather vane and the cocks of the bell-towers everywhere, under the bursting shower. Madame *** installed a piano in the Alps. The mass and the first communions were being celebrated in a hundred  thousand cathedral altars.

  The caravans were leaving. And the Splendid Hotel was built in the chaos of ice and polar night.

  After that, the Moon heard the jackals howling by the deserts of thyme, --and the villagers in wooden clogs groaned in the orchard. Then, in the violet forest, budding, the Eucharis told me it was springtime.

  --Mutes, pond - Foam, swirls over the bridge, and over the woods; black palls and organs, - lightning flashes and thunder,  --rise and swirl ; --rivers of sadness, rise and launch the Deluges.

  As they have since dissipated, --oh the precious stones are being buried and the open flowers! --it's a bore ! and the Queen, the sorceress who lights the live embers in the clay pot, will never want to tell us that which she knows, and which is unknown to us.

彩燈 I  水劫後

    水劫的意念席不遐暖，

野兔已在金銀菊和晃動的小鈐花中停下來透過如畫的蜘蛛網向彩虹祈禱。

   噢！寶石都隱藏起來了，--花兒己盯著。

在骯髒的大街店鋪正開業而船舶正在高處被拖出層層如雕板上的海濤。

   血傾流着，在藍鬍子那兒, --向着那些屠房，--和馬戲團，在哪天主的印鑑漂白着窗户。血乳同流。

   河狸正在建築。在咖啡吧內『喝咖啡的大瓷杯』正冒着蒸氣。

在那些雨水川流不息的大宅窗戶玻璃，辦喪的小孩們正在欣賞窗框上那迷人的圖畫。

   一扇門砰然關上而在村中的廣陽，那小孩在那正爆發的驟雨下把手臂如風向標和各處鐘樓的公雞般旋轉。某太太在亞爾斯山上安裝了鋼琴。彌撒和初領聖體在成千上萬大教堂的祭台上被慶祝。

    馬車隊正在離開。輝煌酒店在混沌的冰雪和北極般的夜裡被建造。

    之後，月亮聽見豺狼在百里香的沙漠中咆哮--穿木屐的鄉民在果園中呻吟。然後，在含苞侍放的紫羅蘭森林中，聖體告訢我春天到了。

    --啞聲，池塘--泡沬，在橋及樹林上旋轉--黑色的柩衣和風琴--閃電和打雷--冒出和升起;哀痛之河，升起和發動水劫。

     因他們已散去，噢！寶石和綻開的花卉被埋沒！--太乏味了！而皇后及燃點瓷盆中火燼的女法師永不會告訴我們她知而我們不知的東西。