At 4:12 AM -0600 1/30/03, seiferle wrote:
>Who's the translator of Rimbaud's Illuminations, of which you posted
>the excerpt?

Whoops, my apologies.  They're in progress by a young Melbourne
actor/poet called Dan Spielman; he's off to Paris soon to work more
on them with a translator, who thinks that Rimbaud has been much
mistranslated and likes these ones.  I like them myself in fact for
their fidelity to Rimbaud's syntax, as much as their energy and
clarity.  But I just happened to be thinking about that point of the
prosaic when it was raised.

At 5:59 PM +0000 1/30/03, david.bircumshaw wrote:
>that Rimbaud ended up writing dry reports is not necessarily a point of
>admiration

Rimbaud's later activities are not without interest or their own
virtues - they're the main point of fascination of Graham Robb's
excellent biography, where he makes a very strong case for Rimbaud as
a formative factor in the French colonisation of Africa, and an
important explorer.  The "dryness" of his reports was something
Rimbaud was rather proud of; Robb speaks of him fitting more
information into 2000 words than others did into a novel, and he
seemed to devote the same ferocious intelligence and energy to
colonisation that he did earlier to poetry.  I think this gives an
interesting slant on the Illuminations, their intelligence and their
disillusion.

The English tradition of prose poetry is a little different from the
French - Blake's prose poems in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are
surely formative? - and predate Rimbaud by about a century.  I guess
the Psalms and the King James Bible were important liberating forces
for English poets - is Jubilate Agnato a prose poem?

As you know, I write a fair bit of prose, some of it more "poetic"
than others, and no doubt this inflects what I'm saying: I'm
beginning to think that it's all writing.  I once thought there was a
huge difference between prose and poetry, but as I've got older and
more confused the distinction between prose poems and prose is by no
means clear to me.  The variety in the prose poems posted here, which
kind of forbids generalisation already! perhaps tells us something.
There is poetry that has prose rhythms and syntax but is in stanzas,
and is called poetry, and then there is prose that has poetic rhythms
and syntax and maybe even rhyme, and is called prose, and every
variety in between: and I suppose things emerge out of the
shadowlands that are clearly prose poems, because one can't call them
anything else, unless you just called them poems.  But I'm not sure
that there are concrete identifying signs, even of syntax, which make
a prose poem - Ania Walwicz, an Australian poet, writes prose poems
which do terrible violences to sentence-type syntax.  So I don't
know...

Thanks for those Jacob translations, Mark: I've read them before (a
review somewhere?)  Are they published?  And phew, Trevor!  That's an
amazing poem.  Story.  Prosepoem.  Writing.  Poem.

Best

A
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Alison Croggon
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