Rimbaud’s “Matinée
d’ivresse” from Les Illuminations scarcely needs a new English translation. Superfluous though it may be, the reader will
find one here, along with an interpretive paraphrase and a few further comments.
Rimbaud elicits from some of his readers
an unusual intimacy.
Oh my
good! My lovely! Terrible fanfare in which I do not
falter! Faery torture! Bravo for the work never heard and for the
wonders of the body, for the very first time!
This all began amid the laughter of infants just as it will end. The poison will remain running in our veins
when the fanfare pivots and we find ourselves in the old, old dissonance. Oh now! We whom these agonies suit so very well, we
must collect on the superhuman promise made to our created bodies and souls –
such a promise, what madness! Elegance,
science, violence! We were promised the
tree of good and evil would be buried in shade, the tyranny of propriety sent
away that we might claim our exceedingly
pure love. Beginning with a certain
distaste, == unable at once to seize eternity -- it ends with a cascade of perfumes.
The laughter of
Infants, the discretion of slaves, the austerity of virgins, a dread of people
and objects here, sacralized by the memory of last night. See -- what began in
total philistinism ends among angels of fire and ice.
Little drunk
vigil – holy! Were it only for the mask
you have granted us. O method, we affirm
you! We have not forgotten that
yesterday you glorified our every age.
Our faith is in poison. We know
that every day we must offer our undivided life.
Now is the time
of the assassins.
O mon Bien ! O
mon Beau ! Fanfare atroce où je ne trébuche point ! Chevalet féerique ! Hourra
pour l'oeuvre inouïe et pour le corps merveilleux, pour la première fois ! Cela
commença sous les rires des enfants, cela finira par eux. Ce poison va rester
dans toutes nos veines même quand, la fanfare tournant, nous serons rendus à
l'ancienne inharmonie. O maintenant, nous si digne de ces tortures !
rassemblons fervemment cette promesse surhumaine faite à notre corps et à notre
âme créés: cette promesse, cette démence ! L'élégance, la science, la violence
! On nous a promis d'enterrer dans l'ombre l'arbre du bien et du mal, de
déporter les honnêtetés tyranniques, afin que nous amenions notre très pur
amour. Cela commença par quelques dégoûts et cela finit, - ne pouvant nous
saisir sur-le-champ de cette éternité, - cela finit par une débandade de
parfums.
Rire des enfants,
discrétion des esclaves, austérité des vierges, horreur des figures et des
objets d'ici, sacrés soyez-vous par le souvenir de cette veille. Cela
commençait par toute la rustrerie, voici que cela finit par des anges de flamme
et de glace.
Petite veille
d'ivresse, sainte ! quand ce ne serait que pour le masque dont tu as gratifié.
Nous t'affirmons, méthode ! Nous n'oublions pas que tu as glorifié hier chacun
de nos âges. Nous avons foi au poison. Nous savons donner notre vie tout
entière tous les jours.
Voici le temps
des Assassins.
Here is Rimbaud’s
recommendation for the systematic derangement of the senses which has led many
to the brink of self-destruction (or beyond) and which the author himself abandoned
when he devised an even riskier way to live his life. In this Romantic view, the artist must suffer
and sacrifice self in order to create.
The prose poem
opens with mystic cries for the absolute, a verbal fanfare, as though Platonic
forms might be summoned by command. The
trumpet calls announcing visionary breakthroughs resemble a torture device, the
psychic strain is so great, yet at the same time the sufferer feels enchanted. The brand-new art (l’œuvre inouïe)
arises from the physical body with a joy resembling that of the discovery of
sex. The desire for the absolute
signaled in the initial addresses to goodness and beauty corresponds in purity
and innocence to the laughter of children, present at life’s beginning and end,
yet elusive in between. For, during
life, one is afflicted with a poison, the drug of conventionality and idées
reçues, which art may temporarily banish, but which will “remain in our
veins.” Our divided character,
semi-divine and semi-damned, renders people torn in agony. Thus
elegance is associated with violence and both with visionary truth. Love can overcome distaste only with the
abandonment of bourgeois morality, but the afflatus will inevitably dissipate. Enlightenment is bound up with laughter but with dread as well and the
ecstatic moment will inevitably become a mere memory. Yet
drunkenness is holy since it provides a route to the ultimate, and, when that
oceanic feeling recedes, it leaves only a pose, a mask, the spoor of
liberation, when liberation itself has
fled. Rimbaud has faith, but it is a
frightening faith in poison. One recalls
the fact of which Derrida made so much, that φάρμακον means both medicine and
toxin. It means as well scapegoat which
suggests a new set of contraries, which may seem inconsistent or antagonistic,
but which in fact require each other.
Rimbaud walks the
ridgepole, on the one hand in exaltation and insight and on the other amid pain
and blindness, both poles amped up to the highest pitch. His experience is profoundly ambivalent,
dialectical in fact, a weird and arduous harmony of pain and pleasure, fear and
triumph, darkness and light, an amalgam which seems at times to mirror
life. One might view Rimbaud’s attitude
as simply facing the facts, looking head on at the agonizing process of living,
while it may seem to another a self-indulgent diversion of a neuraesthenic. Surely it is both.
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