Niall McDevitt reviews John Ashbery's translation of Rimbaud's Illuminations

Niall McDevitt's short review of Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by John Ashbery, concerns the Norton and Carcanet edition. McDevitt gives three reasons for calling it timely: Rimbaud's genius does not date, interest in him as a London writer is growing, and the prose poems seem to speak to the globalised, media-driven world after 9/11.

He argues that Rimbaud, not Baudelaire, began modernist poetry, since Illuminations was begun around 1872, fifty years before 1922. He mentions an essay on Rimbaud in The Dial in 1919, followed by belated English translations, and says Joyce's Ulysses and his Epiphanies owe a debt to Illuminations. He cites a photo-postcard Joyce sent from Paris in 1902 and a London letter by Verlaine.

The page adds that an extended version of the review, from the print copy in issue 25, came from a set of four psychogeographical book reviews.

Work

Illuminations

Author

Arthur Rimbaud, translated by John Ashbery

Publisher

Norton / Carcanet

If Baudelaire was the first modern poet, Rimbaud was the first modernist poet.

Niall McDevitt, The Wolf, issue 25