This is what Oliver Bernard did decades ago with his Penguin Rimbaud. I’ve heard expressed the view that it is only an unstylised word-for-word translation of poetry that can be legitimate. The general view of these final Rimbaud texts is that, because they are uncompromisingly self-referential and private, they are hugely difficult to translate, if not impossible. We marvel at the poise of these distillations of a lifetime spent in the company of Illuminations. Let me say right away that Ashbery has achieved something quietly splendid with these translations. TO ADD TO THE many translations of Illuminations, there now comes one that has been eagerly awaited for a while as it’s by that towering force in modern American poetry, John Ashbery. Or, to borrow Iris Murdoch’s vivid image, the electrical circuit of his poetry had become so overloaded that it fused and burned out. Rimbaud is more intransigent than ever, and in retrospect it seems inevitable that his next step as a poet had to be - silence. Whilst, for all its opacities, Saison reads as a sad statement issued to the world, Illuminations are intransitive. A connection with the reader is no longer part of Rimbaud’s reckoning. And one mark of these gnomic prose utterances is something akin to solipsism.

He had already begun to write the pieces which were to become, posthumously, Les Illuminations, and which, the consensus has it, are the summit of his achievement. In 1873, Rimbaud’s shutters go up, if not on all poetry, as used to be thought when scholars took Une Saison en enfer to be the last literary work ever to be written by Rimbaud, but on poetry as agent of change for the individual and for society, poetry as a public act. The apocryphal story of Rimbaud’s death-bed conversion to Christianity has its logic. He may be the unanchored Drunken Boat that scorns the safety of the mapped world, but he still wishes for connection: ‘ J’aurais voulu montrer aux enfants ces dorades…’ The tenderness that produces occasional flashes speak of a human being unable fully to be shot of a sense of fellowship. He may appear to have not an ounce of forgiveness in his unyielding young heart, but we know that the inconsiderate, elusive homme aux semelles de vent is the same whimpering lad who in panic runs down to Tilbury Docks to plead with Verlaine not to leave him. He may despise that readership, top-heavy as it might be with the pantouflards who get derided in his verse poems, particularly the early ones. That is to say, what he writes, and what he seeks when he first goes to Paris, implies a comprehending readership. UP TO AND INCLUDING Une Saison en enfer, written in the summer of 1873, the ill-behaved, foul-mouthed, and doubtless foul-smelling Rimbaud is a poet with a social sense.

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