num_pages: 99
description: Winner of the 2008 PEN Center USA Literary Award in TranslationIn this new translation of Arthur Rimbaud—illustrious among the 19th-century symbolists and one of the most influential poets upon the modern mind—Donald Revell captures the child-like wonder and tortured, revelatory despair of these poems, which changed, in so many ways, how we think of what a poem can say and mean. Revell’s choice of a most immediate vernacular gives the modern reader all the heady brilliance in Rimbaud’s rebelliousness. Yet, as Revell explains in his essay “Outrageous Innocence, Innocence Outraged,” which is offered as afterword in this translation of A Season in Hell, Rimbaud’s rebellious sensuality was redolent with the oracular. Revell’s essay offers the story of Rimbaud—his wildly creative youth, his years of breaking with all traditions of morality and decorum, his fame as the genius of French letters who is identified as one of the creators of free verse because of his rhythm experiments in prose poems. And Revell’s essay places these poems in the larger historical narrative of the literature of rebellious youth that has molded much of our contemporary culture. Published with the French on facing pages, this translation will open many readers to the pleasure of reading this wild child who was remembered after his death as one of the masters of French poetry.A volatile and peripatetic poet, the prodigy Arthur Rimbaud wrote all of his poetry in a space of less than five years. His poem "Voyelles" invoked synesthesia, marking him as a founder of French symbolism, and his Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) is considered one of the first works of free verse. His poetry was subconsciously inspired and highly suggestive; his persona was caustic and unstable. Though brilliant, during his life his peers regarded him as perverse, unsophisticated, and youthfully arrogant, and he died virtually indifferent to his own work.
language: English
title: A Season in Hell
titlecomplete: A Season in Hell
genres: Classics, LGBT, France, Fiction, Literature, French Literature, Horror, Poetry, 19th Century, Queer
ratings_count: 5192
publisher: Omnidawn