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Beware! Creative translator at work!
Highly unreliable. Schmidt has produced some very good English-language poetry, but it ain't Rimbaud. He conceals this by not printing the original on a facing page. Worse yet, he prints the Illuminations as free verse, when they were written as prose poems (on the rationale that the prose poem isn't as successful a genre in English as it is in French.) I am sternly against this kind of translation, unless you're going to go all the way and admit that what you're doing is a poem by Paul Schmidt "after" Rimbaud. But he doesn't. Rimbaud newbies are directed instead to Louise Varese's superb versions of Illuminations and A Season in Hell; those who want a complete works should go for Wallace Fowlie's less memorable but more faithful edition; total Rimbaud freaks should learn French (and mortgage the house in order to be able to afford the magnificent Pleiade edition of the originals).
December 1999 · Books
the product in question
Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works (Perennial Library)
4.5★ · 24 ratings, as of 2023
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