![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I was a massive Rimbaud fan starting at age 14 (which is when I made the blog, hence why my icon has always been a cartoon depiction of him). I bought a bilingual edition of his collected works that year, and it became my prized possession. I was just beginning to develop a serious interest in literature then and no other poet had captured my heart so entirely.
Je m’en allais, les poings dans mes poches crevées ; / I went off, my fists in my torn pockets;
Mon paletot aussi devenait idéal ; / My coat too was becoming ideal;
J’allais sous le ciel, Muse ! et j’étais ton féal ; / I walked under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal;
Oh ! là ! là ! que d’amours splendides j’ai rêvées ! / Oh! oh! what brilliant loves I dreamed of!
Mon unique culotte avait un large trou. / My only pair of trousers had a big hole.
– Petit-Poucet rêveur, j’égrenais dans ma course / – Tom Thumb in a daze, I sowed rhymes
Des rimes. Mon auberge était à la Grande-Ourse. / As I went along. My inn was at the Great Bear.
– Mes étoiles au ciel avaient un doux frou-frou / – My stars in the sky made a soft rustling sound
Et je les écoutais, assis au bord des routes, / And I listened to them, seated on the side of the road,
Ces bons soirs de septembre où je sentais des gouttes / In those good September evenings when I felt drops
De rosée à mon front, comme un vin de vigueur ; / Of dew on my brow, like a strong wine;
Où, rimant au milieu des ombres fantastiques, / Where, rhyming in the midst of fantastic shadows,
Comme des lyres, je tirais les élastiques / Like lyres I plucked the elastics
De mes souliers blessés, un pied près de mon coeur ! / Of my wounded shoes, one foot near my heart!
This was an early favourite of mine, "Ma Bohème (Fantaisie)." Rimbaud wrote this when he was 15, a romanticized account of his various attempts at running away from home. I was similarly restless then, thought not as much as he: I'd often go into the yard and jump the fence, an entirely clumsy motion in which I scaled the side of the house, placing one foot on a ledge and hoisting myself onto the thin iron frame of the gate before jumping down. Then I'd spend up to five or six hours wandering aimlessly outside, alone. Once, I walked for nearly two hours to a parliamentary office to join a protest. Another time, I overstayed my welcome at a Japanese restaurant by reading an entire collection of T. S. Elliot poems there and ordering only two glasses of barley tea. In 2024 I read the entirety of Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics on afternoons like this, where I'd lay on dewy suburban lawns and on some occasions holler at somebody's dog that was trying to give chase. My shoes were just as ragged as his: the paint-stained laces had been chewed by pigs and the inside retained traces of blood from when I decided to forgo socks and wore down the skin on my heel.
"Roman" was another one I particularly enjoyed that wasn't in A Season in Hell or Illuminations. I will not include it here for fear of artificially extending the size of this post, but it starts something like "No one's serious at seventeen" and details a drunk young man loitering at a promenade full of lime trees before instantly falling in love with a girl he spots walking beside her stiff-collared father. I reread it at 15 (coincidentally the age Rimbaud was when he wrote it) and felt the need to find a girl who'd think me "absurdly naïf." In my mind, she did not need to return the feeling at all, as long as my infatuation with her could give me a novel experience and inspire me to write something! Yet somehow, I was completely unable to find a girl to crush on, and it wasn’t due to lack of sexual interest or close female friends I could plausibly catch feelings for. I saw lots of beautiful women at the grocery store, in extracurricular clubs and in elevators, but none of them occupied my mind when they were out of sight. In hindsight it was for the better, as my motive was completely selfish! I was totally flippant when it came to human relationships; I'd forgo exchanging contacts with good friends on the basis that "we'd probably never see each other again." When I was alone I'd think about the contents of university lectures I watched online, Napoleon's invasion of Russia and experimental nuclear reactors instead of anybody I knew. I wasn't ready to have a girlfriend, or to be responsible for someone else at all. I only wanted an experience in the shape of a person. On n'est pas sérieux...
Je m’en allais, les poings dans mes poches crevées ; / I went off, my fists in my torn pockets;
Mon paletot aussi devenait idéal ; / My coat too was becoming ideal;
J’allais sous le ciel, Muse ! et j’étais ton féal ; / I walked under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal;
Oh ! là ! là ! que d’amours splendides j’ai rêvées ! / Oh! oh! what brilliant loves I dreamed of!
Mon unique culotte avait un large trou. / My only pair of trousers had a big hole.
– Petit-Poucet rêveur, j’égrenais dans ma course / – Tom Thumb in a daze, I sowed rhymes
Des rimes. Mon auberge était à la Grande-Ourse. / As I went along. My inn was at the Great Bear.
– Mes étoiles au ciel avaient un doux frou-frou / – My stars in the sky made a soft rustling sound
Et je les écoutais, assis au bord des routes, / And I listened to them, seated on the side of the road,
Ces bons soirs de septembre où je sentais des gouttes / In those good September evenings when I felt drops
De rosée à mon front, comme un vin de vigueur ; / Of dew on my brow, like a strong wine;
Où, rimant au milieu des ombres fantastiques, / Where, rhyming in the midst of fantastic shadows,
Comme des lyres, je tirais les élastiques / Like lyres I plucked the elastics
De mes souliers blessés, un pied près de mon coeur ! / Of my wounded shoes, one foot near my heart!
This was an early favourite of mine, "Ma Bohème (Fantaisie)." Rimbaud wrote this when he was 15, a romanticized account of his various attempts at running away from home. I was similarly restless then, thought not as much as he: I'd often go into the yard and jump the fence, an entirely clumsy motion in which I scaled the side of the house, placing one foot on a ledge and hoisting myself onto the thin iron frame of the gate before jumping down. Then I'd spend up to five or six hours wandering aimlessly outside, alone. Once, I walked for nearly two hours to a parliamentary office to join a protest. Another time, I overstayed my welcome at a Japanese restaurant by reading an entire collection of T. S. Elliot poems there and ordering only two glasses of barley tea. In 2024 I read the entirety of Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics on afternoons like this, where I'd lay on dewy suburban lawns and on some occasions holler at somebody's dog that was trying to give chase. My shoes were just as ragged as his: the paint-stained laces had been chewed by pigs and the inside retained traces of blood from when I decided to forgo socks and wore down the skin on my heel.
"Roman" was another one I particularly enjoyed that wasn't in A Season in Hell or Illuminations. I will not include it here for fear of artificially extending the size of this post, but it starts something like "No one's serious at seventeen" and details a drunk young man loitering at a promenade full of lime trees before instantly falling in love with a girl he spots walking beside her stiff-collared father. I reread it at 15 (coincidentally the age Rimbaud was when he wrote it) and felt the need to find a girl who'd think me "absurdly naïf." In my mind, she did not need to return the feeling at all, as long as my infatuation with her could give me a novel experience and inspire me to write something! Yet somehow, I was completely unable to find a girl to crush on, and it wasn’t due to lack of sexual interest or close female friends I could plausibly catch feelings for. I saw lots of beautiful women at the grocery store, in extracurricular clubs and in elevators, but none of them occupied my mind when they were out of sight. In hindsight it was for the better, as my motive was completely selfish! I was totally flippant when it came to human relationships; I'd forgo exchanging contacts with good friends on the basis that "we'd probably never see each other again." When I was alone I'd think about the contents of university lectures I watched online, Napoleon's invasion of Russia and experimental nuclear reactors instead of anybody I knew. I wasn't ready to have a girlfriend, or to be responsible for someone else at all. I only wanted an experience in the shape of a person. On n'est pas sérieux...
From:
getting out there (something i'm surprisingly pretty novel to)
From:
the limits of my gps mean the limits of my world
I never really had a reason to run off either. I've got a pretty great home life, but that hasn't saved me from restlessness. In the period when pandemic restrictions were starting to ease off. I was driven by an overwhelming need to see my best friend at the time, so most of my longer trips were to her house. I used to daydream about freighthopping, but that's too risky to justify in my mind.