Shapeshifter's brilliance returns the genie to his echo

POETRY SPECIAL: In the Light of (after Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations). By Ciaran Carson. Gallery Press,  €11.95 paperback, €18.50 hardback

John Ashbery calls Arthur Rimbaud’s Génie one of the greatest poems ever written. It heralds the coming of a new, secular saviour and has been translated dozens of times. Each translator may have seen him- or herself as its English-language messiah.

Ciaran Carson’s new version of Génie does justice to Ashbery’s statement even as it acknowledges the difficulty of retranslation, of “returning [the genie] to his echo”. His new version of Rimbaud’s Illuminations enters a congested field.

Rimbaud remains so attractive to us partly because his genius is aphoristic and acts as a kind of invitation and prompt to translators: “Je est un autre,” he declares; or he asks that the poet “make oneself a seer through a long, prodigious, systematic disordering of all the senses”.

And it is not, of course, just the poems that exercise their fascination. Rimbaud’s life is like a fable: fatherless child in Charleville, runaway who shocked the Paris literary salons, witness to the Paris Commune, escaping Paris to King’s Cross with his lover Paul Verlaine, victim in the violent quarrel with Verlaine that ended with a gunshot and Verlaine in a Belgian jail. A man whose last act as a poet was to entrust, carelessly, the manuscript of Illuminations to his ex-lover after a brief meeting in Stuttgart, a manuscript that Verlaine would publish in the belief that it was a posthumous memorial, thinking that Rimbaud had already died in Africa, where in fact he would spend the rest of his life making and losing a fortune as a trader.

It is easy to see why Rimbaud remains so perpetually fresh and intriguing, but why should Carson be the right translator? At this point in Rimbaud’s, or any major foreign poet’s, trajectory into English, faithfulness is only one aspect of the translator’s contribution: it is vital that the translator bring something of his or her own to bear upon the original.

And Carson does seem well equipped. First, he has form for translating Rimbaud, having previously brought across his sonnets – along with those of Baudelaire and Mallarmé – in The Alexandrine Plan (1998). More importantly, Carson is the protean shapeshifter of Irish poetry. Rather than retreat into mannerism or self-imitation, he has always tried on new ideas for size. His enormous and wonderfully varied Collected Poems of 2008 has been followed by the bleak, gapped, short-lined Until Before After, by two novels, including this year’s Borgesian mystery novel Exchange Place, and now by this version of one of modernism’s inaugurating texts.

Carson’s introduction announces that his work took its bearings from Walter Benjamin’s essay The Task of the Translator and its injunction that the translator “must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language”. Carson cannot resist pointing out that Benjamin’s essay is collected in a book itself called, in English, Illuminations, a title that he duly avoids: in fact, by titling his version In the Light of he sets out its particular relation to the original and the previous translations.

Doubling pun

Carson’s other innovation is to excerpt Rimbaud: there is a sort of numerical, doubling pun in the fact that he chooses to render 22 of the poems into couplets, that these 22 versions are split into two groups of 11 and, headscratchingly, that the book features three prose poems as “intro”, “interlude” and “coda”.

The versions also make sidelong references to Carson’s own contexts, with their references to mailboats, “forty shades of greenery”, Twenty Years a-Growing and even a nod to the fact that this book began life as a commission for NUI Maynooth: “Commissions? That I’ve done.”

That line comes at the end of Lives, Carson’s version of Vies, a poem whose chain of alternative lives now seems like both precursor and Carson’s commentary on Derek Mahon’s great poem of that name.

Having established a formal frame, and a set of contemporary references, we might also expect Carson to hammer the poems’ wildly various tones into some kind of unity as well. But, instead, the poems move freely, changing direction and voice, signalling the wild, directed dramas of Rimbaud’s work.

And Carson proves equal to the challenge of Rimbaud’s tonal variety: his interest in the language of balladry allows him to carry across the kind of archaism and high poetic abstraction otherwise long absent from poetry in English: he translates Aube as As I Roved Out, and his version manages to sound like a drug dream (“I embraced the summer dawn”) and a surreal ballad (“And boldly did I go / across the plain where I betrayed her to the cock”), while inserting lovely, alert new images which catch a sense that the nonhuman world is just as alive as its human witnesses: “I woke quick, live warm clouds of breath as on I strode. // Gemstones eyed my passing. Wings arose without sound.”

Carson’s versions are also alive to the feverish and comic sensuality of La Bête (Bottom), whose Shakespearean protagonist ends up on the wrong side of the tracks, “braying on to the fields, / brandishing my great big donkey grievance, till the well-heeled // Sabine housewives from beyond the railway track / flew madly to throw themselves on my donkey-rough neck”.

But Carson can also present another side again of Rimbaud as his couplets re-create the beautiful, eerily poised meditation of On the Road (Enfance), whose sixth part imagines life beyond the grave: “Enormously remote / above my subterranean salon, houses send down roots, // fogs gather. The muck is red or black. Monstrous / city, endless night!”

Rimbaud’s readers have spent more than a century reconstructing the poetic oeuvre that he abandoned. Carson’s brilliant new edition of the poems of Illuminations should grip the imagination of Rimbaud’s English-speaking readers as well as new readers of these strikingly contemporary, modern writers, Arthur Rimbaud and Ciaran Carson.