I re-wrote some more of the Fowlie translation while riding the plane to NOLA. Things are still the same on that front. I would say I'm about 1/3 done.
Recently, I purchased, at a very decent used book price, the Enid Rhodes translation with the funky orange and green cover.
And then, while meandering around the internet on poetry things, I found this Rimbaud quote that I wanted to repost here for posterity. I have read this before, I'm sure, in 2005 during the Symbolist course at UMaine but I didn't memorize it or anything, so it seems rather fresh to my mind as a result. It goes thusly:
A poet makes herself a visionary though a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; she searches herself, she exhausts within herself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where she will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where she becomes all people: the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For she attains the unknown! Because she has cultivated her soul, already rich, more than anyone! She attains the unknown, and, if demented, she finally loses the understanding of her visions, she will at least have seen them! So what if she is destroyed in her ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!
And I would like to note that I changed all the hes, hims and mens to apply to me. Except, at the end there, about the destroying; I don't agree. I think that's a bullshit cop out to be frank. I think those little shits and major assholes, like Rimbaud, like others I've met, they say that you have to be this tormented being in order to create because that's the easy way out. I think the real challenge is to see what you see, explore what you explore, learn what you learn and then make existing as a decent social being an important part of it all. I don't mean you make things easy or comfortable, but you don't let being an "artiste" be a cop out for contributing.