Pierre Michon - Rimbaud the Son

Rimbaud the Son

BOOKS BY PIERRE MICHON IN ENGLISH

The Origin of the World
Masters and Servants
Small Lives
The Eleven
Winter Mythologies/Abbots

PIERRE MICHON

TRANSLATED BY JODY GLADDING AND

ELIZABETH DESHAYS

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN & LONDON

The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

Cet ouvrage a bnfici du soutien des Programmes daide la publication de lInstitut franais. (This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Franais.)

Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.

English translation copyright 2013 by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays.

Originally published as Rimbaud le fils, copyright ditions Gallimard, Paris, 1991.

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Set in Electra and Nobel types by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Michon, Pierre, 1945
[Rimbaud le fils. English]
Rimbaud the son / Pierre Michon ; Translated by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays.

pages cm

Originally published in French as Rimbaud le fils, ditions Gallimard, Paris, 1991.
ISBN 978-0-300-17265-2 (alk. paper)

1. Poets, French19th centuryBiography. 2. Rimbaud, Arthur, 18541891Family. I. Title.
PQ2673.I298Z711513 2013
841.8dc23
2013012746

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

There is a whole epoch between us and, today, an entire country of snow.
Mallarm

Take it into your head to write a preface to Rimbaud, writes Pierre Michon, and your wings fall off; you start quoting the saints of the almanac. Duly warned, we proceed with caution and will be brief. Rimbaud le fils (Rimbaud the Son) was published in France in 1991, seven years after Michons first book, Vies minuscules (Small Lives). Vies minuscules won Michon immediate acclaim and was quickly followed by other successes; Rimbaud le fils was his fifth published work. Although still relatively unknown to readers in the United States, Michon is widely recognized in Europe as one of Frances foremost contemporary writers. He won the Grand Prix du Roman from the Acadmie Franaise for his most recent novel, Les Onze (The Eleven), and the Prix de la Ville de Paris for his entire opus.

In Rimbaud le fils, Michon asks what drives art. What explains a poets devotion to the word and then our own devotion to that poet after he abandons it? Through Rimbaud, Michon explores his recurring themes: the absent father, the smothering mother, the backwater upbringing, and how they shape that tortured mix of genius and ambition we call an artist. Although Michon begins with Vitalie Cuif, Rimbauds mother, it is really the paternal line, the fatheror fathersthat interests him. Rimbaud le fils traces lineage as determined by literature and how Rimbaud becomes literature incarnate, only to reject that patrimony.

Michon is a virtuosic writer whose medium is language, yet his imagination is visual. Rimbaud is revealed to us in images. We see him first sitting for a school photograph. Later we follow him to tienne Carjats studio for the shooting of that iconic portrait with the crooked tie. And finally there he is in Harar, posing before the banana fields, a figure no longer identifiable as poetry in person. These are all photographs but Michons methods are painterly. His eye for color, his sense of depth, dimension, composition, the way he returns again and again to the image, adding layer upon layerall this renders Rimbaud le fils a meticulously painted canvas, or many canvases, from which the poet eternally escapes.

Dense and poetic, Michons work calls for every translation trick in the book. A Michon sentence is an architectural feat: shift the position of a verb, extract a semicolon, and the whole thing topples. But the delight of bringing Michon into English is multiplied by the daunting nature of the task. And by the sheer mastery of Michons prose: What makes men write? Other men, their mothers, the stars, or the old enormous things, God, language? The powers know. The powers of the air are this breath of wind through the leaves. The night turns. The moon rises, there is no one against the haystack. Rimbaud, in the attic among some pages, has turned toward the wall and sleeps like lead. What makes men write? Michon does not answer this question. But few writers have asked it so beautifully.

Rimbaud the Son

It is said that Vitalie Rimbaud, ne Cuif, country girl and bad-natured woman, suffering and bad-natured, gave birth to Arthur Rimbaud. It is not known if she cursed first and suffered after, or if she cursed at having to suffer and persisted in that malediction; or if, joined like the fingers on her hand, curse and suffering overlapped in her mind, switched places, reinforced one another, so that, irritated by their touch, she crushed her life, her son, her living and her dead between her dark fingers. But it is known that the husband of this woman who was the father of this son, although alive, became a phantom in the purgatory of distant garrisons where he was only a name, when the son was six years old. There is some debate over whether that lightweight father, who was a captain, who read Arabic and dabbled in the annotation of grammar books, was justified in abandoning that creature of darkness who wanted to sweep him under her shadow, or if she only became that way because of the darkness into which his departure cast her; we just do not know. It is said that the child, with phantom on one side of his desk and creature of curse and disaster on the other, was the perfect schoolboy and had a strong attraction for the ancient game of verse: perhaps in the old perfunctory tempo of twelve feet he heard the phantom bugle of distant garrisons, and also the paternosters of the creature of disaster who, in order to recite her accursed suffering, had found God, just as her son, to the same end, discovered verse; and in that scansion he married the bugle and the paternosters, perfectly. Verse is an old matchmaker. So it seems that he composed it in great quantities from a very tender age, some in Latin, some in French; in these verses, which still exist, no miracle took place: they are from the hand of a gifted provincial child whose anger has not yet found its own consubstantial rhythm, that true rhythm thanks to which it is changed into charity without losing a fraction of its fine edge, anger and charity blended in the same movement released in a single burst and falling back with all their weight, or taking off but remaining there mixed, heavy, disabled, like fireworks that go off in your hand though sparking impeccably, all of which would later assume the name of Arthur Rimbaud. These were the exercises of a schoolboy. In the period when he was covering page after lined page with these practice scales, it is clear that the polite smile was not his forte and that he sulked, as shown in the photos that devout hands here and there have collected, multiplied like loaves, and that have passed unaltered through all the devout hands in the world: with, on his lap, the small round military cap of the Rossat Institute in Charleville, with that ridiculous scrap of clerical lingerie on his arm with which mothers used to deck out their sons for communion, here his small fingers slipped into the edge of a missal that appears cabbage green, there well hidden in the secret hollow of the kepi, but always the direct and wicked gaze, held out before him like a fist, as though greatly detesting or desiring the photographer who in those days covered himself with a black hood in order to fashion a future out of the past, to tamper with time, the child endlessly sulked. And the rest of his life, or our devotion, teaches us that beneath that appearance the true extent of his anger was considerable: not simply against the armband and the kepi but against the armband and the kepi as well. For under those old castoffs, it is said, there was the shade of the Captain and the living creature of refusal and disaster, of refusal in the name of God who castigated his soul in order that he become Rimbaud: not there in person, but their fabled effigies on either side of the desk; and though perhaps hating them both with all his might, and thus hating the verses in which paternosters and bugles married, he truly loved the mission that they required of him. That was why he was sulking. He persisted, and we know what followed.