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Rimbaud in Abyssinia
Part travelogue, part history, this book explores the mysteries surrounding Arthur Rimbaud's voyage from poetry to gun-running in Abyssinia.
- GenresBiographyNonfiction
323 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1984
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About the author
Alain Borer
35 books12 followersAlain Borer is a French poet and writer. He has been a Professor at the L'École supérieure des beaux-arts de Tours since 1979, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, since 2005. He currently resides in the French town of Chaumussay, in Touraine. In 2008, he was awarded the prestigious 70th Apollinaire prize for Icare & I don't (Seuil)
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 16, 2014
A Rimbaud nerd's delight. It presupposes a relative fluency in his life and work; nearly every page has at least one footnote referencing his poems or letters and/or quotes and letters by people who knew him; and there are 50 pages of notes at the end, many of which have something worth reading. It's a book you read with two bookmarks, continually flipping from text to notes and back again.
It's divided into chapters headed by single words or simple phrases that act as over-riding concepts for that chapter - "Wandering", "Innocence", "The Middle Term", etc. But still each chapter is like a slight variation of the others, maybe going a little farther in one direction but also digging deeper in the same direction, so that the overall reading experience is almost like listening to a minimalist symphony. And like said hypothetical symphony it resonates in your head long after you step away from it.
It seems the author wrote the notes that eventually grew into this book while travelling through Abyssinia while working on a film about Rimbaud's life, though I couldn't find out any info on the film, or even if it was ever completed. So there are lots of shifts in the text from present day to the late 19th c. and back again, and the book also has a cinematic feel, or rather a flow of snapshots with multi-vocal commentary and imagined travels into the past.
The overall tone is speculative, in that it is a gold prospector's sifting for evidence that Rimbaud's genius was undimmed while in Africa. Speculative because there actually is very little tangible evidence of this as he mostly wrote letters about business and letters of complaint to his family, so any conclusion can only be opinion.
One major conclusion of the author's is that Rimbaud came as close as humanly possible to disappearing in the austere present tense of the desert, beyond words and even ego, and so achieved a kind of solitary apotheosis far from the trivial literary worlds of Paris.
It's divided into chapters headed by single words or simple phrases that act as over-riding concepts for that chapter - "Wandering", "Innocence", "The Middle Term", etc. But still each chapter is like a slight variation of the others, maybe going a little farther in one direction but also digging deeper in the same direction, so that the overall reading experience is almost like listening to a minimalist symphony. And like said hypothetical symphony it resonates in your head long after you step away from it.
It seems the author wrote the notes that eventually grew into this book while travelling through Abyssinia while working on a film about Rimbaud's life, though I couldn't find out any info on the film, or even if it was ever completed. So there are lots of shifts in the text from present day to the late 19th c. and back again, and the book also has a cinematic feel, or rather a flow of snapshots with multi-vocal commentary and imagined travels into the past.
The overall tone is speculative, in that it is a gold prospector's sifting for evidence that Rimbaud's genius was undimmed while in Africa. Speculative because there actually is very little tangible evidence of this as he mostly wrote letters about business and letters of complaint to his family, so any conclusion can only be opinion.
One major conclusion of the author's is that Rimbaud came as close as humanly possible to disappearing in the austere present tense of the desert, beyond words and even ego, and so achieved a kind of solitary apotheosis far from the trivial literary worlds of Paris.
April 14, 2010
Alain Borer wrote this book as a kind of travelogue recounting his adventures in making a movie in Africa about Rimbaud and what he produced is a pretty tough thing to read. I can only imagine what a pretentious film came out of all this Land-Rovering and airplane hopping. As for the book, it could be summed up as a blithering bunch of ridiculous crapola caked over a core of what are occasionally shrewd assessments of the life and character of the great French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who gave up poetry at the age of 19 or thereabouts and spent the rest of his life toiling in east Africa as a merchant. Oh, but what nonsense. Let me share a couple of random examples:
At the end of his life, “feverish, drugged, his leg amputated,” Rimbaud is waiting with his sister for a train for his last journey away from his hometown. A fully-uniformed officer walks by and according to his sister, Rimbaud breaks into a “momentary fit of extraordinary and harrowing laughter.” Borer, in typical fashion, cannot help making a pseudo-Camus café existentialist remark on this burst of laughter: “This uncontrollable laughter of the cancer patient is the most authentic moment of Rimbaud’s life. It shows his deep and unchanged personality as it is—not only in regard to an officer who may have reminded him of his father, or the flagrant ridiculousness of the army….this is the uncontrollable, convulsive, tragic, ridiculous laugh of Arthur Rimbaud, the free man who sacrificed his life to an escape from the absurdness of the bourgeois world, an escape from mediocrity – and who had forgotten in his remote adventures that it could still exist to this degree. (pp. 137-138). “The most authentic moment”!? Really? This is an outrageous presumption. And silly too, full of “flagrant ridiculousness.” Time and time again Borer, after presenting an interesting fact or observation will tack on a page and a half of his own gaseous thoughts. You could easily chop two-thirds of this merde and have something useful.
Another (minor) example of authorial weirdness: there were a couple of times when Borer described animals in what can only be described as being in a 19th century Great White Hunter way, that way where you can without embarrassment describe a wolf as “vermin” and otherwise pass anthropomorphic judgements on animals. As much as I applaud any writer’s flouting of the Politically Correct, sometimes this made me squirm. Here is Borer on hyenas: “We filmed them cowering back from the blinding light of the projectors; we say their reddish, bloodshot eyes, flicked with little green spots of decay…” (p. 152) Really? “Green spots of decay” is pretty decadent and cool and all that, but it just isn’t true or accurate or anything but authorial self-indulgence, is it? I mean, the hyenas are just doing their hyena thing, right? In fact, from what I have read, in Rimbaud’s time (and to some extent now), in the Ethiopian hinterlands, hyenas were encouraged to come into the town and eat the garbage and dead dogs and etc. Hyenas doing hyena things are not rotting from the inside out…
One more tiny atrocity: towards the end of the book, Borer really cranks up the rhetoric, and here is a typical example: “The regions stretching on either side of the Red Sea, Abyssinia and Arabia, where Rimbaud seemed to arrive by chance, became the necessary place for perfecting his suffering, where he always seemed drawn in spite of himself, but by himself, as if he had chosen (while accusing others and the whole world), had decided (while complaining) on the precise place for what was to happen to him…(pp. 242-243). I don’t know what this means. In any case, whenever I read about somebody finding the necessary place or perfecting their suffering I reach for my revolver. This is just pure twaddle, and I’d say about a third of the book is larded over with this kind of crapola. You’ve been warned… I suppose the genesis of Borer’s gross overwriting, over-emoting and constant recourse to the hackneyed literary beau geste circa 1947 is the tendency for writers writing about Rimbaud to feel they actually have become Rimbaud. And yet when you read Rimbaud, even at his most extravagant, even in his “visionary” letters, Rimbaud himself did not write this way. Or when he did go off on such flights, he would quickly ground himself with something concrete or sardonic or self-aware. I’m no Rimbaud expert, but I have yet to find him ever just bloviating. Mon Dieu! Does Borer bloviate!
And yet the author was out-bloviated at least once. Borer at one point endured without complaint Allen Ginsberg, an experience I would gladly trade for the hardship of the Ethiopian desert. “I went to Charleville (Rimbaud’s birth-and-burial place) another winter, with Allen Ginsberg. The great poet of the Beat Generation , who had just recorded an improvised chant on Rimbaud with Bob Dylan, discovered Charleville, which he had wanted to visit for twenty years. He stood plunged in thought at Rimbaud’s grave, recited poems preceded by the “OM” of meditation next to the old mill…” (p. 86) Talk about suffering! Poor Alaine Borer! Poor Bob Dylan! Poor Rimbaud, spinning one-legged in his coffin at those Ginsbergian OMs.
And yet the book was worth reading sometimes. Borer, when he isn’t in rapt ecstasies of raptness in the coils of his own awful prose, provides some valuable insights. On page 69 Borer adroitly hones in on the neediness of Rimbaud, his constant badgering requests made of family and friends even long after he was in Africa rather contradicts the ideal of the lone wanderer in the desert who has forsaken everything and everyone. To my considerable astonishment, in an aside, Borer makes one of the most clarifying and helpful comments about free verse I have ever encountered, quoting French poetry practices that I didn’t know anything about – the idea of chevilles (“hinges”), those bits of padding that fill out formal verse and which the French vers libre poets rebelled against (Baudelaire, Rimbaud). This was on page 163 and I will be eternally grateful for Borer to bringing it to my attention.
At the end of his life, “feverish, drugged, his leg amputated,” Rimbaud is waiting with his sister for a train for his last journey away from his hometown. A fully-uniformed officer walks by and according to his sister, Rimbaud breaks into a “momentary fit of extraordinary and harrowing laughter.” Borer, in typical fashion, cannot help making a pseudo-Camus café existentialist remark on this burst of laughter: “This uncontrollable laughter of the cancer patient is the most authentic moment of Rimbaud’s life. It shows his deep and unchanged personality as it is—not only in regard to an officer who may have reminded him of his father, or the flagrant ridiculousness of the army….this is the uncontrollable, convulsive, tragic, ridiculous laugh of Arthur Rimbaud, the free man who sacrificed his life to an escape from the absurdness of the bourgeois world, an escape from mediocrity – and who had forgotten in his remote adventures that it could still exist to this degree. (pp. 137-138). “The most authentic moment”!? Really? This is an outrageous presumption. And silly too, full of “flagrant ridiculousness.” Time and time again Borer, after presenting an interesting fact or observation will tack on a page and a half of his own gaseous thoughts. You could easily chop two-thirds of this merde and have something useful.
Another (minor) example of authorial weirdness: there were a couple of times when Borer described animals in what can only be described as being in a 19th century Great White Hunter way, that way where you can without embarrassment describe a wolf as “vermin” and otherwise pass anthropomorphic judgements on animals. As much as I applaud any writer’s flouting of the Politically Correct, sometimes this made me squirm. Here is Borer on hyenas: “We filmed them cowering back from the blinding light of the projectors; we say their reddish, bloodshot eyes, flicked with little green spots of decay…” (p. 152) Really? “Green spots of decay” is pretty decadent and cool and all that, but it just isn’t true or accurate or anything but authorial self-indulgence, is it? I mean, the hyenas are just doing their hyena thing, right? In fact, from what I have read, in Rimbaud’s time (and to some extent now), in the Ethiopian hinterlands, hyenas were encouraged to come into the town and eat the garbage and dead dogs and etc. Hyenas doing hyena things are not rotting from the inside out…
One more tiny atrocity: towards the end of the book, Borer really cranks up the rhetoric, and here is a typical example: “The regions stretching on either side of the Red Sea, Abyssinia and Arabia, where Rimbaud seemed to arrive by chance, became the necessary place for perfecting his suffering, where he always seemed drawn in spite of himself, but by himself, as if he had chosen (while accusing others and the whole world), had decided (while complaining) on the precise place for what was to happen to him…(pp. 242-243). I don’t know what this means. In any case, whenever I read about somebody finding the necessary place or perfecting their suffering I reach for my revolver. This is just pure twaddle, and I’d say about a third of the book is larded over with this kind of crapola. You’ve been warned… I suppose the genesis of Borer’s gross overwriting, over-emoting and constant recourse to the hackneyed literary beau geste circa 1947 is the tendency for writers writing about Rimbaud to feel they actually have become Rimbaud. And yet when you read Rimbaud, even at his most extravagant, even in his “visionary” letters, Rimbaud himself did not write this way. Or when he did go off on such flights, he would quickly ground himself with something concrete or sardonic or self-aware. I’m no Rimbaud expert, but I have yet to find him ever just bloviating. Mon Dieu! Does Borer bloviate!
And yet the author was out-bloviated at least once. Borer at one point endured without complaint Allen Ginsberg, an experience I would gladly trade for the hardship of the Ethiopian desert. “I went to Charleville (Rimbaud’s birth-and-burial place) another winter, with Allen Ginsberg. The great poet of the Beat Generation , who had just recorded an improvised chant on Rimbaud with Bob Dylan, discovered Charleville, which he had wanted to visit for twenty years. He stood plunged in thought at Rimbaud’s grave, recited poems preceded by the “OM” of meditation next to the old mill…” (p. 86) Talk about suffering! Poor Alaine Borer! Poor Bob Dylan! Poor Rimbaud, spinning one-legged in his coffin at those Ginsbergian OMs.
And yet the book was worth reading sometimes. Borer, when he isn’t in rapt ecstasies of raptness in the coils of his own awful prose, provides some valuable insights. On page 69 Borer adroitly hones in on the neediness of Rimbaud, his constant badgering requests made of family and friends even long after he was in Africa rather contradicts the ideal of the lone wanderer in the desert who has forsaken everything and everyone. To my considerable astonishment, in an aside, Borer makes one of the most clarifying and helpful comments about free verse I have ever encountered, quoting French poetry practices that I didn’t know anything about – the idea of chevilles (“hinges”), those bits of padding that fill out formal verse and which the French vers libre poets rebelled against (Baudelaire, Rimbaud). This was on page 163 and I will be eternally grateful for Borer to bringing it to my attention.
September 6, 2020
في ليلة من ليالي تلك الأعوام ، وفي حانة القط الأسود
سمع الناس فيرلين يصرخ بكلام غامض يقول : ذهب
إلى مصر ، وكانت كل الطرق تقوده إلى الشرق سواء
إلى فيينا أم قبرص والحقيقة أنه رحل من قبل إلى
مصر في حلم نجده في كراسته المدرسية وهو في
العاشرة .. ذلك الحلم الذي غذاه على قراءاته في
المكتبات ، من كتاب شاتوبريان ' رحلة من باريس
إلى القدس ' و كتاب فلوبير ' رحلة في الشرق
١٨٤٩ - ١٨٥١ ، ووصف نيرفال الذي ظهرت طبعته
الموثقة عام ١٨٥٠ ، ومن تيوفيل غوتيه الذي كان
في سرقته من شامبليون ، دو كامب في
' قصة المومياء ' قد رأى مصر الأهرام بفترة طويلة
قبل ذهابه إليها عام ١٨٦٩ ، لزيارة المعابد المدفونة
تنويه
لم أجد غلاف الطبعة العربية لذا وضعت الإقتباس
تحت الإصدار الأصلي بالفرنسية ، بترجمة المبدع
حسين عبدالزهرة مجيد
سمع الناس فيرلين يصرخ بكلام غامض يقول : ذهب
إلى مصر ، وكانت كل الطرق تقوده إلى الشرق سواء
إلى فيينا أم قبرص والحقيقة أنه رحل من قبل إلى
مصر في حلم نجده في كراسته المدرسية وهو في
العاشرة .. ذلك الحلم الذي غذاه على قراءاته في
المكتبات ، من كتاب شاتوبريان ' رحلة من باريس
إلى القدس ' و كتاب فلوبير ' رحلة في الشرق
١٨٤٩ - ١٨٥١ ، ووصف نيرفال الذي ظهرت طبعته
الموثقة عام ١٨٥٠ ، ومن تيوفيل غوتيه الذي كان
في سرقته من شامبليون ، دو كامب في
' قصة المومياء ' قد رأى مصر الأهرام بفترة طويلة
قبل ذهابه إليها عام ١٨٦٩ ، لزيارة المعابد المدفونة
تنويه
لم أجد غلاف الطبعة العربية لذا وضعت الإقتباس
تحت الإصدار الأصلي بالفرنسية ، بترجمة المبدع
حسين عبدالزهرة مجيد
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