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The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings
A new translation of the best and most provocative work by France's infamous rebel poet, in a bilingual editionPoet, prodigy, precursor, the short, precocious, uncompromisingly rebellious career of the poet Arthur Rimbaud is one of the legends of modern literature. By the time he was twenty, Rimbaud had written a series of poems that are not only masterpieces in themselves but that forever transformed the idea of what poetry is. Without him, surrealism is inconceivable, and his influence is palpable in artists as diverse as Henry Miller, John Ashbery, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith. In this essential volume, renowned translator Mark Polizzotti offers authoritative and inspired new versions of Rimbaud’s major poems and letters, including generous selection of Illuminations and the entirety of his lacerating confession A Season in Hell—capturing as never before not only the meaning but also the daredevil attitudes and incantatory rhythms that make Rimbaud’s works among the most perpetually modern of his or any other generation.
337 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 26, 2022
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About the author
Arthur Rimbaud
734 books2,719 followersHallucinatory work of French poet Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud strongly influenced the surrealists.
With known transgressive themes, he influenced modern literature and arts, prefiguring. He started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian war. During his late adolescence and early adulthood, he produced the bulk of his literary output. After assembling his last major work, Illuminations , Rimbaud completely stopped writing literature at age 20 years in 1874.
A hectic, violent romantic relationship, which lasted nearly two years at times, with fellow poet Paul Verlaine engaged Rimbaud, a libertine, restless soul. After his retirement as a writer, he traveled extensively on three continents as a merchant and explorer until his death from cancer. As a poet, Rimbaud is well known for his contributions to symbolism and, among other works, for A Season in Hell , a precursor to modernist literature.
With known transgressive themes, he influenced modern literature and arts, prefiguring. He started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian war. During his late adolescence and early adulthood, he produced the bulk of his literary output. After assembling his last major work, Illuminations , Rimbaud completely stopped writing literature at age 20 years in 1874.
A hectic, violent romantic relationship, which lasted nearly two years at times, with fellow poet Paul Verlaine engaged Rimbaud, a libertine, restless soul. After his retirement as a writer, he traveled extensively on three continents as a merchant and explorer until his death from cancer. As a poet, Rimbaud is well known for his contributions to symbolism and, among other works, for A Season in Hell , a precursor to modernist literature.
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August 26, 2023Rimbaud's poetic oeuvre is a motley: silly, outré, surreal, mystical, sentimental and deeply erotic. As a teenager in a provincial town, he distinguished himself as a master of languages. He wrote epic scenes in Latin dactylic hexameter; he composed Roman declamations in the style of Cicero. By seventeen, he was a veritable enfant terrible. He deserted home, got arrested, moved to Paris, and behaved as a delinquent rebel scoffing at the mediocrity of his contemporaries. According to Polizzotti's introduction, he interrupted poetic recitations and once masturbated into a glass of milk behind the back of an elderly poet. He moved to London with his lover, Paul Verlaine; they took absinthe heedlessly; one day in Brussels, Verlaine shot him. Rimbaud's poetry is marked by a similar push to break boundaries, bust taboos and reinvent conventions, transcending the rote exercises of his classical education.
Although he only wrote over a few years in his youth, Rimbaud's poetry charts out a veritable career: his earlier poems like "The Drunken Boat" show a Romantic poet, a bard composing in sensuous imagery and language, depicting luscious landscapes imbued with rich symbolism. In "Seasons of Hell" and "Illuminations", however, we see Rimbaud cast a retrospective look at his poetry and tout himself as a fully matured poet. In "Alchemy of the Word", Rimbaud precociously repudiates his earlier poetry, praising and disparaging it at the same time: Rimbaud saw himself as capturing the mystery of the world but only as a menial scribe ("At first it was a study. I transcribed silences and nights, recorded the inexpressible. I captured whirlwinds"). By implication, he has outgrown these puerile attempts at poetry ("Now I know how to welcome beauty") and has fully come into his own voice. In "Lives", he lauds himself with teetering braggadocio ("I am an inventor vastly greater than any before me. A musician, too, who has found something like the key of love...I try to be moved by the memory of an impoverished childhood, of apprenticeship or arrival in wooden shoes..."). Shifting from the highly constructed meters and rhymes of traditional verse, his later prose poems show a different poetic persona: liberated, oracular, prophetic and damning.
Polizzotti's selection of Rimbaud's poetry gives an excellent sense of his poetic career, one that Rimbaud was actively manufacturing and telegraphing to his readers. His poetry is a deliberate exercise in self-canonization: in his short years he graduates from Romantic poet to transgressive Symbolist to mystical seer. The poetry is always inscrutable, solemn and silly at different turns, and Rimbaud's poetry celebrates these moments of baffling insanity ("I expect to turn into a very mean lunatic"). He is the poetic predecessor of the Beat generation.
Although he only wrote over a few years in his youth, Rimbaud's poetry charts out a veritable career: his earlier poems like "The Drunken Boat" show a Romantic poet, a bard composing in sensuous imagery and language, depicting luscious landscapes imbued with rich symbolism. In "Seasons of Hell" and "Illuminations", however, we see Rimbaud cast a retrospective look at his poetry and tout himself as a fully matured poet. In "Alchemy of the Word", Rimbaud precociously repudiates his earlier poetry, praising and disparaging it at the same time: Rimbaud saw himself as capturing the mystery of the world but only as a menial scribe ("At first it was a study. I transcribed silences and nights, recorded the inexpressible. I captured whirlwinds"). By implication, he has outgrown these puerile attempts at poetry ("Now I know how to welcome beauty") and has fully come into his own voice. In "Lives", he lauds himself with teetering braggadocio ("I am an inventor vastly greater than any before me. A musician, too, who has found something like the key of love...I try to be moved by the memory of an impoverished childhood, of apprenticeship or arrival in wooden shoes..."). Shifting from the highly constructed meters and rhymes of traditional verse, his later prose poems show a different poetic persona: liberated, oracular, prophetic and damning.
Polizzotti's selection of Rimbaud's poetry gives an excellent sense of his poetic career, one that Rimbaud was actively manufacturing and telegraphing to his readers. His poetry is a deliberate exercise in self-canonization: in his short years he graduates from Romantic poet to transgressive Symbolist to mystical seer. The poetry is always inscrutable, solemn and silly at different turns, and Rimbaud's poetry celebrates these moments of baffling insanity ("I expect to turn into a very mean lunatic"). He is the poetic predecessor of the Beat generation.
September 11, 2024
I bought this at the airport Christmas Day? Or Christmas Eve? Either way it was almost two years ago and I remember the person at Compass Books was suitably impressed when I bought it, and then I leaned against the wall by the airport gate while I read it with my hand positioned very carefully so people could see the cover. Then I forgot about it for some time after my flight boarded because there was nobody to watch me read it.
Rimbaud is, I think, one of the most pretentiously name-dropped poets (case study: me). He’s French, and tragic, and traveled the world to whinge about it more accurately, and caught himself up in a whirlwind of substance and sexuality and a glamorous sort of poverty.
His descent and self-destructive streak seems somewhat premeditated: “The Poet,” he says in a letter to Paul Demeny, “makes himself a seer by a long, massive, and reasoned disordering of all the senses.” The Poet must become an invalid, a criminal, and “the supreme Scientist.” The point, he says, is to “make your soul monstrous.” All this is done with the intent of obtaining the Unknown: to Rimbaud, this appears to be done (at least initially) entirely within the self. One must burrow into one’s own consciousness, turning over and cultivating (he loves the word cultivating, or at the very least the translator does) at the edges of the soul, and after all this labor he will have arrived at the Unknown. The process is destructive: “He attains the unknown, and even when he ultimately loses his mind and stops understanding his visions, he will have seen them!”
He writes, a year later, to Georges Izambard, “I have recognized myself as a poet.”
With this, it’s easy to see why he’s pre-surrealist; “disordering the senses” and the idea that art ought to come from hyper-introspection line up quite neatly. Keeping this framing in mind, as well as the spirit of revolution that permeated France at the time, is helpful in understanding the motivations and allusions underlying his body of work.
Now onto his poetry. His poems and writings were to me, largely, all right. No doubt they were ground-breaking at the time and no doubt it’s at least partially user error (as I read the English translation). The majority of them were enjoyable enough to read, but not such to remember. However, there were some gems.
“But enough of my tears! The Dawn is distressing. Every moon is atrocious, and bleak every sun: Bitter love has swelled me with dizzying torpors. Let me go to the sea! Let my keel come undone!” “The Drunken Boat” is a phantasmagoric excellence, exhilarating and grotesque in turns. It’s easy to see why it’s regarded as a magnum opus of Rimbaud’s. The original French has an ABAB rhyme scheme, but Polizzotti’s translation goes for an ABCB, which feels like a nice compromise between holding up structure and remaining accurate to word choice/a literal translation. It’s a neat juxtaposition between these insanely lurid and bizarre descriptions and the rhyme scheme holding everything together. It sort of gives the impression that the poem is bursting at the seams, like a flood about to crest over the dam, and produces this tautness and tension that is just wonderful.
Another one, “Romance,” is charming: “No one’s serious at seventeen,” it opens, and thus begins the first mention of the age seventeen, which Rimbaud seems rather taken by. He writes in a letter to Theodore de Banville that “we are in the months of love. I’m nearly seventeen,” despite being fifteen and a half at the time; “Romance” was written when he was sixteen. It reeks of anticipatory nostalgia; perhaps Rimbaud imagines that he will be like this in a year, old enough to experience life’s greater joys but still shielded by youth from its larger vices. Anyway, it’s cute and sweet and short: well worth the read.
Last one I’ll mention in detail is “What’s it to us, heart of mine…” and this is perhaps one of the best poems I’ve ever read, ever. Polizzotti’s note says that it “translates the anger, bitterness, despair, and persistent hope” of the war, and I felt that note so apt that I just copied him. There isn’t much to say other than urging a read; it’s gloriously hopeless, and nevertheless defiant, and just an amazing, amazing poem (https://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/...).
“Childhood” is also wonderful. “There is, finally, when you’re hungry and thirsty, someone to chase you away.”
From “Vagabonds”: “He fancied I was endowed with very weird innocence and rotten luck, then piled on some worrisome rationales.”
And, perhaps my favorite line of the whole collection, taken from an 1870 letter to Izambard, “I’m like a fish out of water, sick, furious, dumb, down, and out…” I googled just to see if Orwell’s memoir was connected, and turns out it’s just a British phrase, but nonetheless; Rimbaud is very human, and the inclusion of his letters serve as a wonderful reminder that despite his seer-like philosophies, precocious poetry, and near-mythological relationship with Verlaine he’s as much a man—a boy, even—as anyone.
Overall, an excellent collection; well translated, well-summarized, and a lovely selection of notes on both translation and historical context from Polizzotti.
Rimbaud is, I think, one of the most pretentiously name-dropped poets (case study: me). He’s French, and tragic, and traveled the world to whinge about it more accurately, and caught himself up in a whirlwind of substance and sexuality and a glamorous sort of poverty.
His descent and self-destructive streak seems somewhat premeditated: “The Poet,” he says in a letter to Paul Demeny, “makes himself a seer by a long, massive, and reasoned disordering of all the senses.” The Poet must become an invalid, a criminal, and “the supreme Scientist.” The point, he says, is to “make your soul monstrous.” All this is done with the intent of obtaining the Unknown: to Rimbaud, this appears to be done (at least initially) entirely within the self. One must burrow into one’s own consciousness, turning over and cultivating (he loves the word cultivating, or at the very least the translator does) at the edges of the soul, and after all this labor he will have arrived at the Unknown. The process is destructive: “He attains the unknown, and even when he ultimately loses his mind and stops understanding his visions, he will have seen them!”
He writes, a year later, to Georges Izambard, “I have recognized myself as a poet.”
With this, it’s easy to see why he’s pre-surrealist; “disordering the senses” and the idea that art ought to come from hyper-introspection line up quite neatly. Keeping this framing in mind, as well as the spirit of revolution that permeated France at the time, is helpful in understanding the motivations and allusions underlying his body of work.
Now onto his poetry. His poems and writings were to me, largely, all right. No doubt they were ground-breaking at the time and no doubt it’s at least partially user error (as I read the English translation). The majority of them were enjoyable enough to read, but not such to remember. However, there were some gems.
“But enough of my tears! The Dawn is distressing. Every moon is atrocious, and bleak every sun: Bitter love has swelled me with dizzying torpors. Let me go to the sea! Let my keel come undone!” “The Drunken Boat” is a phantasmagoric excellence, exhilarating and grotesque in turns. It’s easy to see why it’s regarded as a magnum opus of Rimbaud’s. The original French has an ABAB rhyme scheme, but Polizzotti’s translation goes for an ABCB, which feels like a nice compromise between holding up structure and remaining accurate to word choice/a literal translation. It’s a neat juxtaposition between these insanely lurid and bizarre descriptions and the rhyme scheme holding everything together. It sort of gives the impression that the poem is bursting at the seams, like a flood about to crest over the dam, and produces this tautness and tension that is just wonderful.
Another one, “Romance,” is charming: “No one’s serious at seventeen,” it opens, and thus begins the first mention of the age seventeen, which Rimbaud seems rather taken by. He writes in a letter to Theodore de Banville that “we are in the months of love. I’m nearly seventeen,” despite being fifteen and a half at the time; “Romance” was written when he was sixteen. It reeks of anticipatory nostalgia; perhaps Rimbaud imagines that he will be like this in a year, old enough to experience life’s greater joys but still shielded by youth from its larger vices. Anyway, it’s cute and sweet and short: well worth the read.
Last one I’ll mention in detail is “What’s it to us, heart of mine…” and this is perhaps one of the best poems I’ve ever read, ever. Polizzotti’s note says that it “translates the anger, bitterness, despair, and persistent hope” of the war, and I felt that note so apt that I just copied him. There isn’t much to say other than urging a read; it’s gloriously hopeless, and nevertheless defiant, and just an amazing, amazing poem (https://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/...).
“Childhood” is also wonderful. “There is, finally, when you’re hungry and thirsty, someone to chase you away.”
From “Vagabonds”: “He fancied I was endowed with very weird innocence and rotten luck, then piled on some worrisome rationales.”
And, perhaps my favorite line of the whole collection, taken from an 1870 letter to Izambard, “I’m like a fish out of water, sick, furious, dumb, down, and out…” I googled just to see if Orwell’s memoir was connected, and turns out it’s just a British phrase, but nonetheless; Rimbaud is very human, and the inclusion of his letters serve as a wonderful reminder that despite his seer-like philosophies, precocious poetry, and near-mythological relationship with Verlaine he’s as much a man—a boy, even—as anyone.
Overall, an excellent collection; well translated, well-summarized, and a lovely selection of notes on both translation and historical context from Polizzotti.
May 13, 2025
When you detach these poems from their legendary writer I believe they can be rated as 3 stars; when considered in the shadow of Rimbaud’s life, though,it’s easily 4 stars.
I knew Rimbaud originally as the French poet who disappeared in Africa to become a gun runner and sort of nomadic figure. Because of this, I had the impression going into his poetry that his works would express feelings of rebellion and adventure. This was not disproven at all. However, the problem I think with Rimbaud is that his truly fascinating life and personality elevates his poetry to a higher level than if it was just written by some bloke. As a child he fled from home, supported the Paris Commune in 1871, was shot by his lover, and finally disappeared to Africa to start a new life for himself. Rimbaud’s poetry is certainly worth reading, however it tends to be overshadowed by his character and story.
As for the poems themselves, they can be broadly separated into two categories: one part displays Rimbaud’s revolutionary side while the second part is his more artistic and personal side. The first category of his poems are very clearly early indicators of his desire to move to Africa. Several of his poems paint gloomy pictures of industrial cities like Paris and London while he also critiques Europe and colonialism. I would consider Rimbaud as one of those great artists of late modernity portraying the changing times of the Gilded Age and the second industrial revolution. It is in these poems that Rimbaud sometimes shares his admiration for “the Orient”, a clear sign of his preference for Alexandria over France (where he fled to in 1880). Another major theme is Rimbaud’s laments for the Paris Commune.
The other category of his poems tend to be more stereotypically artsy. Rimbaud wrote several poems on scenes he noticed in his travels, or on personal struggles/experiences he had that he thought were worth recording. There is little ideological favoring and rather tends to be observations made in Rimbaud’s surreal style of writing.
Rimbaud’s poems do, though, all share the surrealism that his writing is known for. This is , in my opinion, both a flaw and positive trait of Rimbaud’s works: he is able to create vivid imagery which doesn’t quite make logical sense but still constructs an image in your head that you can imagine and it has a certain vibe to it and lends to what Rimbaud is writing about in the poem. One line I remember that stood out to me as particularly beautiful was “In the morning I kissed the dawn”. What does that mean? While it doesn’t paint a specific and exact image, the language used gives you a sense of what you should imagine to the point where regardless of whether the words make sense you still have an understanding of what Rimbaud wanted to convey. This is both a flaw and a skill; while he never gives enough specificity in his language to give you an understanding of what he means, it’s written in such a way that you have a broad feeling of what he means.
Overall, Rimbaud is certainly worth reading, however it is incredibly important to understand his life before you read his works because he and his character add infinitely to his poems. There are also letters from Rimbaud included after the poems in this specific book, which are very helpful in having a better grasp on Rimbaud’s personality.
I knew Rimbaud originally as the French poet who disappeared in Africa to become a gun runner and sort of nomadic figure. Because of this, I had the impression going into his poetry that his works would express feelings of rebellion and adventure. This was not disproven at all. However, the problem I think with Rimbaud is that his truly fascinating life and personality elevates his poetry to a higher level than if it was just written by some bloke. As a child he fled from home, supported the Paris Commune in 1871, was shot by his lover, and finally disappeared to Africa to start a new life for himself. Rimbaud’s poetry is certainly worth reading, however it tends to be overshadowed by his character and story.
As for the poems themselves, they can be broadly separated into two categories: one part displays Rimbaud’s revolutionary side while the second part is his more artistic and personal side. The first category of his poems are very clearly early indicators of his desire to move to Africa. Several of his poems paint gloomy pictures of industrial cities like Paris and London while he also critiques Europe and colonialism. I would consider Rimbaud as one of those great artists of late modernity portraying the changing times of the Gilded Age and the second industrial revolution. It is in these poems that Rimbaud sometimes shares his admiration for “the Orient”, a clear sign of his preference for Alexandria over France (where he fled to in 1880). Another major theme is Rimbaud’s laments for the Paris Commune.
The other category of his poems tend to be more stereotypically artsy. Rimbaud wrote several poems on scenes he noticed in his travels, or on personal struggles/experiences he had that he thought were worth recording. There is little ideological favoring and rather tends to be observations made in Rimbaud’s surreal style of writing.
Rimbaud’s poems do, though, all share the surrealism that his writing is known for. This is , in my opinion, both a flaw and positive trait of Rimbaud’s works: he is able to create vivid imagery which doesn’t quite make logical sense but still constructs an image in your head that you can imagine and it has a certain vibe to it and lends to what Rimbaud is writing about in the poem. One line I remember that stood out to me as particularly beautiful was “In the morning I kissed the dawn”. What does that mean? While it doesn’t paint a specific and exact image, the language used gives you a sense of what you should imagine to the point where regardless of whether the words make sense you still have an understanding of what Rimbaud wanted to convey. This is both a flaw and a skill; while he never gives enough specificity in his language to give you an understanding of what he means, it’s written in such a way that you have a broad feeling of what he means.
Overall, Rimbaud is certainly worth reading, however it is incredibly important to understand his life before you read his works because he and his character add infinitely to his poems. There are also letters from Rimbaud included after the poems in this specific book, which are very helpful in having a better grasp on Rimbaud’s personality.
April 27, 2023
Excellent translated selection of Rimbaud's poetry, encompassing many of the early poems, the entirety of A Season in Hell and some poems from Illuminations. Includes a small section of some of the poet's surviving letters with copious notes reflecting both poems and crucial biographical background on the poetry's composition. I grew up reading earlier translations of Rimbaud which were awful, (usually 1940's or 1950's translations); this edition is bilingual and gets the "boy genius's" gist right. I recommend this selection highly.
May 6, 2025
Fine collection, disappointing translation.
An example stanza—
Original:
Mon unique culotte avait un large trou.
—Petit-Poucet rêveur, j'égrenais dans ma course
Des rimes. Mon auberge était à la Grand-Ourse.
—Mes étoiles au ciel avaient un doux frou-frou
Translation:
My one pair of trousers had sprung a big hole.
—Quixotic Tom Thumb, on my path I declaimed
New verses. I slept at the Big Dipper Inn.
—My stars in the sky made a delicate swish
A delicate *swish*? Big Dipper Inn? Quixotic Tom Thumb?
The murder of the ABBA rhyme, alliteration, and the softness of the frou-frou? The translator attempts to excuse himself in the introduction by quoting Henry Miller on how difficult it is to translate Rimbaud (and its difficulty is undeniable), but the result is rather unfortunate.
An example stanza—
Original:
Mon unique culotte avait un large trou.
—Petit-Poucet rêveur, j'égrenais dans ma course
Des rimes. Mon auberge était à la Grand-Ourse.
—Mes étoiles au ciel avaient un doux frou-frou
Translation:
My one pair of trousers had sprung a big hole.
—Quixotic Tom Thumb, on my path I declaimed
New verses. I slept at the Big Dipper Inn.
—My stars in the sky made a delicate swish
A delicate *swish*? Big Dipper Inn? Quixotic Tom Thumb?
The murder of the ABBA rhyme, alliteration, and the softness of the frou-frou? The translator attempts to excuse himself in the introduction by quoting Henry Miller on how difficult it is to translate Rimbaud (and its difficulty is undeniable), but the result is rather unfortunate.
March 21, 2023
Meh. I am still not a poetry fan. It just does not pull me in to the writing.
Rimbaud has talent and does wonderful writing about sex/intimacy. He writes beautifully but sounds a bit like an over dramatic teenager which he kinda was.
Glad I read his work but not really connected feeling to it.
Rimbaud has talent and does wonderful writing about sex/intimacy. He writes beautifully but sounds a bit like an over dramatic teenager which he kinda was.
Glad I read his work but not really connected feeling to it.
November 25, 2022
"I wish you a good day, which is damn nice of me." (from a letter to Paul Demeny, p. 234)
April 28, 2023
finished but now French starts to reads to me!!
now need to study it!
now need to study it!
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April 8, 2025"I'm not well known, but so what? all poets are brothers. these verses believe, they hope, they love, that's all."
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November 29, 2022well packaged; not a good enough translation to recommend it though
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews