ARTHUR RIMBAUD A SEASON IN HELL edited and translated by Andrew Jary A new translation of Arthur Rimbauds extraordinary poetic statement written in 1873. The sensual violent and anguished emotion in Rimbauds visionary alchemy of the word remains startling and continues to inspire poets. Printed with the French text facing the translation. For a time when he was a teenager until he was 19 art was crucial for the psychic wellbeing of the restless Arthur Rimbaud 18541891. The young wouldbe rebel Rimbaud escaped from the bland provincial town of Charleville in Northern France to wander the streets of Paris in poverty. After writing his Illuminations and A Season in Hell some of the most extraordinary poems of all world literature Rimbaud renounced it all for a hellish and apparently boring life in Aden. Mortel ange ET demon autant dire Rimbaud as Rimbauds lover Paul Verlaine wrote Mortal angel AND demon that is to say Rimbaud. Arthur Rimbaud is the tornado of world poetry. He outblasts just about every other poet. For poets he is more significant than the socalled founding fathers or influential philosophers of modern times Marx Freud Nietzsche and Einstein. For poets he is everybodys favourite hippy a Communard a precursor of the current movement of subversion of Western notions of self society and discourse and a savage mystic. Arthur Rimbaud is one of the most authentically rebellious of modern poets. Other poets have written of rebellion and radical action but Rimbaud is one of the very few who actually carried it out and didnt sound like an idiot when he spoke of it. Picture the young poet in his midteens utterly bored by the living deaths of suburban life aching to run away to Paris. Though he was dragged back a number of times Rimbauds life after his early teens was never again centred in his homeland. True he returned to his mother family and homeland but his true heartland his landscape of the soul was elsewhere. Rimbaud was ever a poet of elsewhere