Rimbaud in Java: The Lost Voyage

In A Season in Hell, at the age of eighteen, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud predicted the rest of his life: “My day is done; I’m leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs; lost climes will tan my skin.” Three years later, in 1876, he joined the Royal Army of the Dutch Indies as an infantryman and sailed for Java, where he promptly deserted and fl ed into the jungle. It was the most enigmatic passage in a life crowded with puzzles and contrarieties.

In the fi rst book devoted to Rimbaud’s lost voyage to Asia, novelist and critic Jamie James reviews everything that is known about the episode; from there, he imaginatively spirals into a reconstruction of what the poet must have seen and informed speculation about what he might have done, vividly recreating life in nineteenth century Java along the way. Rimbaud in Java concludes with an inquiry into what the Orient represented in the poet’s imagination, with a scandalous, amusing history of French orientalism. James’ surprising book is a richly concentrated blend of biography, criticism and thought-travel, which brings into sharp focus this brief encounter between a great writer and a vanished world.

RIM

BA

UD

IN JA

VA

The Lost Voyage

JAM

IE JAM

ES

The Lost Voyage

JAMIE JAMES

RIMBAUD IN JAVA

JAMIE JAMES

Title:Rimbaud In Java:Edm4th Proof Job No:CW0711-21/ Alice

rimbaud cvr 3 with options_NEW.i1 1rimbaud cvr 3 with options_NEW.i1 1 7/9/11 2:14:13 PM7/9/11 2:14:13 PM

Preface 7

Introduction: Rimbaud at 21 13

I. Voyage to Java 34

II. Angel in Exile 68

III. Eastern Mystery 90

A Note on Sources 122

Acknowledgements 126

About the Author 128

ConTenTs

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18

Rimbaud in Java

For from the chatter among the machines – blood, flowers, fire, jewels –

From the excited calculations aboard this fleeing ship,You can see, rolling like a dike beyond the motorized

hydraulic road,Monstrous, illuminated without end – their stock

of studies;They are driven into harmonic ecstasyAnd the heroism of discovery.

Amid the most amazing atmospheric accidentsA youthful couple stands apart on the ark– Should this antique shyness be forgiven? –And sings and keeps watch.

The Drowning Man’s Elegant Gesture, collage by Max Ernst, 1929


19

Rimbaud at 21

Rimbaud is frequently described as a precursor of surrealism. The Illuminations, with their logical incongruities and extreme shifts in scale, share a sense of threatening revelation with the collages of Max Ernst. “The Drunken Boat,” Rimbaud’s longest surviving poem, is written in a visionary style that Breton and Apollinaire would later develop into elaborate symbolic narratives of carefully crafted weirdness. Rimbaud’s masterpiece, for all its strangeness still rooted in the poet’s emotions, radiates an exuberant beauty, a youthful, exhilarating delight in itself. Two stanzas near the end predict the poet’s later vagabondage:

I who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues’ distanceThe groan of rutting Behemoth and dense maelstroms,The eternal spinner of blue immobilities,How I long for Europe with its ancient parapets!

I have seen sidereal archipelagos! and islandsWhose delirious heavens are open to the voyager:Are you sleeping, exiled in those bottomless nights,O million golden birds, O Life Force of the future?

After Rimbaud’s death, his vision and technical innovations lay dormant, a time bomb that would explode in the high modernism of the Americans in London, Eliot and Pound. The dislocating shifts in point of view and mystical pessimism of The Waste Land are directly descended from Rimbaud, as is The Cantos’ move “away from the word as symbol toward the word as reality,” in William Carlos Williams’ phrase. Among Pound’s last works, composed in a mental hospital in Washington, D.C., were translations of poems by Rimbaud.


100

Rimbaud in Java

O lacklustre eyes! pale lips!I have a bitter sorrow in my soul.Wind bellies the swelling sail,In the distance foam silvers the sea.

I have a bitter sorrow in my soul: There is her beautiful head, dead!In the distance foam silvers the sea;The swift prahu carries me away.

There is her beautiful head, dead!I cut it off with my kris.The swift prahu carries me away,Bounding like a gazelle.

I cut it off with my kris;It bleeds on the rocking mast.Bounding like a gazelle,The prahu plunges and staggers.

It bleeds on the rocking mast;Its last groan pursues me.The prahu plunges and staggers;The pale sea sprays the night.

Its last groan pursues me.Is it really you that I killed?The pale sea sprays the night.Lightning cracks the black thunderhead.


101

Eastern Mystery

Is it really you that I killed?It was destiny – I loved you!Lightning cracks the black thunderhead;An abyss opens forever.

It was destiny – I loved you!May I die, and so forget!An abyss opens forever.O lacklustre eyes! pale lips!

A correspondent in Jakarta has suggested that Rimbaud could have picked up baou from a French pantoum. It’s an intriguing theory. Most European poets who composed pantoums knew little Malay beyond Leconte de Lisle’s kris and prahu; yet it’s a scenario as credible as any other that a minor poet might have picked up the word from a wandering Malay like the sailor who called on Thomas De Quincey and used it in a lost pantoum.

Galland’s Frenching of the Arabian Nights spawned a vogue for the oriental tale, which persisted throughout the eighteenth century. The most famous examples are Voltaire’s Zadig and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, whose exotic settings were Europe thinly disguised for the purpose of satire or philosophical enquiry. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters brought the Orient to Europe in its account of two Persian noblemen travelling in France, where they marvel at the odd customs of the infidels. In an infamous passage, one of the oriental visitors describes the Pope as a powerful magician who can “make [the King] believe that three are only one, that the bread one eats is not bread, that the wine one drinks is not wine, and a thousand other things of the same kind.”


122

a noTe on souRCes

The translations from French are my own, with the few exceptions noted; the authors of translations from other languages have been identified in the text. The translations of Rimbaud’s poetry are based upon the Pléiade Complete Works, edited by Antoine Adam. I have aimed for literal fidelity in sentences that read like good English. That’s easier in the prose poems, of course; in verse I have hewed close to Rimbaud’s line but made no attempt to rhyme – in French to English, almost always the road straight to the hell of tortured syntax and quaint vocabulary.

Obviously I encourage you to read Rimbaud: the original texts are easily found in cheap paper editions in France and for free on-line; one must pay for English translations. There are many more or less complete editions of Rimbaud in English, and they all have their virtues and causes for complaint. Despite its occasional awkwardness I remain loyal to the old Penguin edition with Oliver Bernard’s “plain prose translations” at the bottom of the page, because it insistently directs the eye to the French. I often return to Louise Varèse’s free-ish versions of A Season in Hell and Illuminations in single volumes. Yet I usually find that the more translators try to “capture the spirit of the original,” as opposed to the meaning of the words, the more their own spirits creep in. I could warn you off a few recent


123

versions, but the translation of poetry is a subjectivity as deep as wine or chocolate. The point is to create your own Rimbaud.

The definitive biography of Rimbaud, comprehensive and composed with brilliant lucidity, is that by Jean-Jacques Lefrère; however, it remains untranslated, and at over 1,200 pages it is a book for the confirmed enthusiast. One of the best biographies in any language is Graham Robb’s, a work of great erudition, elegantly written and gleaming with wit. Jean-Luc Steinmetz’s Arthur Rimbaud: Presence of an Enigma (translated by Jon Graham) is a wonderful life, racily told in a present-tense narration that is often persuasive in its attempt to read the poet’s mind. Edmund White’s Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel is a pleasure but too brief to substitute for a comprehensive biography. No book has found more readers for Rimbaud than Enid Starkie’s classic biography, originally published in 1938 and thoroughly revised in 1961. Bold about offering her opinions, some of which are plainly wrong, Starkie nonetheless tells the story of Rimbaud’s life, as a story, better than anyone. Wyatt Mason has rendered a major service to English readers by translating Rimbaud’s letters complete, in a volume entitled I Promise to Be Good.

The work I am most indebted to in this little book of mine is another little book, the only previous volume devoted to Rimbaud’s voyage to the Indies: De Charleville à Java, by Jean Degives and Frans Suaso, which draws heavily on articles by Louis-Charles Damais and J.J.M. van Dam. Published in 1991 by Radio Netherlands Worldwide to accompany a broadcast on the subject, it is very difficult to find and has not been translated, so I have drawn liberally on the authors’ research in the hope that any duplication will be forgiven.


In A Season in Hell, at the age of eighteen, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud predicted the rest of his life: “My day is done; I’m leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs; lost climes will tan my skin.” Three years later, in 1876, he joined the Royal Army of the Dutch Indies as an infantryman and sailed for Java, where he promptly deserted and fl ed into the jungle. It was the most enigmatic passage in a life crowded with puzzles and contrarieties.

In the fi rst book devoted to Rimbaud’s lost voyage to Asia, novelist and critic Jamie James reviews everything that is known about the episode; from there, he imaginatively spirals into a reconstruction of what the poet must have seen and informed speculation about what he might have done, vividly recreating life in nineteenth century Java along the way. Rimbaud in Java concludes with an inquiry into what the Orient represented in the poet’s imagination, with a scandalous, amusing history of French orientalism. James’ surprising book is a richly concentrated blend of biography, criticism and thought-travel, which brings into sharp focus this brief encounter between a great writer and a vanished world.

RIM

BA

UD

IN JA

VA

The Lost Voyage

JAM

IE JAM

ES

The Lost Voyage

JAMIE JAMES

RIMBAUD IN JAVA

JAMIE JAMES

Title:Rimbaud In Java:Edm4th Proof Job No:CW0711-21/ Alice

rimbaud cvr 3 with options_NEW.i1 1rimbaud cvr 3 with options_NEW.i1 1 7/9/11 2:14:13 PM7/9/11 2:14:13 PM

Rimbaud in Java: The Lost Voyage

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