A Season In Hell

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Schmidt: "Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed."

I loved the wilds, scorched orchards; faded shops, lukewarm drinks. I would drag myself through stinking alleys, and, eyes closed, offer myself to the sun, god of fire.Your memory and your senses will be nourishment for your creativity. What will become of the world when you leave? No matter what happens, no trace of now will remain." (p61)

Fowlie: "Long ago, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where everyone's heart was generous, and where all wines flowed."You’re a hyena still…’ the demon cries who crowned me with such delightful poppies. ‘Win death with all your appetites; your egoism, all the deadly sins.’ The completed poem, displaying the attractive notion of a despairing teenager tossing off brilliant experiments in the heat of passion, shows the marks of careful editing, making the work more unified and objective. Three fragments of Rimbaud’s manuscript revisions were discovered in the twentieth century. As collected and translated by Wyatt Mason in the Modern Library edition (2002) of Rimbaud’s poetry, they show that the author removed personal references to his sojourn in London with Verlaine and to the hallucinations he experienced there while smoking opium. He replaced them with the more general language of Heaven and Hell and allusions to such biblical figures as the Foolish Virgin and the melancholy preacher of Ecclesiastes. Denunciations of poets, both in specific and in general, are left out. Ed è questa eccezionale, estrema, eccessiva forza vitale, portata fino alla distruzione, che si ritrova nella sua poesia. Nella prosa e nella poesia, perché ‘Una stagione all’inferno’ è un’opera ambigua, che rimane nel mezzo. He goes on, bringing in line after line that shows how truly miserable and transformed he is. The speaker hates the world and himself so much that he summons “plagues” and stifles himself “with sand and blood”. He’s encouraging his own suffering and that of others. “Misfortune,” something that most people try to avoid at all costs, is this speaker’s “god”. I accustomed myself to pure hallucination: I saw quite clearly a mosque instead of a factory, a college of drummers consisting of angels, a salon in the depths of a lake; monsters, mysteries; a vaudeville title conjured up terrors before me.