Arthur Rimbaud

“Eternas ondinas,dividid el agua fina.Venus, del azul hermana,conmueve las puras aguas.Judío errante en Noruega,dime, ¿cómo nieva?Viejos exiliados tiernos,contadme el océano.YO-. Nunca esas bebidas puras,ni esas flores de florero, ni leyendas, ni figuras,saciarme pudieron.Coplista, tu ahijadaes mi sed que se desboca,hidra íntima sin bocasque roe y devasta.”

“Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?”

“Estendi cordas de campanário a campanário; guirlandas de janela a janela; correntes de ouro de estrela a estrela, e danço.”

“What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?”

“Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am an animal, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are fake niggers; maniacs, savages, misers, all of you.- Bad Blood”

“Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry,Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!”

“Against snow, a tall Beautiful Being. Whistlings of death and circles of muffled music make this adored body rise, swell and tremble like a ghost; scarlet and black wounds open in the magnificent flesh.”

“My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?”

“Come from forever, and you will go everywhere.”

“And, in the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.”

“And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.”

“C'était comme une nuit d'hiver, avec une neige pour étouffer le monde décidément.”

“What an old maid I'm getting to be. lacking the courage to be in love with death!”

“To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lies shall I uphold? In what blood tread?”

“A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:From time to time my heart is like some oakWhose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.”

“Whose hearts must I break? What lies must I maintain? - Through whose blood am I to wade ?”

“And from then on, I bathed in the Poem of the Sea, star-infused, and opalescent,devouring green azures”

“It was the voice of mad seas, roaring immense,/ That shattered your infant breast, too soft, too human.”

“It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.”

“The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses”

“But, true, I’ve wept too much! Dawns break hearts./ Every moon is brutal, every sun bitter.”

“True life is elsewhere”

“Evening prayerI spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair,Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs,My neck and gut both bent, while in the airA weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs.Like steaming dung within an old dovecoteA thousand Dreams within me softly burn:From time to time my heart is like some oakWhose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.And then, when I have swallowed down my DreamsIn thirty, forty mugs of beer, I turnTo satisfy a need I can't ignore,And like the Lord of Hyssop and of MyrrhI piss into the skies, a soaring streamThat consecrates a patch of flowering fern.”

“J'aimais les peintures idiotes, dessus de portes, décors, toiles de saltimbanques, enseignes, enluminures populaires ; la littérature démodée, latin d'église, livres érotiques sans orthographe, romans de nos aïeules, contes de fées, petits livres de l'enfance, opéras vieux, refrains niais, rythmes naïfs.”

“A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn't he?”

“Unhappiness was my god.”

“The same bourgeois magic everywhere the mail train sets you down.”

“I could never throw Love out of the window.”

“I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault.”

“Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.”

“O seasons, O castles,What soul is without flaws?All its lore is known to me,Felicity, it enchants us all.”

“Os poetas serão! Quando for abolida a servidão infinita da mulher, quando ela viver para ela e por ela, tendo-lhe o homem dado baixa – até agora abominável -, ela também será poeta! A mulher encontrará o desconhecido! Divergirão dos nossos os seus mundos de ideias? Ela descobrirá coisas estranhas, insondáveis, repugnantes, deliciosas, tomá-las-emos e compreenderemos”

“Pagan blood returns!”

“One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.”

“By being too sensitive I have wasted my life.”

“Love...no such thing.Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist. Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.”

“My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes-- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes.I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic.I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”

“أيها العالم! الغناء الصافي لأحزان جديدة!”

“Je devrais avoir mon enfer pour la colère, mon enfer pour l'orgueil, - et l'enfer de la caresse; un concert d'enfers.”

“La vraie vie est absente. Nous ne sommes pas au monde.”

“Cela s'est passé. Je sais aujourd'hui saluer la beauté.”

“Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.”

“Here I am on the shore of Brittany. Let the cities light up in the evening. My day is done. I am leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs. Lost climates will tan me. I will swim, trample the grass, hung, and smoke especially. I will drink alcohol as strong as boiling metal--just as my dear ancestors did around their fires.”

“On the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths,And walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat:Daydreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet.I will let the wind bathe my bare head. I will not speak,I will have no thoughts: But infinite love will mount in my soul;And I will go far, far off, like a gypsy,through the countryside - as happy as if I were with a woman. "Sensation”

“The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.”

“Elle est retrouvée!-Quoi? -l'Éternité.C'est la mer mêléeAu soleil.Je devins un opéra fabuleux : je vis que tous les êtres ont une fatalité de bonheur : l'action n'est pas la vie, mais une façon de gâcher quelque force, un énervement. La morale est la faiblesse du cerveau.À chaque être, plusieurs autres vies me semblaient dues. Ce monsieur ne sait pas ce qu'il fait : il est un ange.”

“The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one--and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! ....So the poet is actually a thief of Fire!”

“I have stretched ropes from bell-tower to bell-tower; garlands from window to window; chains of gold from star to star, and I dance.”

“You will always be a hyena.”

“I shed more tears than God could ever have required.”