Rimbaud, (Jean Nicolas) Arthur

地狱一季

Rimbaud, (Jean Nicolas) Arthur (1854-1891), French poet of the symbolist school. He was born and educated in Charleville, Ardennes Department. He exhibited great intellectual precocity and wrote verse at the age of ten. When he was 17, he composed the strikingly original poem, “The Drunken Boat” (1871; trans. 1941), which he submitted to the older poet Paul Verlaine. This work, which set the tone of the entire symbolist, or decadent, movement, so impressed Verlaine that he entreated the author to move to Paris. Later, accompanied by Verlaine, he went to England and then to Belgium. In Belgium, Verlaine, with whom Rimbaud had a stormy relationship, tried twice to take the life of the younger poet, wounding him seriously in the second attempt. Rimbaud wrote an allegorical account of the matter in A Season in Hell (1873; trans. 1932).

In 1880 Rimbaud became a trader in North Africa, with headquarters at Hārer and Shoa, central Abyssinia. Verlaine, under the impression that Rimbaud was no longer alive, published the latter's poems in Illuminations (1886; trans. 1932). This work contains the famous Sonnet des voyelles (Sonnet of the Vowels), in which each of the five vowels is associated with a different color. In 1891 Rimbaud returned to France for medical treatment of a tumor on his knee; he died in a hospital at Marseille. On the strength of a few poems that he wrote between the ages of 10 and 20, Rimbaud ranks as one of the most original of all French poets.