Poetry
A Season in Hell
Une saison en enfer
Arthur Rimbaud · 1873
Opening lines
«Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les cœurs, où tous les vins coulaient.
“Once, if I remember rightly, my life was a feast where all hearts opened, where all wines flowed.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Nine sections of prose, in which verses appear. The speaker declares himself damned, questions his origins in Mauvais sang and passes through a Nuit de l'enfer. In Délires, he gives the floor to a Vierge folle who describes her companion, the Époux infernal, then returns, in Alchimie du verbe, to his own inventions as a poet. There follow L'Impossible, L'Éclair, Matin and an Adieu, in which this confession seeks a way out.
Context
The book was written from April to August 1873, for the most part at the family farm of Roche, in the Ardennes, before and after the Brussels affair. The Alliance typographique of M.-J. Poot printed it in Brussels in the autumn of 1873, at the author's expense; the author did not pay the bill and took away only a few copies. The rest of the print run remained with the printer until 1901, when a Belgian bibliophile, Léon Losseau, found several hundred of them. It is the only book that its author himself published.
Who it is for
Some fifty dense pages of allusive prose, which call for rereading; the sections echo one another.
Prizes and reception
Without echo during its author's lifetime, it is regarded as a founding text of the modern prose poem and left its mark on the Surrealists.
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