Найти книгу: "Illuminations"

This uncompleted suite of poems by French poet Arthur Rimbaud was first published serially in the Paris literary review magazine «La Vogue.» The magazine published part of «Illuminations» from May to June 1886. Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud's lover, suggested the publication of these poems, written between 1873 and 1875, in book form. All forty-two of the poems generally considered as part of «Illuminations» are collected together here in this edition. Of these forty-two poems almost all are in a prose poem format, the two exceptions are «Seapiece» and «Motion», which are vers libre. There is no universally defined order to the poems in «Illuminations», while many scholars believe the order of the poems to be irrelevant, this edition begins traditionally with «Apres Le Deluge» or «After the Flood.» Albert Camus hailed Rimbaud as «the poet of revolt, and the greatest.» The worth of this praise for Rimbaud can be seen in «Illuminations», one of the most exemplary works of his poetic talent.

Arthur Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell” is a prose poem loosely divided into nine parts. In one part of the poem the poet portrays quite transparently his own relationship with French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. The two had a brief alcohol and drug fueled affair which finally came to end when Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist in a drunken rage. “A Season in Hell,” which has been referred to as a pioneering example of modern symbolism, is included in this collection along with “The Drunken Boat,” a fragmented first-person narrative which vividly describes the drifting and sinking of a boat lost at sea. It is probably one of the best known works from Rimbaud’s early period. Also included in this edition is what is arguably Rimbaud’s masterpiece, “Illuminations.” A collection of forty-two poems almost all of which are in a prose format. Albert Camus hailed Rimbaud as “the poet of revolt, and the greatest.” This greatness can be readily seen in this exemplary collection of “A Season in Hell, The Drunken Boat, and Illuminations”. This follows the translations of James Sibley Watson, Lionel Abel, and Wallace Fowlie.

San Francisco in the early 1990s. Cab is on the deep end of a losing streak. After having been dumped yet again, he moves to Haight-Ashbury fresh out of college. It is the middle of a recession, before the dot-com boom, and AIDS is an immediate and untreatable reality. He finds himself working in a housing program for people with HIV/AIDS. The entire city is reeling. His clients are dying. Cab records their every word.


He starts drafting a narrative of every person with whom he’s slept: those who dropped him, those he adored, and those he let go of without a second thought, to reassess what he has left behind from the South of his childhood of dyslexia and infatuations, football and ecstasy, divorce and sex panics. In between girlfriends, acting up, attempts at romance, and trying to find his place in the greater San Francisco narrative, Cab is looking for something, tracing the interconnecting stories of the people he’s meeting, sleeping, and drinking with, as everyone tries to find a space in the city. As treatments emerge and the economy changes, a new story takes shape in Cab’s life and the city.