Illuminations (Picas series) - Tapa blanda

Schizophrenic disassociation of life and mind make for a double tragedy in this young man's early death. A. Ginsberg longed for that ancient connection with the starry dynamo in the night; Rimbaud's brain shook with its deadly current and it made him feel quite odd among the emissaries of French bushwa normality, wearing buttoned coats, with eyes averted, as they stepped over the alter-ego of the boy, the poet in heat, in the gutter of the whorehose they were leaving.

The poems typify European longing for escape from the feudal history of their rigid societies, and make one think of a dog yowling at the moon while teathered to the rock that Sisyphus rolled up the hill.

A highly introverted exposay of French longing for the nobel savage, dramatically punctuated with images as consoling as the sun going nova, blazing in the eye of a mad dog.

The poetic genius of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) blossomed early and burned briefly. Nearly all of his work was composed when he was in his teens. During the century following his death at thirty-seven, Rimbaud's work and life have influenced generations of readers and writers. Radical in its day, Rimbaud's writing took some of the first and most fundamental steps toward the liberation of poetry from the formal constraints of its history, and now represents one of the most powerful and enduring bodies of poetic expression in human history.
Wyatt Mason has translated the works of various contemporary French writers, and has been a finalist for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. His translation of Arthur Rimbaud's poetical and prose works, "Rimbaud Complete," appeared in 2002 from the Modern Library. His writing has appeared in "Harper's," "The Nation," and the "Los Angeles Times," He was named a fellow of the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers for 2003-2004. His current projects include a new translation of Dante's "La Vita Nuova," for the Modern Library. He is also at work on a translation of the essays of Michel de Montaigne.