Thank God he was a Frenchman! Let us then believe in the power and the glory of the poetic word, let us believe in the everlasting life of the spirit, in the resilience of images (of the dead and visions), as they emerge from between the pages of a few great men, exceptions of the sort that appear just once or twice in a century. This is about remembering Jean-Arthur Rimbaud. Many a Hölderlin or Georg Trakl would turn over in his grave from so much contrived, grafted culture, from so much art-market talk from which nothing but indecency emerges! And so (in our country!) it is not the poet who is honored, but rather the gentleman from the cultural office who delivers the greeting, the Honorable Sir, Executor of Poetry the actor, the performer. There are celebrations and pomp, the pensum of the dead is discovered, dragged into the light-the poet is “staged”-mainly just to stave off boredom, which is what one is actually being paid for. Then come the laurels and “laurel-ettes,” and an amusing intercourse develops between wine tavern and ministry until the record of the poet either disappears or someone has resolved to publish his works. And as God would have it, there will appear a national office that will begin leafing through its address book, and so the work of posterity gets underway. The saying goes that we honor poets only when they are dead, when the lid of the burial vault or the wet mound of earth has definitively separated him from us, when the creator of lyrical poems, having suffered in hardship and misery-as it is so beautifully and disconcertingly put in the obituaries of inferior spirits-has given up his spirit. “Without exaggerating,” Bernhard once told a journalist, “you can’t say anything.” Bernhard’s account of Rimbaud’s life and work is riddled with brazen exaggerations and inaccuracies (Verlaine did love more than the “poetic strength” of his “brother” Rimbaud was in Yemen for three years before moving to Harare, etc.) of the sort that would become the Austrian writer’s literary trademark. Bernhard was twenty-three when he delivered it at the Hotel Pitter in Salzburg before a small audience that called itself the “Bergen Circle.” It was first published in the May 14, 2009, issue of the German newspaper Die Zeit, and recently included in an anthology of Bernhard’s writings, Der Wahrheit auf der Spur. 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 "Après 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.Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) wrote this lecture-published in English for the first time here-for Jean-Arthur Rimbaud’s (1854–1891) one-hundredth birthday. Of these forty-two poems almost all are in a prose poem format, the two exceptions are "Seapiece" and "Motion", which are vers libre. All forty-two of the poems generally considered as part of "Illuminations" are collected together here in this edition. Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud's lover, suggested the publication of these poems, written between 18, in book form. 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.
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