Rimbaud the Son

TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

Take it into your head to write a preface to Rimbaud, writes Pierre Michon, and your wings fall off; you start quoting the saints of the almanac. Duly warned, we proceed with caution and will be brief. Rimbaud le fils (Rimbaud the Son) was published in France in 1991, seven years after Michon’s first book, Vies minuscules (Small Lives). Vies minuscules won Michon immediate acclaim and was quickly followed by other successes; Rimbaud le fils was his fifth published work. Although still relatively unknown to readers in the United States, Michon is widely recognized in Europe as one of France’s foremost contemporary writers. He won the Grand Prix du Roman from the Académie Française for his most recent novel, Les Onze (The Eleven), and the Prix de la Ville de Paris for his entire opus.

In Rimbaud le fils, Michon asks what drives art. What explains a poet’s devotion to the word and then our own devotion to that poet after he abandons it? Through Rimbaud, Michon explores his recurring themes: the absent father, the smothering mother, the backwater upbringing, and how they shape that tortured mix of genius and ambition we call an artist. Although Michon begins with Vitalie Cuif, Rimbaud’s mother, it is really the paternal line, the father — or fathers — that interests him. Rimbaud le fils traces lineage as determined by literature and how Rimbaud becomes literature incarnate, only to reject that patrimony.

Michon is a virtuosic writer whose medium is language, yet his imagination is visual. Rimbaud is revealed to us in images. We see him first sitting for a school photograph. Later we follow him to Étienne Carjat’s studio for the shooting of that iconic portrait with the crooked tie. And finally there he is in Harar, posing before the banana fields, a figure no longer identifiable as “poetry in person.” These are all photographs but Michon’s methods are painterly. His eye for color, his sense of depth, dimension, composition, the way he returns again and again to the image, adding layer upon layer — all this renders Rimbaud le fils a meticulously painted canvas, or many canvases, from which the poet eternally escapes.

Dense and poetic, Michon’s work calls for every translation trick in the book. A Michon sentence is an architectural feat: shift the position of a verb, extract a semicolon, and the whole thing topples. But the delight of bringing Michon into English is multiplied by the daunting nature of the task. And by the sheer mastery of Michon’s prose: “What makes men write? Other men, their mothers, the stars, or the old enormous things, God, language? The powers know. The powers of the air are this breath of wind through the leaves. The night turns. The moon rises, there is no one against the haystack. Rimbaud, in the attic among some pages, has turned toward the wall and sleeps like lead.” What makes men write? Michon does not answer this question. But few writers have asked it so beautifully.