Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Possibly it seems a lot to ask, but one never knows



Shoju


Do you think we could interest Rimbaud in a game of softball? 


There's room for chapeaux of rakish tilt, and degrees of concealment, as a pitcher turns in profile to hide his grasp of the pitch, the batsman coiled in his posturing. It isn't true that the pitch is a blur; it is merely bright and in rotation and in styled pace and vector on an axis we're a tangent to in flight. This is what a solstice is, minus the aggression: a tether of light between two related bodies from a sudden angle of sight. It's over as it's begun, and gorgeous in between. He owns that tense.








J'ai tendu des cordes de clocher à clocher; des guirlandes de fenêtre à fenêtre; des chaines d'or d'étoile à étoile, et je danse.


I stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; gold chains from star to star, and I dance. 














Arthur Rimbaud
John Ashbery, translation
Illuminations
  Fragments du feuillet 12
op. cit.


i  André Ziehe
ii Anonymous Dutchman

4 comments:

  1. David TomsJune 22, 2011 at 7:58 AM

    I think Rimbaud never took any interest in the pursuit of anything of an athletic nature. However given the illustrations you have shown, dear Laurent, his interested might have changed.

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  2. LaurentJune 22, 2011 at 9:49 AM

    How did you happen to draw this impression of Rimbaud, Dink?

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  3. David TomsJune 22, 2011 at 9:02 PM

    I have this impression because at an early age our young poet's behaviour was outwardly provocative and abandoned his hitherto characteristically neat appearance by allowing his hair to grow long.

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  4. LaurentJune 22, 2011 at 9:58 PM

    Ah, yes. Like Bjorn Borg, you mean.

    ReplyDelete