by Mandy de Waal
Click on over to the New York Times and you'll find a gallery of tortured artists. First up is a youthful, but ghostly looking Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud. The caption for the dark painting on the NYT site reads: “The Poet Rimbaud. Serial runaway. Absinthe and hashish benders. Shot by poet-lover Verlaine.”
Born in October 1854 in the Champagne-Ardenne region of France, Rimbaud started writing poetry in primary school. By the time he was 16 he'd already written Le Dormeur du Val [The Sleeper In The Valley].
“It is a green hollow where a stream gurgles,” the poem begins, before telling the story of “A young soldier, open-mouthed, bare-headed, With the nape of his neck bathed in cool blue watercress,” sleeping stretched out on the grass under the sky.
Written during the French-Prussian war, the denouement of this piece is tragic:
“No odour makes his nostrils quiver;
He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his breast
At peace. There are two red holes in his right side.”
Rimbaud's life was no less grim. His genius flowered early, and then stalled. By the time he was 21 he'd stopped writing. Four years earlier he'd send Le Dormeur du Val to celebrated French poet, Paul Verlaine, who'd forsake his wife and child for Rimbaud. The relationship would end after a few short years after Verlaine discharged a gun at Rimbaud in a jealous, drunken rage. Rimbaud wouldn't die then, but at at the age of 37 after suffering many agonising months from bone cancer.
