Brian Kim Stefans's New Rimbaud Translations Aim to Preserve Rebellious Spirit

For UCLA's Daily Bruin, Alyssa Block covers in detail the new translations of Rimbaud by poet and professor Brian Kim Stefans, who is about to publish Festivals of Patience: The Verse Poems of Rimbaud. "For these translations, Stefans said he aims to preserve the sound and rhythm of the poems as the poet intended – something past translations have failed to accomplish," writes Block. Further on:

...Rimbaud’s works were revolutionary for his time, breaking away from the traditional, conservative model of French poetry, Stefans said. The poet disregarded the staunch Alexandrine style of poetry, whose meter is characterized by iambic lines with 12 syllables that stem from French heroic verse. Rimbaud was also unorthodox because he cared about issues surrounding science, politics and the working class. Rimbaud was at once a rebel as he left tradition behind, but also insightful and talented, Stefans said.

“(Rimbaud) is this combination of a cruel, crude abject character, but also maintained this visionary aspect about him,” Stefans said. “It’s this weird combination of all these things that make him kind of fascinating.”

However, though Stefans is undertaking a translation of the complex French syntax of Rimbaud’s poetry, he is not fully fluent in French. Stefans said for his translations, he relies upon an online French dictionary and past translations of Rimbaud to get an accurate rendering of each poem’s content and the sound. Because the syntax of Rimbaud’s poems can become extremely complicated, many interpretations of the poems exist, Stefans said.

There has been a long history of attempts to translate Rimbaud’s work, but Stefans hopes to add something new by preserving the Alexandrine form of Rimbaud’s works, said English assistant professor Daniel Snelson. Additionally, the rebellious spirit of Rimbaud’s poetry is something that has not lost its universality over time, Snelson said.

Read the full story at the Daily Bruin.