collage by Indra Tamang
The Drunken Boat
by Arthur Rimbaud
translated by JN REILLY
As I was going down the impassable rivers,
I no longer felt myself guided by haulers:
Screaming redskins having taken them for targets,
Had nailed them to colored stakes.
I was indifferent to all crews,
Carriers of Flemish wheat or English cottons.
When with my haulers those uproars finished,
The rivers let me go where I wanted.
In the furious lapping of the tides,
The other winter, deafer than the brains of children,
I ran! And unmoored peninsulas
Have not undergone a more triumphant hubbub.
The tempest blessed my maritime awakenings.
Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves,
Which are called the eternal rollers of victims,
Ten nights, without missing the simple eye of lanterns.
Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples is to children,
The green water penetrated my hull of fir
And washed me of stains of blue wine
And vomit, scattering helm and grapnel.
And from then on I bathed in the Poem
Of the sea, infused with stars and latescent,
Devouring the green azures; where, flotsam pale
And ravished, a pensive drowned person sometimes sinks;
Where, suddenly dyeing the blueness, delirium
And slow rhythms under the gleams of daylight,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres,
The bitter redness of love ferments!
I know the skies bursting with lightning, and the waterspouts
And the surf and the currents: I know the evening,
The dawn exalted as a flock of doves,
And sometimes I have seen what man thought he saw.
I have seen the low sun stained with mystical horrors
Illuminating with long violet clots,
Like the actors of very ancient dramas,
The waves rolling far away their quivering of shutters!
I have dreamed the green night with the dazzling snow,
A kiss slowly rising to the eyes of the sea,
The circulation of unheard-of saps,
And the yellow and blue awakening of singing phosphorous!
I have followed, through the pregnant months, the swell,
Like hysterical cows, assaulting the reefs,
Without dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys
Could constrain the muzzle of the wheezing oceans!
I have struck upon, you know, incredible Floridas
Mixing with the flowers of panthers' eyes in the skin
Of man! Rainbows stretched like bridles
Under the horizon of the seas, to glaucous herds!
I have seen enormous swamps ferment, hoop-nets
Where a whole Leviathan rots in the rushes!
The collapse of waters in the midst of calms,
And the distances contracting towards the abyss!
Glaciers, suns of silver, nacreous waves, skies of embers!
Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs
Where giant serpents devoured by bugs
Fall from twisted trees with black scents!
I would have liked to show children those dorados
Of the blue wave, those fish of gold, those singing fish,
—the foam of flowers rocked my drifting
And ineffable winds momentarily winged me.
At times, martyr weary poles and zones,
The sea, whose sob made me roll gentle
Rose to me with her flowers of shadow with yellow suckers
And I remained, like a woman on her knees . . .
Almost an island, tossing on my sides the quarrels
And the droppings of clamoring birds with blond eyes.
And I was sailing, when through my frail bonds
The drowned descended backwards to sleep!
Now I, lost boat under the hair of coves,
Thrown by the hurricane into the birdless ether,
I whose water-drunk carcass neither Monitors
Nor Hanseatic sailing ships would fish out;
Free, smoking, risen with violet mists,
I, who pierced the reddening sky like a wall
Bearing exquisite jam to good poets;
Lichens of sun and mucus of azure;
Who ran, spotted with electric lunulae,
A crazy gangplank, escorted by black seahorses,
When Julys beat down with cudgel blows
The ultramarine skies to the burning funnels;
I who trembled, feeling from fifty leagues away
The moaning rut of Behemoths and deep Maelstroms,
Eternal spinner of blue immobilities,
I miss Europe with its ancient parapets!
I have seen sidereal archipelagos! and islands
Whose delirious skies are open to the voyager:
—Is it these bottomless nights you sleep and exile yourself,
Million birds of gold, oh future Vigor?
But, true, I have wept too much! The dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon atrocious and every sun bitter:
Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpors.
Oh, let my keel splinter! Oh, let me go into the sea!
If I desire a water of Europe, it is the pool
Cold and black where into the balmy twilight
A child squatting full of sadness, releases
A boat as frail as a butterfly in May.
No more can I, bathed in your languors, oh waves,
Be taken in the wake of carriers of cottons,
Nor cross the pride of flags and flames,
Nor swim under the horrible eyes of hulks.