An Unfaithful Translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer; Prologue & Ist Chapter: by Geraint Jonathan
Memory serves me right, no ifs about it. I gorged on what passed for life, the wine running riverlike & the human heart with it.
Then, some twilight or other, Beauty Herself came sat on my lap, but I, bloated, found her wanting, bid her go ball the dead. Let Justice go hang, I said. And with more ado, I addressed the darlings of Squalor, Woe & Terror & bid them cherish the toads engendered in my face of a morn.
There was picnic somewhere always, you could hear the smile: it said meadows & shining water; my cue to spring from nowhere, canines quick to the jugular. Picnic over.
To Mr Firing Squad, I said: shoot, you look too fucking ridiculous standing there. To the Plague Family, I said: your pustular worst will make me yawn at best. Affliction’s the name I gave my god; it did what it said on the tin. Clothes matted dry in the steam-breaths of drunks, I played with my mind, courted the mad side. And the first sign of spring was a thin psychotic giggle.
But now, skeletal as I am, that aroma of ancient grub has me aping appetite, or maybe I’m just hungry.
Which way to the feast? I’ve the key & it’s called ‘a charitable heart . . .’ I always was a dreamer.
“And you’ll always be a fleariddled cur . . .” etc. – the etc being the Devil’s – which means, in effect, that one is perpetually at death’s door & things are said & left hanging mid-air, a little ropey with overuse but no mater, this fucker’s Old Harry & a smile oils his diction. That sales-pitch, forked tongue-in-cheek, the Inferno’s full of it. Give it a rest, I say. And while you’re about it, I’ll tot up the stupidities & give readers who loathe the Edifying & Worthy a chance to peruse a few notepad jottings salvaged from the flames.
How It Bleeds
My tribe’s eyes: blue. Their skulls: thick. Their combat skills: nil. These qualities I’ve inherited. My clothes stink & stick to my skin. I don’t, however, golden my locks with butter.
My ancestors, Gauls all, were a battlefield joke; ham-handed louts when it came to skinning game; no better when it came to anything else. Their guile & bravura have survived in me; other tendencies also. It’s from them I get my shifty lope, not to mention the goatish drool.
As for what it takes to learn a trade: it is not on the agenda. Crossing the Field & crossing the Page: the Plough & the Pen: discuss. It’s all hands! Mine have had it, left & right; I’ll not be homeward-bound anytime soon. What would I do with a hearth? A scene of domestic blitz & no end to it. In the meantime beggars tire me with their sincerity & thugs rouse my bile. Intact is all I ask. As for the jizz I gave lazy, it was only to be expected. I tell you, in a body that lifted nothing, I’ve lived everywhere. All Europe is known to me, not a cobwebbed nook I don’t know. Europe loves me, just watch me return.
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Imagine a fellow-spirit, some exemplar from the ashes, dead but recognizable. But nope, nothing beyond the inane grin on the face of the farm dill. Bloodline dodgy, I’d say. Centuries of stupid. Rise up? Who, me? I wouldn’t have a clue where to start. My people, if they ever rose up at all, rose to lay waste the defenceless; think jackals prodding a body not quite dead.
Now for some mytheological perspective: consider the Spinster, Rome’s eldest, which is to say, Dear France: how high her prayers! As I trudged the vast terrain below, a small thing among God’s own, what calibre of prayer accompanied me I wonder? The vultures never had a chance; my whole being oozed what I was. I took what I could of what I’d come to find: burkha & burnous were duly noted; Jerusalem had attitude & Babylon dust. Meanwhile the heat of a grim noon hammered & a mother rocked back & for, her arms around herself, while her son, still breathing, took the screams he heard for phantoms. Pity enough to move a stone, for sure, but a dog’s howl later & I’m at the foot of a chewed wall lying leper-like, spent. Later, whatever that means, under foreign skies, wherever they were, it was jackboot & bivouac & Old Glory the Bugler giving it the lonesome before sunset gushed like a throat. Next, there being those who gather in glades at night to make faces & wax ancient, it’ll be me farouche among the haggards & newborn. The air here is adulterate Jesus. How could it not be, nearly twenty centuries on? If it’s local, it’s biblical. Moses & Jesus are as French as brioche. And I’ll never be done knowing it. The loneliness is nowt, half-angel, half-alien. Needless to say I was never part of the Church Committee.
It’s puzzling, this question of my earlier whereabouts. What was I doing there? And when exactly was it? Was it at all? Would I recognize my face were I to see it again, as it was back then, in a crowd, say, or reflected in filthy water? A puckered brow in a buttery face is one thing, out-tinting the rose with bloodshot balls of sight quite another.
The time is big with fools. It takes a face. Science loves you! It says so on the wall. The lens of question; dolorosa of meds, mantras, woefugues to warm in the chill hush. The latest in Truth! Progress pants on, rests a moment, fidgets. Mathematics lights the future. Destination: pure number. That’s as oracular as it gets, trust me. I could elaborate but the sound would stick in my craw.
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Blood’s back in; primal mulch, standard-issue. Spirit? Saying nothing about it is a beginning. How comes it Christ comes with Old Rattler? Picking up the scent of the scared & the scared drowning while trying to cross the river. How comes it Old Rattler’s God’s? In the meantime it gets meaner & river clogs with those God forgot.
God? I’ll say it again: Sheer greed’s what makes me wait for Him. Needy like the rest of my kind, it’s always been this way. Take the town’s flickering in the mizzle that evening on the Breton coat. Enough’s enough; Europe’s fucked; I’m off. On a personal note, a climate to blister the lips & boil the brain & burn the eyes would be most suitable, leaving no one, least of all myself, in any doubt: this is not a man I know. What I will know, however, is the ground at my feet; my step will be assured; mountains will be mine & nights will see me sup mighty brews like my ancestors round their fires, singing the kill. You know the kind, even if I don’t.
Needless to say, I’ll return a supple specimen, darkskinned, with eyes that don’t lie. You’ll take me for a man who can take it. You can bet I’ll be dripping with gold, a brutalized returnee. There are women rumoured to relish the prospect of nursing just such a specimen. I’ll be politically suspect, name ringed in red ink. But right now, patriotism being the rags-to-flags story it is, there’s nothing for it but a bottle before crashing out on the beach.
The roads have run out, the lanes blighted; take it from one who has inched his way home, innocence blazing, last of its kind. Sayably so. Poverty’s a king’s joke & don’t you forget it. Disgust & desolation tell it like it isn’t, no big production. Onwards is all, boots on the so-called ground. Good morning Sorrow, hello Heartbreak. Nice to meet me. Whom shall I say is interrupting? Any worthies need menacing? If there be things to monster, I’m your man. Or woman, seeing what it takes to be one. In short, I’ve crawled the valley of the Psalms & emerged scathed, justice quaint as an antique; if lured by tat or sequin, I revamp the starkstaring truths with injunctions musty & sweetened with age: Keep your own floor bare & unpolished lest emergency hit – in which case, die, but make sure before you do so that your coffin is within easy reach. Hair thins, greys, jowls loosen, other perils await, but be in no doubt: French & Terror do not go together; I know whereof I speak; the use of ‘whereof’ should indicate as much. And should any semblance of holy pass by, remember what there was in you of good. Your stupidity is almost admirable – but take no one’s word for it, least of all mine. De profundis, Domine. Or, more fathomably, what good is good?
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A stripling with beetroot complexion, I swooned to tales of the seasoned thief whose face fears nothing, stamped as it is by the jails that couldn’t contain him. I probed the darks he’d graced with his brute appetite & when spring bloomed it was with his antennae I picked up the smell of the bloody end that awaited him. He had a hustler’s nous & the ribcage of a saint, qualities that would eventually come in useless at the crucial hour, prompting him to even wryer silences on matters of great moment.
It was mummers-lore those winter windings, belly hollowed out, voices coming from approx nowhere, saying things like, “Which of you’s in today? Brother Maybe, or Brother No-Chance? Aha! It’s Maybe! In which case you’d do well to remember that you don’t know where you’re going or how you’ll get there, let alone why you’d be going there in the first place, therefore, respond as you see fit, no one will kill you any more than they would a carcass.” And come morning, fuck me if I didn’t have a face so uninhabited it barely registered in my own eyes let alone in the eyes of others. The city, all the while, did its red-room routine, lamplit in a mirror. Untold was hinted at, modern life belched, & everything signaled riches. I was merely hungry, a token mouth. But I was filled, amaziated. The only absence was Comrade Woman; if blonde, she would be stubble-headed, a hardy fugitive from the kitchens. But she never showed. Two against winter would never be the case. As for me, I fancied myself against the wall, Joan-like in my pity, the gun-barrels aimed my way yet again.
I knew my place & cleared my throat.
“Men of the gown & gavel, men of bling & the cloth, men of medals & the jackboot, you’ve got the wrong man. I am the wrong man. Is that saying it enough? It is not. I could Tarzan my astonishment at your phenomenal stupidity, but me no got the talk to say what mean, yes? No? Fuck. Don’t pardon my French. What you see before you is what I am: a scumbag of the first order. And like scumbags anywhere, I can smell my own kind a mile off. As you, gentlemen, can no doubt smell me. I see the Judge is sniffing, – ah, the General too, & you, Father, you too can pick up on your own kind. A bag of scum is something to be, for sure. As for you in the gold hat & purple cloak: every inch a scumbag. As I was saying, you’ve got the wrong man. I am he.”
Cancer’s what sweats round these parts; folk take it the Divine’s behind each bead. Other folk, pillars of the good, bestow regal smilets, their faces asking to be boiled alive. That probably means it’s time to leave. I’ll turn left, go east, settle somewhere fossilized.
Another thing: who’s this ‘I’ I go on about? I being who exactly? And how many words is it going to take? Dust speaks. And soon enough: shouts, drums, dancing nobodies, their dance relentless. Me, I’ve not the eyes to foresee the coming of Whitey, nor the ears to hear his jargonomics, but come he will & blind with science, no doubt about it.
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Sunup, he’s here already, a dirty white, dragging the old cannon, hamming the holy. Nothing for it but get dunked in Christ, put overalls on & turn up keen to be fodder.
Then it hits, without warning, like a joke from nowhere: head stuffed with mercies to perform, love about the place, & lots of strangers to look for, their bags heavy. I’ll not be a stranger to good, I say, & saying it, am proved a liar. It was the saying of it, as always. How, then, shut up? Simply house your vocabulary where no one can reach it: try your innards.
Shsh . . .
If you listen you’ll hear the hush. Insomnia has its very own. That’s a billionaire listening to his money. That’s the shagpile he walks barefoot, one of many. The muttering is of no consequence, the chessmasters of his future do not exist but it’ll be a while before he howls piteously with news of it. Times are reasonable. What ploughs through the waves isn’t. Angels fanfare their own excellence & remain free of blemish despite aeons of boasting. Angels are nobody’s friends.
The world as it is will have to do. Bless it, despite everything. No puerile vow this time round. God’s my strength & I say it.
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To dignify Boredom with a capital B is not worth the paper you can’t be bothered to write the word down on. The gutter runs cliché. Gorilla-chested claims of heights scaled & depths plumbed are standard fare among louts of the parish. My innocence would move a stone I do declare, & am indeed myself moved. But as for matters matrimonial, with Jesus booked in as father-in-law: I don’t think so, do you?
Reason was never “mere”. When I said God, I meant it, no prisoners taken. The sweet gag of salvation spurred many a penny-stinkard, believe me. No, don’t. Sundry pastimes having scattered, & various loves died, I find I’ve not the faintest yen for the company of Understanding Types. I’ll be silent before the trinkets & think timber, not forest. Promise. And should the prospect of a life cheek-to-cheek with another lure me to the hearth . . . know that inwardly it’s rags. Old saw has it life will out where there’s work to be done. Float, drift, hover, that’s more my style; I lack the weight to be where the action is.
I quake, it’s what I do & I don’t do it well, always one fearful remove from what passes for life, that’s me. A miracle would go down well. But no chance, it being all chance.
Farce without precedent? You bet. If my innocence could weep it would drown all comers. Farcical is too kind a word for what is.
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Stop! Or, less bluntly, step forward & continue as you mean to go on: cleansed, corrected.
Meanwhile, sight stings, conditions in the skull boil, & I hear my heart – the bloody beating meat one – squelch, & my limbs do their own thing . . .
Destination: Voodooville. Bivouac’s the home I dreamed of & here it is, my fear proves it.
What do I need? Shooting would be a start. Here I am, point blank. But not so much as a pop. At this rate there’ll be nothing for it but to lie in the path of the next passing stampede.
I’ll get used to it.
Chivalry’s certainly not what it was.
Image: A Pot Pourrie of leaves, petals and seeds, in colours of red, orange, purple and pink from Pixabay.com
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