Olson and Rimbaud

Dearest reader:

Would it sound too weary of me to say that I'll just pick up where I left off yesterday? Good — then I'll jump in with both feet, as they say.

Like O'Hara's reworking of Rilke, Charles Olson's translation of Arthur Rimbaud's "Ô saisons, ô châteaux..." involves significant differences from its original. This much is indicated by its title, "Variations Done for Gerald van der Weile." The poem itself is in three parts, and is, as its title also suggests, less a serial poem than an accretion of revisions.

The first half — twenty-one lines — of Olson's first "Variation" bears no apparent relationship to Rimbaud's text. Instead, the poem begins as imagistic verse not unlike those of Pound or H.D. (or the poetry of Williams, Stevens, and Yeats, as Thomas F. Merrill notes): syntactically condensed lines arranged into stanzas of irregular length describe a pastoral scene onto which bursts tractors, busy as birds, bees. "The Diesel / does not let up pulling / the plow." The other sections of Olson's poem effectively constitute revisions of this passage: the Diesel and plow have dropped away by the second part, though the action of plowing reappears in the third. And so forth.

The business of translation begins in the poem's first part with a direct quotation, preceded with an open parenthesis and lacking quotation marks or circumflexes, of Rimbaud's opening line. What appears to be further quotation in an isolated one-word stanza — "Délires!" — is in fact invention, though it recalls Rimbaud's themes. The translation continues in the following couplet, and is, at its base, an accurate translation of the original: "Quelle âme est sans défauts!" ["What soul is without sin!"] becomes "What soul / is without fault?"

Where Merrill's interpretation emphasizes Olson's varying renderings of Rimbaud's fifth couplet ("Ce charme a pris âme et corps / Et disperse les efforts"), I'd like to examine his versions of the poem's second couplet. It is here that, in the first section of "Variations" becomes a variation on Rimbaud's text. "J'ai fait la magique étude," reads Rimbaud's original, "Du bonheur, qu'aucun n'élude" ["The magic study I've made, / Of happiness none can evade"]. Olson's text responds to, rather than translates, this: "Nobody studies / happiness." Not only does this move depart from translation in favor of direct address, it does so with a skepticism that would call the original text, in its sincerity and its romantic imagination of poet as seer, into question.

Questioning continues in the version presented in Olson's second variation. Here, the skepticism is replaced with necessity, and the truncation of Rimbaud's couplet is reversed: "can you afford not to make / the magical study // which happiness is?" Rather than opposing happiness with study, Olson here rereads happiness as a special category of study, one that cannot be refused. The lines are directed not at Rimbaud's poem, but at the reader, and the antagonism of the rhetorical question in part one is replaced with an imperative. And here versions of Rimbaud's couplet disappear from the scene, never to return.






[NOTE: I plan to continue this in the next day or two, as Olson's variant readings of another couplet from Rimbaud merit some commentary.]

[ADDENDUM: For "next day or two" in the above note, please read "indefinite future." It's not that I don't want to contine this, but rather that other ideas have intervened.]