Brian Kim Stefans Publishes Festivals of Patience: The Verse Poems of Rimbaud
Brian Kim Stefans has published a new English translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s poems in verse in a volume entitled Festivals of Patience: The Verse Poems of Rimbaud.
Rimbaud, poet of “logical revolts,” of sexual freedom, inveterate modernist, Symbolist, and inspiration to beatniks, conceptual artists and punks, wrote some of the most enduring poems of world literature. His career lasted all of five years, between 1870-1875. In this new English translation of all his poems in verse, Brian Kim Stefans has kept Rimbaud’s sense of songcraft in mind, retaining the French meters in his English versions. He is the first to have done this. The book opens with a Latin poem that Rimbaud wrote more than a year before his first known French poem, and it ends with a short poem he wrote a few years after leaving Paris, one which became a touchstone for Surrealist Andre Breton.