A Final Note
on the Poems and Writings Quoted

There has been no monkeying with the poems and writings quoted.

All the poems and letters quoted are taken verbatim from noted English translations, most from Wallace Fowlie’s Rimbaud. Cuts are noted with ellipses.

To be sure, Rimbaud has many fine English translators, but Professor Fowlie’s 1966 classic remains my hands-down favorite.

Jim Morrison of the Doors, Rimbaud’s bastard seed—the same man now buried in Père-Lachaise—was another Fowlie fan, so much so that he wrote Professor Fowlie a number of searching letters before his death at the age of twenty-seven. No doubt Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and now younger artists have pored through the same translation, still undiminished in its power to thrill and incite, perplex and disturb.

Please, read the poems. In any language they are ageless.