Antique

Gracious son of Pan! Around your face crowned with florets and berries your eyes, precious bowls, flicker. Stained with brown lees, your cheeks strain. Your teeth glisten. Your chest seems a cithara, tinklings circling in your blond arms. Your heart beats in this hollow where sleeps the double sex. Go walking, in the night, moving slowly this thigh, this second thigh, and this left leg.

-Arthur Rimbaud: 'Antique' from Les Illuminations, published 1874, translated by Andrew Woodrow Butcher

From my final years of high school until well past my first sally at university, French modernism - literary and musical, mostly - was an obsession of mine. Surrealism, Dada, and other Parisian ridiculousnesses between the Wars were of course appealing, but I was also really into the art from the preceding several decades: Baudelaire, Debussy, Maeterlinck, Satie.

These interests have receded over the past five years, and have been replaced by a voracious (if slapdash) study of myth and antiquity, particularly all things Dionysian. I found myself writing a poem this week that had at its conclusion a Dionysian procession, complete with satyrs and Silenoi. But as I worked on that poem I saw that I was drawing heavily on Rimbaud, particularly on his Illuminations, which I would have first read in 1996 or thereabouts. And so I went back to some of those poems this week for the first time in a few years: interests circling back on interests!

Hence tonight's quick translation of 'Antique': a great poem on its own, and lovely also as set by Benjamin Britten and sung by Karina Gauvin with Les Violons du Roy below!