One of the most written-about literary figures in the past decade,
Arthur Rimbaud left few traces when he abandoned poetry at age
twenty-one and disappeared into the African desert. Although the dozen
biographies devoted to Rimbaud's life depend on one main source for
information--his own correspondence--a complete edition of these
remarkable letters has never been published in English. Until now.
A moving document of decline, Rimbaud's letters begin with the
enthusiastic artistic pronouncements of a fifteen-year-old genius, and
end with the bitter what-ifs of a man whose life has slipped
disastrously away. But whether soapboxing on the essence of art, or
struggling under the yoke of self-imposed exile in the desert of his
later years, Rimbaud was incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence.
As translator and editor Wyatt Mason makes clear in his engaging
Introduction, the letters reveal a Rimbaud very different from our
expectations. Rimbaud--presented by many biographers as a bohemian wild
man--is unveiled as "diligent in his pursuit of his goals . . . wildly,
soberly ambitious, in poetry, in everything."
I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud is the second and
final volume in Mason's authoritative presentation of Rimbaud's
writings. Called by Edward Hirsch "the definitive translation for our
time," Mason's first volume, Rimbaud Complete (Modern Library, 2002),
brought Rimbaud's poetry and prose into vivid focus. In I Promise to Be
Good, Mason adds the missing epistolary pieces to our picture of
Rimbaud. "These letters," he writes, "are proofs in all their
variety--of impudence and precocity, of tenderness and rage--for the
existence of Arthur Rimbaud." I Promise to Be Good allows
English-language readers to see with new eyes one of the most
extraordinary poets in history.
