Arthur Rimbaud, "The Alchemy of Words," The Anchor Anthology of

French Poetry. Anchor Books: NY, 2000.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

you are false Negroes. Merchant, you're a Negro; judge,

you're a Negro; general, you're a Negro; emperor, you
scabby old itch, you're a Negro: you have drunk contra-
band liquor from Satan's workshop. -This people is in-
spired by fever and cancer. Cripples and old men are so
respectable that they ask to be boiled.-The smartest thing
to do is to leave this continent, where madness prowls in
search of hostages for these wretches. I enter the true king-
dom of the sons of Ham.
Do I still mow nature? Do I mow myseI£P -Speak no
more. I bury the dead in my guts. Shouts, drum, dance,
dance, dance, dancer I do not even see the time when, as
the white men disembark, I shall fall into nothingness.
Hunger, thirst, shouts, dance, dance, dance, dancel

WILLIAM M. DAVIS

THE ALCHEMY OF WORDS

Alchimie du verbe

Listen. The tale of one of my follies.

For a long time I had boasted my mastery of all possible
landscapes, and I found ridiculous the celebrities of modem
painting and poetry.
I loved absurd paintings, overdoors, decors, side-show
backdrops, signboards, popular prints; outmoded litera-
ture, church Latin, misspelled erotic books, romances of
the days of our grandmothers, fairy tales, little books for
children, old operas, childish ditties, naive rhythms.
I dreamed of crusades, voyages of discovery of
which there are no accounts, republics without histories,
hushed-up religious wars, revolutions in customs, displace-
ments of races and of continents: I believed in all en-
chantments.
I invented the colors of the vowelsl A black, E white,
I red, 0 blue, U green. I settled the form and the move-
ment of each consonant and, with instinctive rhythms, I
flattered myself that I was inventing a poetic language ac-
 ARTHUR RIMBAUD 127
cessible, one day or another, to all of the senses. I kept
back the translation.
In the beginning it was an experiment. I wrote silences,
nights, I noted down the inexpressible. I crystallized vertigo.
. . . The bric-a-brac of poetry played a considerable
part in my alchemy of words.
I got used to plain hallucination: I saw quite clearly a
mosque in place of a factory, a school of drums made by
angels, tilburies on the highways of the sky; a parlor at the
bottom of a lake; monsters; mysteries; the title of a music-
hall comedy raised up horrors before me.
Then I explained the magic of my sophistries by means
of the hallucination of words!
I ended by deeming sacred the disorder of my spirit. I
was idle, prey to high fever! I envied the beasts their
happiness-caterpillars, which symbolize the innocence of
limbo; moles, the sleep of virginity I
I became embittered. I bade farewell to society in some-
thing like ballads.

I became a fabulous opera: I saw that all creatures are

destined to a certain contentment; action is not life, but a
means of wasting strength, an enervation. Morality is the
softening of the brain. It seemed to me that to each creature
several other lives belonged. This gentleman does not know
what he is doing-he is an angel. That family is a litter of
pups. With several men I have conversed with a moment
from one of their other lives.
"And so .•• I have loved a pig."
None of the sophistries of madness-the madness locked
within-have I forgot; I could recite them all, I know the
system.
My health was endangered. Terror came. I fell asleep for
several days at a stretch and, risen, continued the most de-
pressing dreams. I was ripe for death, and along a highway
of danger my weakness led me to the ends of the earth and
of Chimmeria, the land of shadow and whirlwinds.
I had to travel, and seek distraction from the spells gath-
ered in my brain. At sea, which I loved as though it should
lz8 ARTHUR RIMBAUD

cleanse me of a stain, I watched the rise of the consoling

cross. I had been damned by the rainbows. Happiness was
my doom, my remorse, my worm: my life would always be
too vast to be given up to strength and beauty.
Happinessl Her tooth, sweet unto death, would warn me
at cockcrow-ad matutinum. at the Christus venit-in the
most dismal cities:

Oh seasons, oh castlesl
What soul is Hawless?

1 have made the magic study

Of happiness, that none evades.

Hail to it, each time

The gallic rooster crows.

Ahl 111 have no cares:

It manages my life.

This spell, now Hesh and soul

Has put an end to toil.

Oh seasons, oh castles I

Its hour of Hight, alas!

Will be the hour of death.

That is over. Now 1 know how to greet beauty.

BERT M-P. LEEFMANS-WILLIAM M. DAVIS