A Season In Hell

This handy edition is simple but lovely. A new free but beautiful English version with the original French on the next page over or after it.The cover is worth the book alone. And at the end, besides A Season in Hell and a full-page b&w photo of Rimbaud in Harar, there is a beautiful English version of the symbolic odeLe Bateau Ivre (The Drunken Boat) that closes the book.

I re-read, or, to be more precise, attempted to re-read this book, because I had just written an account, in a memoir of childhood and youth, of a few hours when I had sat enraptured with it. I wanted to find out what it was that had engaged me. I had to conclude that it was the youthful capacity for self-delusion. What I now found, in old age, was that, however receptive I tried to be, I could not delude myself. I would encourage others to try A Season in Hell, but to determine not to be swayed by a feeling that they have a capacity for receiving it that others might not have. In brief, I would now say that it would not matter if this book never came into your hands. But try it, to test what I have just written.

Arrived so quickly, absolutely tiny though! But I think that's a good thing, makes it easy to carry around!

Tasty tasty a season in Hell is a fine little read, According to some sources, Rimbaud's first stay in London in late 1872 and early '73 converted him from an imbiber of absinthe to a smoker of opium. According to biographer, Graham Robb, this began "as an attempt to explain why some of his [Rimbaud's] poems are so hard to understand, especially when sober". The poem was by Rimbaud himself dated April through August 1873, but these are dates of completion. He finished the work in a farmhouse in Roche, Ardennes.There is a marked contrast between the hallucinogenic quality of Une Saison's second chapter, "Mauvais Sang" ("Bad Blood") and even the most hashish-influenced of the immediately preceding verses he wrote in Paris. Its third chapter, "Nuit de l'Enfer" (literally "Night of Hell"), then exhibits a refinement of sensibility. The two sections of chapter four apply this sensibility in professional and personal confession; and then, slowly but surely, at age 19, he begins to think clearly about his real future; the introductory chapter being a product of this later phase.

Great book, although tiny

Great. Love the bilingual text - nice to remind myself of the French language lurking in the depths of my memory! Nice and light copy, not bulky, easy to take around with you.