Wyatt Mason's Rimbaud Complete, published by Modern Library in March, is a translation of the complete writings of French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). The book contains all of his poetry—from his earliest juvenilia to his later poems, which Rimbaud wrote in his early twenties, before he stopped writing poems altogether. The volume contains fifty pages of previously untranslated material, including all the poet's earliest verse, a school notebook, and a rough draft of his best known poem A Season In Hell.

Mason has also translated five books by contemporary French author Pierre Michon, and was a finalist for the French American Foundation Translation Prize for his first publication, Michon's Masters and Servants (Mercury House, 1997). Mason's complete translation of Rimbaud's correspondence is forthcoming from Counterpoint in 2003.

Poets & Writers Magazine asked Mason what drew him to the work of Rimbaud, what particular characteristics attracted him to the idea of translating him so thoroughly.

Wyatt Mason: I came to Rimbaud later than many. I remember reading A Season in Hell when I was sixteen and not liking it: It seemed to lurch around a lot, had an odd rhythm. I assumed-disastrously-that meant it wasn't good. I was too young, too inexperienced, or just too stupid to realize that the very quality I disliked was one of its virtues, or, at least, I would later come to appreciate it as such.

P&W: So what changed your mind?

WM: Time, and dumb luck. About ten years ago, when I was living in Italy for the winter, I rented a house in an off-season tourist town. The house had a few books on its shelves. A Bible of course; Moravia, Calvino; and a translation of some Rimbaud, bilingual French/Italian. Initially, I used it as a sort of grammar-Rimbaud as Italian tutor-admittedly, not the most distinguished use of a great poet. That misuse was short-lived though. I soon found I liked the poems a great deal, and devoured everything.

P&W: Do you remember which poem first caught your attention?

WM: Absolutely: "Faim." "Hunger" in English. The images in that poem were entirely his own. The narrator speaks of quenching his hunger with a meal of earth and stone, rock, air, loam. He eats pebbles underfoot, old church stones. And if that weren't voracious enough, we get a wolf devouring a bird, spitting out feathers, the narrator comparing the wolf's hunger to his own, not for a bird, but for himself. It's lyrical and musical, and at the same time raw and unflinching. A balance apparent in Rimbaud's best work. He takes Whitman's grounding in the experiencing of the natural, his interest in self, but digs in his claws, bites.

P&W: Can you say a little more about Whitman and Rimbaud?

WM: There are lots of interesting connections, some meaningful, some just fun. Whitman's first version of Leaves of Grass came out when Rimbaud was a year old, and his final expanded version the year Rimbaud died. Whitman's book took 37 years to write; Rimbaud's life took the same amount to live. Both poets are seen as sensualists of a kind, though that only gets us so far: There has always been the idea of the poet with a capital P. Sappho is as interested in bodies as Whitman; Wordsworth as interested in the natural world as Rimbaud. But the type and depth of engagement is different in each.

What seems new in Whitman is his self-consciousness, his depiction of himself celebrating what the poet traditionally celebrates: Portraiture becomes self-portraiture. The poem is not about a grassy field but about the poet grabbing handfuls of that field. There is a similar force at work in Rimbaud, as in "Hunger," but Rimbaud is grazing that field. Whitman and Rimbaud both use "I" in their poems, but they define them very differently. Yes, Whitman's "Song of Myself" features a celebratory "I" lusting through the landscape; yes, Rimbaud's poem "Sensation" features a solitary "I" in nature, as happy alone, he says, as if with a woman. The difference is the guilelessness of Whitman's "I": It celebrates itself; it contains multitudes. It is democratic, is many in one, e pluribus unum. Rimbaud's "I" is a separatist, is somebody else: "Je est un autre." I see Rimbaud wearing many masks, adopting different personae and shedding them just as Pound would do later. Whitman's "I" is always Whitman. Rimbaud's "I" is a term of art, not a matter of confession.

P&W: So how did you end up translating all of his work?

WM: Well, I started translating a few of his poems when I found that book in Italy. He's irresistible, because he seems so easy, so direct, so personal. Everybody tries to translate Rimbaud, and everybody, at least everybody sensible, gives up: He's really very hard to convey in all his richness. I worked on various of his poems from time to time in my notebooks-in retrospect laying a sort of foundation-before many years later Modern Library asked me to do the complete works.

P&W: What makes translating Rimbaud particularly challenging?

MW: His entire lifetime of composing poetry was compressed into about five years—five years during which his style can been seen evolving from month to month. Like Picasso, he doesn't have a style: He has styles. That changing voice is difficult enough to appreciate in French, and altogether treacherous in translation.

P&W: Given that his style changed often over the course of his life, what quality remains constant or "consistent" throughout?

WM: That's difficult to answer, as it tends to become reductive. Too often Rimbaud is saddled with labels like "visionary," "unsparing," "bloodless," descriptions that have more to do with our misunderstanding of his life than our appreciation of his poetry. A familiarity with all his work brings a reader to Rimbaud's preoccupation with passage. That theme seems undeniable. I could say "departure," but it puts too fine a point on things, leads us stumblingly to the "poem-as-prognostication school" that believes A Season in Hell is some sort of psychic itinerary for Rimbaud's later years. Reading Rimbaud, I think of Joyce's description, evolved from Flaubert, of the artist standing back, paring his fingernails in the face of his creation. Of course, Rimbaud would famously turn his back on his work entirely, but while he was still at it he achieved a distanced poise hinted at all along and perfected in many of the late poems in Illuminations. And yet, contradictorily, his passage to that remove is through experience, often of the dirt beneath the fingernails variety, the rending and devouring of flesh.

One might say Rimbaud's inconsistency is what's most consistent. Ultimately, though, what makes a poet different from another, and what makes his work lasting and essential, is his eye, which some call "voice." Rimbaud's eye roams a world of girls with orange and green lips, talking boats, descriptions of rabbits' visions, children looking out rain-coated windows, all of it seen in passing. The only still points in Rimbaud are the fact of the poems. Perhaps a provisional answer to your question then would be that Rimbaud is always a poet of movement. Even a poem like "Faun," a description of silence and stillness, is disturbed by motion. Rimbaud's poems fidget, wander, won't stay still.

P&W: How would you compare the experience of translating Rimbaud with the other translations you've done-of renowned French prose writer Pierre Michon for instance?

WM: Michon's narratives are short: A novel from him weighs in at around 15,000 words. In place of length, there's density. Sentences go on for pages, are richly musical, full of echoes to earlier passages and dependent on sonorities and rhythms for a great deal of their power. Roger Shattuck says Michon's writing can at any time lift or lower into semi-hallucinatory effects that recall Arthur Rimbaud's assaults on conventional perception. So there's a kinship that isn't accidental: Michon read Rimbaud early and often, and has written a super little book called Rimbaud the Son that I'm doing into English right now. Anyway, I'd say that translating Michon's writing requires the same level of engagement necessary when working with a poet of Rimbaud's complexity and rigor. This isn't always the case. Some writing is more transparent.

While no one sensible would argue that Hemingway didn't put as much thought and craft into his style as Faulkner did, translating Hemingway would be a hell of a lot easier. Translation is basically close reading, and Hemingway is an easier read than Faulkner (which is, of course, not a comment on their relative artistic merits). All translation requires a dedication to meaning, but to get a Michon or Rimbaud right requires an extra engagement to the musical qualities of their language. Not every prose writer is a stylist, though every serious prose writer must at some point engage the question of style in narrative. Every poet, however, is by definition a stylist. "Style" or "voice" or "eye" is how we tell them apart. In order to maintain that telling difference, the translator has to serve often contradictory impulses: to the truth of meaning and the truth of music. Without both, the original gets hopelessly lost.

P&W: Some would argue that literal translation is the only acceptable way of proceeding without losing the poem.

WM: Literal translation is a necessary fiction. Borges says the idea of literal translation comes from translations of the Bible: "If we think of the infinite intelligence of God undertaking a literary task, then every word, every letter, must have been thought out. It might be blasphemy to tamper with the text written by an endless, eternal intelligence." Borges found the idea of literal translation distasteful. He liked to imagine a time when "translation will be considered something in itself . . . when men will care for beauty, not for the circumstances of beauty." Because: A poem is always lost in translation. So the key is finding it again in the language you're translating into. The whole "literalism and its discontents" kerfuffle can't be resolved-both sides have their points-but at least it can be anecdotally fun.

There's the story about Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. Nabokov, who never spent more than six years on a novel, spent twelve on his translation of Pushkin's Onegin. He considered it the most important work of Russian literature, and dedicated himself to seeing justice done to it in English. The whole thing-notes, introduction, commentary-ends up being four volumes, around a thousand pages, Nabokov's longest work. A masterpiece, one would think. When it comes out, Nabokov's old friend Wilson reviews it. And trashes it. Says Nabokov doesn't know Russian, gets words wrong. He also accuses Nabokov of being too literal, of stubbornly and pedantically refusing to put his considerable poetical gifts at the service of approximating the beauty of Pushkin's Russian in English.

On one hand, Wilson's response is just silly. Nabokov spoke and wrote English, French, and Russian with equal facility: In his phrase, he was born "a perfectly normal tri-lingual child." Wilson was a dedicated student of Russian, but the idea of him correcting Nabokov on that count is comical. What isn't so ridiculous is for Wilson to chastise Nabokov's reluctance to come up with more lyrical solutions than he does. That's an entirely reasonable point of view, one philosophically at odds with Nabokov's position: He wasn't trying to be lyrical. He was trying to be exact, to create a useful book for students, not a poem of equal value, which he believed was impossible. If he'd had the time, Nabokov would have translated a great deal more, and with the same objective. This was a man who taught comp-lit for over a decade at Cornell, fighting through what he considered abominable translations. If we look at his copies of the Constance Garnett Anna Karenina or the Muirs' Kafka, he's always correcting them. Nabokov's allegiance, as a translator, was to students of the original, of whom he was one. Any translator's ultimate allegiance must be to his readers, but always in the service of his writers.

Literal translations, like Nabokov's Onegin, Wallace Fowlie's Rimbaud, or Donald Frame's Montaigne, are valuable scholarly works of unimpeachable integrity and seriousness. But none captures the very quality that makes each writer most unique: his style. Since most readers of works in translation will never read the original, translations destined for the general reader must convey style and substance in equal measure. To do so, the translator requires (in Nabokov's famous formula) "a scholar's passion and a poet's patience blent." How each of us interprets that equation is, of course, where the fun begins.

P&W: What value do you think reconsidering Rimbaud would have for contemporary readers and writers?

WM: When we look at Rimbaud, we can't see him. There's the same problem with Van Gogh. Van Gogh isn't a painter anymore: He's "the patron saint of the beaux-arts." We look at a wheatfield and see a suicide; we look at a self-portrait and think about the whore he gave a piece of his ear to as a Christmas gift; we see squiggles and think of him dying for his art. We don't see pictures: We see fame. Rimbaud's mythic posterity has done a similar disservice to his poetry.

If we think of Rimbaud at all we think of the gay poet, or the adolescent poet, or the drug-addicted poet. These labels are problematic for all sorts of reasons, beginning with the facts of his life, which often don't support the more exotic claims made for his biography. Regardless of what he may or may not have lived, we know without a doubt that he wrote poems. We even have them available to us. Yet it's inevitable that when we go to the poems with such preconceptions, they're all we end up finding.

The basic example: Letters and manuscripts bear out beyond any doubting that Rimbaud and poet Paul Verlaine were close friends. What follows from these facts is instructive: first, a supposition made by most of the biographers (variously corroborated through anecdote and documentation), that Verlaine and Rimbaud were lovers; then, in the hands of recent biographers such as Graham Robb, a deduction that Rimbaud was firmly gay; followed by an interpretation by writers such as Benjamin Ivry (in his Rimbaud of a few years back), that Rimbaud's poems are gay poems; and finally, by Rimbaud critic Robert Greer Cohen, a conclusion that A Season in Hell, Rimbaud's best-known work, should be read as the story of Verlaine and Rimbaud's affair. This maddening plunge into conjecture, assumption, and narrow-mindedness is the rule of law in reading Rimbaud. Take the pages of critical space devoted to his self-proclaimed "long, involved, and logical derangement of all the senses." It makes him seem like a wild-man, a hell-raiser, an image to which many have grown attached: poet as party-animal.

I am not saying that Rimbaud wasn't a wild-man. Rather, that I neither know nor care. What I know, after the chronological study that translating his complete works entailed, is evidence of an entirely different sort of fellow: a methodical poet who underwent a long, involved and logical engagement with the history of poetry. For when I translated those parts of his legacy that no one had bothered to translate before, a new Rimbaud emerged. Translating his student works, an early notebook, multiple drafts of key poems, and his fragmentary rough draft of A Season in Hell, I watched a poet deliberately forge an individual style by stealing from his predecessors. By looking, I saw-perhaps more clearly than with any other poet-how Rimbaud became Rimbaud. So many collected works of the Great Poets are these unassailable tomes. Eliot and Yeats and so many others pruned their Complete Works into a final, canonical form, discarding lesser efforts, or adjusting lines here and there, or, as with Whitman, rewriting one poem for 37 years. Rimbaud's complete works are a partial mess, full of perfect and imperfect things. I don't claim this makes him better or worse, only unique: His art remains forever unfinished. It's full of false starts and wrong turns, and even a surprisingly happy ending. That happy ending, in the form of A Season in Hell and Illuminations, is the creation of a unique poetic voice, that, like all art, is one imagination speaking to another. And that's always worth reconsideration.