Illuminations, By Arthur Rimbaud, translated by John Ashbery

A rebel poet whose star burns yet

Thief, teenage master-poet, gun-runner in Africa, attempted murderer: the short life and sensational achievements of Arthur Rimbaud fascinate us. When I finished re-reading Carcanet's parallel-text edition of his cycle of visionary poems in prose, in its new translation by John Ashbery, my head was full of words by those whom Rimbaud so palpably influenced, from Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" to John Lennon's "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I Am the Walrus". It struck me that there was no real distance between Dylan, Lennon and Rimbaud.

It always feels such a shockingly quick jump from the 1870s to the present, psychologically and emotionally, in the risks Rimbaud seems to be taking with human experience. He is so completely at one with the idea of the simultaneity of the self, that master discovery of the 20th century. He feels to be so vividly our contemporary.

It is difficult not to feel wholly in the grip of Rimbaud in these poems. He is moving at such an imaginative pace and with such verve. He is in a kind of fever, helplessly in the grip of whatever forces him to lay these rapturous words down. When he writes in the first person, he seems to have absorbed everything into himself. At other times he seems to be both himself and many others all at once.

He is perpetually travelling through strange lands. Fantastic scenes, bizarre architectural wonders, are always being flung out in front of him. The world is such a wonder. It is always so fleeting, so self-renewing and self-distorting. It has to be snatched at before it careers away in another direction.

Ashbery is good at rendering him: there is so much fellow-feeling here. Ashbery too is a poet for whom life feels to be a perpetual surprise. He walks into it, time and again, as one would walk into a closed door. At times his translation may seem a bit too casually demotic, a little undercharged. Rimbaud, being so close to his schooling, can be quite a high-flown, formal poet. Ashbery occasionally shifts him a little too far in the direction of Walt Whitman, a touch too loose-limbed. To translate "écrasée" as "squelched", for example, doesn't feel quite right. Those are minor quibbles in a version which shows off the sequence as "a disordered collection of magic lantern slides". A lovely turn of phrase, it seems to capture this butterfly in its net.