Pierre Michon: Rimbaud the Son

We do not know exactly what the Saison is; we think we know only that it is high literature, because those two voices, the voice of the king of adoration and the voice of the furious prophet, which are all of literature, are fighting there. It is more commented upon than the Gospels; between the celestial song and the blasphemy we cannot see very clearly; it is a renouncement that does not renounce; the yes and the no are not disentangled; and leaning over it in our silk skullcaps we are interminably disentangling that yes from that no. It is said that the entire West is halted by it; that all its contradictions churn there as in a mill wheel, shattering like water on the wheel, emerging again intact like water from the wheel. Like water in the wheel, we clearly see that exultation; we cannot decide if it puts an end to the West or once more relaunches it; but rightly or wrongly, we agree to consider it a miracle, at nineteen years old, in an attic in the Ardennes, to write this fistful of pages, hermetic as John, abrupt as Matthew, foreign as Mark, strict as Luke; and like Paul of Tarsus, aggressively modern, that is to say, risen up against the Book, rival of the Book. And of course something is missing: because that sheaf of pages has no evangelical model other than itself, its poor, empty self, which, though an other , was not really the other , the verminous, glorious one of Nazareth. Perhaps this Saison is an old-fashioned thing compared to the Gospel. What matters is that, now, it is one of our Gospels. The little Jeremiah won, he was stronger than literature even while remaining within it, he has caught us.

He wrote the Saison .

I can imagine him going out at night into the Roche courtyard when the harvesters are sleeping. He, too, has worked hard. It is July and the sky is full of stars; under the stars there are dark haystacks as in the story of Boaz. We do not see Rimbaud, who is there: his disheveled hair, wide eyes, big hands, all his features secret, guarded, as though postulated, in the cool shadows of the night. He is crouching against that haystack. We can hear him. He is saying sentences written in the daytime, with great emotion, incomparable to any other in the world since God left the human heart. And if there are powers in the air, if, as the poem of Boaz affirms, they particularly love to frolic during harvest nights, they recognize that great emotion which they heard in the past in Judea, Rome, and Saint-Cyr, everywhere where emotion has given rhythm to language. They know it. We know it as well, we know that it exists; but we do not really know what it is. We do not really know what is leaping in that willful man’s or girl’s heart, in unison with the words that roll from his mouth. The attentive, distracted stars twinkle. The voice in the dark says the Saison for the stars. The big hands close, the emotion builds, the voice gives way to tears. We know this emotion exists. Perhaps it is a joy of December. Is it power? Is it to be master over them all now, Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and little Banville? Is it war? Is it to have thrown down the device of twelve feet that kept us standing, to have defeated the old protocol and left us all without protocol, powerless and taciturn as haystacks in the night? Is it the bitter joy of having made of the poem this perfectly straight, dark, vain, taciturn thing, indifferent to men as a haystack in the night? Is it glory, far from haystacks and men, for the stars, as the stars? Is it June? Is it the sanctus? Is it the sweet joy of having found the new prayer, the new love, the new pact? But with whom? The stars are dancing through the dark leaves. The house is darker than the night. Ah, perhaps it is finally rejoining you now, embracing you, mother who does not read me, who is sleeping with closed fists in the well of your room, mother, for whom I invent this wooden tongue close to your ineffable mourning, your sealed enclosure. For I raise my voice to speak to you from very far away, father who will never speak to me. What endlessly relaunches literature? What makes men write? Other men, their mothers, the stars, or the old enormous things, God, language? The powers know. The powers of the air are this breath of wind through the leaves. The night turns. The moon rises, there is no one against the haystack. Rimbaud, in the attic among some pages, has turned toward the wall and sleeps like lead.

PIERRE MICHON was born in Creuse, France, in 1945. His first work of fiction was published in 1984, and since that time his reputation as one of the foremost contemporary French writers has become well established. He has won many prizes, including the Prix France Culture for his first book, Small Lives; the Prix Louis Guilloux for the French edition of The Origin of the World; and the Prix de la Ville de Paris in 1996 for his body of work. He has also received the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française for his novel The Eleven , the Grand Prix Société des gens de lettres de France (SGDL) for Lifetime Achievement in 2004, and the Prix Décembre (2002) and the Petrarca-Preis (2010).

JODY GLADDING is a poet and translator. The author of three collections of poetry, she has translated over twenty books from the French. She teaches in the MFA Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. ELIZABETH DESHAYS is a teacher, translator, and specialized horticulturalist. She is the author of a study on bilingual education and the translator of Julien Gracq’s La Presqu’ile . Gladding and Deshays won the 2009 Florence Gould French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Pierre Michon’s Small Lives .