Festivals of Patience

Poet of “logical revolts," of sexual freedom, inveterate modernist, Symbolist, and inspiration to beatniks, conceptual artists and punks, Arthur Rimbaud wrote some of the most enduring poems of world literature. His career lasted all of five years, between 1870-1875. Here is a collection of all of his poems in verse, in a new English translation by American poet Brian Kim Stefans. With Rimbaud's sense of songcraft in mind, Stefans has retained the French meters in his English versions. He is the first to have done this. The book opens with a Latin poem that Rimbaud wrote more than a year before his first known French poem, and it ends with a short poem he wrote a few years after leaving Paris, one which became a touchstone for Surrealist André Breton. CAConrad declares, “Brian Kim Stefans sets us ablaze with his astonishing new Rimbaud, proving it takes a worldly, genius poet to translate another. This book is a masterpiece!" Brian Kim Stefans is a poet, digital artist and theorist who teaches in the English Department at UCLA.