MAPPLETHORPE, Robert (photo.); RIMBAUD, Arthur.

£1,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

A Season in Hell. First edition thus, number 345 of 1,000 copies signed by the illustrator Robert Mapplethorpe and the translator Paul Schmidt in pencil, and retaining the publisher's 4-page "Limited Editions Club Letter", loosely inserted as issued. Mapplethorpe's illustrations "display a certain visionary quality" (Classe, p. 1168).In the translator's introduction, the poet, actor, and librettist Paul Schmidt (1934-1999) comments that Rimbaud's poem "is a work of adolescent passion - not the passion of exuberance, but passion as suffering. It is the record of a failed attempt to create a new identity by creating a new world. Passion is universal, yet some particular facts may help to explain Rimbaud's feelings, to illuminate the smoky density, the nerve-edge screams, the sulphurous flicker of this little book" (p. vii). Schmidt also published a translation of Rimbaud's complete works in 1975.Originally self-published by Rimbaud as Une Saison en Enfer in 1873, this prose poem was finished in a frenzy after the break-up of his relationship with Verlaine, who wounded him with a revolver in the summer of that year.

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