Translator's Note

Rimbaud wrote Ver erat (“It was Spring”) for a school exam in 1868, when he was fourteen years old.¹ The students were given three and a half hours to expand in Latin verse upon a few lines from Horace, Odes, III. 4 (9-13, 18-20). The prompt comes from a poem addressed to the Muses: Horace describes how he slept safely outdoors as a child, since “the legendary doves” (fabulosae … palumbes, 9-12) had covered him in laurel and myrtle leaves. Rimbaud won first prize on the exam (as he routinely did at school), and the poem became his first published work.²

For my translation, I felt that it was essential to preserve Rimbaud’s meter, the dactylic hexameter. For this piece, form was all-important. The young poet had to display his skill in composing hexameters in Latin, and he showed himself fully at ease with this technically demanding meter. His gifts of descriptive elegance, narrative verve, and poetic vision were a bonus.

Dactylic hexameter is the meter not only of the Greek and Roman epics, but of a variety of ancient poetic genres, including the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Vergil and the satires of Horace and Juvenal. Its rhythms can seem less accessible to the ears of English speakers than those of more familiar meters such as iambic pentameter; for this reason I include here recordings of both the Latin and my English translation.³ The most noticeable feature of this meter is that each line ends with the rhythm DUM-da-da-DUM-DUM (“shave and a haircut”), a dactyl (/uu, stressed syllable followed by two unstressed) plus a spondee (//, two stressed syllables),⁴ e.g.:

rúra petívi                   woódlands and pástures

gaúdia méntem          toók my heart cáptive

flúminis óra                síde of the ríver

Earlier in the hexameter line, each of the remaining four “feet” can be either a dactyl or a spondee. Here is a line that consists of all dactyls, until the final spondee: 

nór did this líght bear a tráce of resémblance to ánything eárthly

And here is one with a spondee in the second foot (“headlong”):

whén, in their heádlóng flíght, they arríved at their hómes, on a moúntain

Rimbaud’s Latin hexameters have an artful variety to their rhythm, and I have striven for the same in my translation. 

The gift of poetic vision was clearly on Rimbaud’s mind. In the poem, Apollo writes on the young man’s forehead in flaming letters: “TU VATES ERIS (You will be a vates).” This is a Latin word for “poet,” used by Vergil, Horace, and others; “You will be a poet” would be a completely legitimate translation here. But vates also means “seer” or “prophet” (a nuance exploited by the classical poets’ use of the word), and in light of Rimbaud’s later writings I have translated “you will be a seer.” A few years after Ver erat, Rimbaud laid out his famous program of the “systematic disordering of the senses” (“un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens”).⁵ By achieving this derangement, Rimbaud wrote to his friends, he hoped to become a voyant, a seer. Here we see the first inklings of Rimbaud’s poetic agenda, not only in the idea of the poet as a visionary (vates/voyant), but in the disoriented and hallucinatory quality of his idyll: 

Nescio quae … mens divinior, “something divine, some intelligence”

lymphatis … sensibus, “my frenzied / proprioception”

attonitus, “stunned” (twice)

Nescio quid … numen, “some divine presence”

calor insolitus, “a feeling of heat—unfamiliar”

Unlike the clear-eyed Hesiod when the Muses bestow on him the poet’s scepter (Theogony 22–34, the literary prototype of Rimbaud’s vision), the narrator of this poem scarcely knows what is happening. This is a state of mind that Rimbaud would come to recommend. 

Notes

¹   I am grateful to Patrick Wang for introducing me to this poem and for many discussions, including discussion of the most appropriate translation of vates.

²   in a regional journal that showcased student work, Le Moniteur de l’enseignement secondaire, spécial et classique. Bulletin officiel de l’académie de Douai, I^re année, 2, January 15, 1869, pp. 13-14.

³   Thanks to Robert Fass for advice on the recordings. Rimbaud would not have used the “scholastic” pronunciation of Latin that I use in these recordings, but rather the “ecclesiastical” pronunciation that was prevalent in his day.

⁴   In Classical Latin verse, the rhythms are based not on stressed/unstressed syllables but on “long” or “short” vowel quantity: e.g. “o” as in “mop” counts as short, “o” as in “mope” counts as long. This is the system Rimbaud is using. In English verse, vowel quantity does not register as a rhythmic element, so my translation uses a stress-based system. Both systems have in common the element of duration: a long vowel takes longer to say than a short vowel, and so does a stressed syllable. In the ancient system, a vowel also counts as long (and takes longer to say) if it is followed by two consonants. The final syllable of a line is always considered long because of the slight pause involved in a line break.

⁵   letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871; cf. letter to Georges Izambard, May 13, 1871: “Je veux être poète, et je travaille à me rendre voyant … Il s’agit d’arriver à l’inconnu par le dérèglement de tous les sens.” “I want to be a poet, and I’m working at turning myself into a seer … it’s a matter of arriving at the unknown by the disordering of all the senses.”

Diane Arnson Svarlien

In the Classroom