Écrivain (Charleville,
Paris, Londres, Bruxelles), puis, à partir de 1876, mercenaire (Java),
commis administratif (Stockholm et Copenhague), contremaître dans une
entreprise de matériaux de construction (Chypre), secrétaire-comptable
(Yémen), assistant-directeur de comptoirs coloniaux (Éthiopie puis à nouveau
au Yémen), trafiquant d'armes (Choa), journaliste (Le Caire),
acheteur-importateur, vendeur-exportateur, comptable, courtier, banquier,
entrepositaire et démarcheur (Abyssinie), né à Charleville le 20 octobre
1854, mort à Marseille le 10 novembre 1891.
Rimbaud est né à Charleville. - À
l'époque, la ville de Mézières, sa voisine, était une ville séparée. -
Charleville, fondée en 1606 par Charles de Gonzague, duc de Mantoue, conserve
de nombreuses traces de ses origines ducales : une grande place ressemblant à
celle des Vosges, à Paris, un ancien couvent des Filles du Saint-Sépulcre et
un Veux Moulin sur un des bras de la Meuse. - La ville de Mézières, à côté,
est plus austère avec sa citadelle et ses rues tortueuses.
Le nom de la rue où est né Rimbaud
portait le nom de Napoléon au moment de sa naissance.
Une librairie occupait le local du
rez-de-chaussée de la maison où il est né.
Le père de Rimbaud, Frédéric, était
capitaine et originaire de Dole (dans le Jura). Il aimait beaucoup écrire mais
tout son oeuvre a été perdu (dont un Coran annoté).
Sa mère est née Vitalie Cuif.
Rimbaud eut un frère, Frédéric, qui
finit conducteur de voitures à Attigny (Ardennes), trois soeurs, une qui
mourut en bas-âge et deux prénommées respectivement Vitalie (1858) et Isabelle
(1860).
Peu après la naissance d'Isabelle, la
famille Rimbaud dénénagea rue Bourbon dans le quartier ouvrier de Charleville.
En 1870, au collège de Charleville,
Rimbaud remporta les premiers prix : d'excellence, de discours latin, de
discours français, de vers latins, de version latine et de version grecque.
Au cours des affrontements de 1870, la
ville de Mézières fut incendiée mais Charleville, déclarée ville ouverte
fut épargnée.
Photos :
 |
 |
 |
| Maison natale |
Monument à Charleville-Mézières |
Tombeau de
Rimbaud, de
ses soeurs, de sa mère
et de son
grand-père |
Photos, gracieuseté de
Monsieur Michel B.-P. de
Charleville-Mézières (décembre 2002)
Cliquez sur chacune pour agrandir.
Oeuvres :
On doit à Rimbaud, entre autres, ce
poème, en prose, intitulé "The drunken boat" :
As I was floating down unconcerned Rivers, I no
longer felt myself steered by the haulers : gaudy Redskins had taken them for
targets, nailing them naked to coloured stakes.
I cared nothing for all my crews, carrying Flemish wheat or English cottons.
When, along with my haulers, those uproars were done with, the Rivers let me
sail downstream where I pleased.
Into the ferocious tide-rips, last winter, more
absorbed than the minds of children, I ran ! And the unmoored Peninsulas never
endured more triumphant clamourings. The storm made bliss of my sea-borne
awakenings. Lighter than a cork, I danced on the waves which men call eternal
rollers of victims, for ten nights, without once missing the foolish eye of
the harbor lights !
Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples to children,
the green water penetrated my pinewood hull and washed me clean of the bluish
wine-stains and the splashes of vomit, carrying away both rudder and anchor.
And from that time on I bathed in the Poem of the
Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
devouring the green azures ; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, a dreaming
drowned man sometimes goes down ; where, suddenly dying the bluenesses-
deliriums and slow rhythms under the gleams of the daylight, stronger than
alcohol, vaster than music-ferment the bitter rednesses of love ! I have come
to know the skies splitting with lightnings, and the waterspouts, and the
breakers and currents ; I know the evening, and Dawn rising up like a flock of
doves, and sometimes I have seen what men have imagined they saw!
I have seen the low-hanging sun speckled with mystic horrors lighting up long
violet coagulations like the performers in antique dramas ; waves rolling back
into the distances their shiverings of venetian blinds !
I have dreamed of the green night of the dazzled
snows, the kiss rising slowly to the eyes of the seas, the circulation of
undreamed-of saps, and the yellow-blue awakenings of singing phosphorus !
I have followed, for whole months on end, the
swells battering the reefs like hysterical herds of cows, never dreaming that
the luminous feet of the Marys could muzzle by force the snorting Oceans !
I have struck, do you realize, incredible Floridas,
where mingle with flowers the eyes of panthers in human skins ! Rainbows
stretched like bridles under the seas-horizon to glaucous herds !
I have seen the enormous swamps seething, traps
where a whole leviathan rots in the reeds !
Downfalls of waters in the midst of the calm, and distances cataracting down
into abysses !
Glaciers, suns of silver, waves of pearl, skies of red-hot coals ! Hideous
wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs where the giant snakes, devoured by vermin,
fall from the twisted trees with black odours !
I should have liked to show to children those
dolphins of the blue wave, those golden, those singing fishes.- Foam of
flowers rocked my driftings, and at times ineffable winds would lend me wings.
Sometimes, a martyr weary of poles and zones, the
sea whose sobs sweetened my rollings lifted my shadow-flowers with their
yellow sucking disks toward me, and I hung there like a kneeling woman... [I
was] almost an island, tossing on my beaches the brawls and droppings of
pale-eyed, clamouring birds. And I was scudding along when across my frayed
cordage drowned men sank backwards into sleep !...
But now I, a boat lost under the hair of coves,
hurled by the hurricane into the birdless ether ; I, whose wreck, dead-drunk
and sodden with water, neither Monitor nor Hanse ships would have fished up ;
free, smoking, risen from violet fogs, I who bored through the wall of the
reddening sky which bears a sweetmeat good poets find delicious : lichens of
sunlight [mixed] with azure snot ; who ran, speckled with lunula of electricity,
a crazy plank with black sea-horses for escort, when Julys were crushing with
cudgel blows skies of ultramarine into burning funnels ; I who trembled to feel
at fifty league's distance the groans of Behemoth's rutting, and of the dense
Maelstroms ; eternal spinner of blue immobilities, I long for Europe with it's
age-old parapets !
I have seen archipelagos of stars ! and islands
whose delirious skies are open to sailers : - Do you sleep, are you exiled in
those bottomless nights, O million golden birds, Life Force of the future ?
But, truly, I have wept too much ! The Dawns are
heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter : sharp love has
swollen me up with heady langours. O let my keel split! O let me sink to the
bottom !
If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the
black cold pool where into the scented twilight a child squatting full of
sadness launches a boat as fragile as a butterfly in May.
I can no more, bathed in your langours, O waves, sail in the wake of the
carriers of cottons ; nor undergo the pride of the flags and pennants ; nor pull
past the horrible eyes of the hulks.
Une traduction en français (et en vers) de ce poème a
été publiée par Madame Fawzi Malhasti,
la poétesse de renom, dans le Supplément de mars 1988 de la Gazette de
Saint-Romuald-d'Etchemin.
