In the Light Of

It’s long since Ciaran Carson established his reputation as a masterful, protean poet and an adept, inventive translator. His versions of The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, The Táin and The Midnight Court are the yields of thrilling raids on other cultures, times and languages. The Alexandrine Plan (1988) included translations of sonnets by, among others, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). In the Light Of flourished from his response to an invitation to translate seven of Rimbaud’s prose poems. The originals of these were collected in Illuminations, most of which first appeared in 1886 in the Symbolist review, La Vogue. Ciaran Carson’s adaptations of prose into rhyming verse ‘are not conventional translations’, as his Author’s Note explains. They are engagements and experiments with the work of a poet who was ‘avant garde before the Avant-garde; a surrealist before Surrealism; and, environmentalist avant la lettre, his critique of industrial society is still relevant today. In all those senses he was indeed a seer.’ And in this exchange the French precursor has met his match.