"the difficulties involved"

About this book

"While a student at Vassar College in the early 1930s, New York poet Muriel Rukeyser translated Rimbaud's seminal poems Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell) and 'Voyelles' (Vowels), and reworked them again once she had left college and returned to New York. After deep research into various incomplete drafts, a complete draft of A Season in Hell was uncovered among Rukeyser's papers at the Library of Congress, including her translator's note, and correspondence with film scholar Jay Leyda, who included Rukeyser's translation of 'Voyelles' in his own translation of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's The Film Sense (1942). This edition establishes the place of this early translation project in Muriel Rukeyser's career as a poet and translator, and reproduces excerpts from Rukeyser's unpublished translation of A Season in Hell, as well as multiple versions of her translations of shorter Rimbaud pieces such as 'Voyelles.'"--Supplied by publisher.