Die späten Verse

I publish these late, last poems of Rimbaud in the original French and in Michael Donhauser's translation in order to draw attention to an author who is almost only perceived as his own legend. In an idiosyncratically appropriative manner, Donhauser shows another Rimbaud as the eternally drunken one who works on the de-regulation of all the senses. Alongside rivers and ponds, baked waters still play a menacing role, but 'Feste der Geduld' (Festivals of Patience) is the title of four of the last poems. In this peculiar hybrid of enthusiasm and modesty, Donhauser reveals a more brittle and sober Rimbaud, whose frenetic vowel madness he translates into creaking consonants. The translation is a disenfranchisement of one language by another. The volume is complemented by an essay by Michael Donhauser on the poem 'Mémoire,' in which he reads Rimbaud's failure as "not being able," "breaking at the rhythm within the verse," "trying to translate this breaking into a whooping."