Le Bateau ivre/ The Drunken Boat Transversion

From 1989 to 1998, I spent the majority of my time living and working in France. So, I read a lot of French writers, particularly from the later part of the 19th century, while I was there. And, on returning to Dublin, I continued to do so. Being able to engage with writers like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Aloysius Bertrand, Jules Laforgue and Nerval, to name but a few, was a hugely important discovery for me, not only as a person, but also as a writer. 

One day, some years ago, I wanted to go out on a boat in my hometown of Skerries, here in North County Dublin. It was raining quite heavily, I remember, so that was that. I was working on the water section of Sker at the time. And then the idea came to me to transverse Rimbaud's great poem Le Bateau ivre. And I did, that very morning in one sitting. 

Samuel Beckett's transversions, and Seamus Heaney's 'impure translations', were hugely important to me in my own development as a Transverser. I see this work as an essential part of my job as a writer/poet. If you want to really read something, this is really the best way to go about it, as you must enter into the skin of the writer. 

This transversion originally was first published on the Deepwater Online Literary Journal based along the river Blackwater in my home County Cork. But they have since shut up shop, so I am making it available here on my blog again. It also appears in The Gladstone Readings Anthology published by Famous Seamus, in 2017. But I think that is out of print.

If you are interested in seeing the transversion in its original context, see Sker published by Lapwing in Belfast. See the link below.       

The Drunken Boat
After Arthur Rimbaud : 1854-1891

How I descended the impassive rivers
No longer guided by the haulers;
Red skins had taken them as targets
Nailing their colours naked to the masts.

Incoherent to the crews,
The importers of Flemish wheat and English cotton,
When the boatmen had finished unloading
The rivers let me go as I pleased.

Into the furious awakening of the tides,
I, the winter previous, deafer than the brain of a child,
I ran! And the peninsulas departed,
Without sounding out triumphant.

The tempest blessed my maritime bath,
Lighter than a cork I danced upon the waves,
What are known as rollers, vice drowned,
For ten nights spun, not missing the silly winks from the bouys.

Softer than the skin of children, the peal of flesh,
The Irish sea inundated my craft of pine,
And the stains of Moorish wine, and vomit,
Bathed me, having dispersed with all rudders and hooks.

And lo’ and behold, I came to bathe in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused in its milk of stars,
Devouring the azure plains- where float
The pale, bloated corpses of the drowned;

Who, holding the brining blue trumpet’s delirious
Rhythm, slowly throughout the rupture of the days,
Stronger than any alcohol, or infinite guitar,
Fermenting all the bitter tattoos of love!

I know the climes die in a flash, and the spouts,
Waves and current: I have known the evening,
And dawn exulted to be only peopled by crows.
And, at times, I have even seen what most men can only dream.

I have seen the ancient disc, stained in Aeschylean horror,
Descend, illuminating the congealed violets
Resembling those ancient satyrs
Whose watery robes tremble with the vicious spray.

And I have dreamed the night green into a dazzling snow,
With kisses merging slowly through the eye of the seas,
Tasted the sap circulating whose whereabouts is still unknown,
And in the aurora of the stupor, perceived a hymn in phosphorous.

I have followed, myself alone, like the herd
Of hysterics, the ripples of the cyclone on the assault of the reefs,
Without dreaming that the soles of the illuminating tides
Could muffle the full force of the oceans.

I have scaled, be it known to you, incredible Floridas,
Mixing the flower of panthers in the eyes of men!
Whole rainbows, extended like the snippets of brides,
Beneath the horizon of seas, and the awful troops.

I have witnessed the distillation of enormous tides, nets
Where lie rotting the corrupted Jonahs of the leviathan.
The systematic collapse of water handed over by the meek,
And the abyss keeps widening its jaws a cataract!

Glaciers, silver suns, floating pearls, and steaming embers!
Hideous groundings at the bottom of shitty gulfs
Where giant worms devour golden bugs,
And tortured elms emit dark Virgilian perfumes.

I should have liked to show children Eldorados,
The great Blue, Neptune, and his singing fish.
However, whole continents of plastic engulfed me,
Pushed onward by the turbulence of wind farms.

Sometimes, martyrized by poles and zones,
The sea, taken in spasms, revealed to me its
Plankton, and further subterranean depths,
And I dived with her, like with a woman kneeling...

Presque isle, tossing about overboard with the struggles
And the droppings of the marauding terns.
And I drifted, and between my fragile links
The drowned plunged sleeping, further retreating!

Now me, a lost boat on the hair of the bays,
Blown by the cyclone, birdless into the ether,
I with whom the monitors and the ships of industry
Could not have replenished the drunk carcass of still water.

Free, smoking, mounting in violet plumes,
I who pierced a hole in the sky glowing like a wall
Bringing with him the exquisite preserve of good poets,
The lichens of the sun, and the snot of azure,

Who ran, charged with electric visions,
Escorted by black seahorses on crazed gang planks,
When all of the 4th of Julys collapsed little by little
The ultramarine climes and ardent funnels;

I who trembled, feeling the moans at fifty leagues
The rutting of the behemoths and the expansive maelstroms,
An eternal spinner in the motionless blue,
Who regrets Europe with her ancient ramparts!

I have seen sidereal archipelagos, and the islands
Where delirium climates abound are sailing:
Is it in those endless nights that you sleep in exile,
A million golden birds, o future vigour?

But, its true, I have cried too much! The dawns have become mediocre.
Every moon now is atrocious, and each sun is bitter.
Acrid love pumps me full of an unnerving apathy.
Christ, if I could get a rest! I need to see the sea.

If I were to envisage a sea for Europe, it would be a puddle
Black and cold, where the dusk is embalmed
And where a child huddled up in sadness, sails
A frail boat like a mayfly.

I can no longer, bathed in these waters, o tears,
Trail in the wake of the cotton porters,
Nor traverse the abomination of flags and flames,
Nor swim below the horrible glare of the pontoons.

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