Fire! Fire at me! Here! Or I’ll surrender – Cowards! – I’ll kill myself! I’ll hurl myself under the horses’ hooves! (transl. by A. S. Kline)

Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), written by Arthur Rimbaud in 1873, is in equal measure autobiographical and fictitious. Based on the myth of the Fall, the poem oscillates between spiritual struggle and mockery. Its narration, alternating between a monologue and a dialogue with oneself, describes the process of damnation, questions its cause, and expresses the desire to return to life. Une Saison also chronicles Rimbaud’s rebellion against the catechism, a rebellion that bursts the boundaries of language and turns narrative codes on their head. The poet’s ever-changing internal voices enter Hell as prisoners of the impossibility of speaking, but also of remaining silent. Those voices thus become sparks of a lonely, overwhelmed word.

In Feu sur moi I endeavoured to represent that unique type of expression in music. The form of the ca. 11-minute-long piece is modelled on the structure, dramatic form, and proportions of the nine dense and brief “stations” that make up Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer.

Prologue
Bad Blood
Night in Hell
Ravings I – Foolish Virgin, The Infernal Spouse
Ravings II – Alchemy of the Word
The Impossible
Lightning
Morning
Farewell

The principles of musical interpretation of this poetic text are suggested by several major aspects of Rimbaud’s work.

The first of these is the fragmentation and multiplication of the “I” between the disappearance of individuality and the ominous spectre of the multitude, frequently associated with the opposition between solo parts and polyphonic texture. At other times, I was attracted to the oral-theatrical dimensions, particularly in some quasi-declamatory segments, contrasted with other, verse or prosaic fragments. That declamatory quality made me design a manner of musical performance in which certain phrases were to be recited rather than sung, depending on their formal function and the need to make the text comprehensible. The most literary text sections, on the other hand, have been set in my composition more for their sound than their meaning. In this case, contrapuntal texture aims to create a polyphony that tends towards a blend, a uniform timbre, or else towards building a texture.

Finally, some passages (especially the Prologue, and – to a lesser extent – Ravings I – Foolish Virgin have been composed without vocal setting of Rimbaud’s text. Sometimes only a few words, consonants or vowels remain, while speech is formally represented by electronic sounds. Text density and comprehensibility are often filtered out as sound objects, or the semantic layer is left out where required by the demands of musical dramaturgy.

At the start of my composition process, the vocal ensemble turned out to be an ideal medium for the embodiment of Rimbaud’s text in its theatrical and religious dimensions. The electronics, however, which expands and transforms the voice material in real time, brings out another, more subtle but decisive dimension of the poetic text. Rimbaud represents two infernos rather than one: there is the theological hell and the real everyday one. They constantly overlap, communicate, and clash.

In Feu sur moi, I therefore decided to assign the space of the first, theological and acousmatic hell to the electronics, while the choir represents the everyday hell on stage. This interplay of mirrors and resonances determined my handling of the voices, the development of the electronic sound layer, and their interactions.

Franck Bedrossian

Une Saison en Enfer (text fragments set in Feu sur moi)

BAD BLOOD

Fire! Fire at me! Here! Or I’ll surrender – Cowards! – I’ll kill myself! I’ll hurl myself under the horses’ hooves!
Ah! …
Hunger, thirst, shouts, dance, dance, dance, dance!
One doesn’t go. – Let’s take to the roads again, full of my vice, the vice that
has thrust its roots of suffering into my side, since the age of reason – that
rises to the sky, strikes me, knocks me down, drags me along.
The last innocence, and the last timidity.
hom shall I hire myself to? What beast must be adored? What saintly
image attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lie must I uphold? –
Wade through what blood?
De profundis, Domine, what a creature I am!
-------
NIGHT IN HELL

I have swallowed a famous gulp of poison – Thrice blessed be the thought
that came to me! – My guts are burning. The venom’s violence wracks
my limbs; deforms me, fells me. I’m dying of thirst; I’m stifling, unable to
cry out. It’s hell, the everlasting torment! See how the flames rise up! I’m
burning in the proper manner. Well then, demon!
-------
RAVINGS I – Foolish Virgin

‘O divine Spouse, my Lord, do not refuse the confession of the most
sorrowful of your servants. I am lost. I am drunk. I am impure. What a life!
Forgiveness, divine Lord, forgiveness! Ah, forgiveness! What tears! And
what tears again, later, I hope! -------
RAVINGS II – Alchemy of the Word

My turn. The history of one of my follies.
For ages I boasted of possessing all possible landscapes, and found
the celebrities of modern painting and poetry absurd.
I loved idiotic pictures, fanlights, stage scenes, mountebanks’ backcloths,
inn-signs, popular prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, erotic
books with poor spelling, novels of grandmother’s day, fairy tales, little
books for children, old operas, empty refrains, naïve rhythms.
I dreamt of crusades, unrecorded voyages of discovery, republics without
histories, wars of suppressed religion, moral revolutions, movements of
races and continents: I believed in every enchantment.

Far from the village girls, birds and cattle,
On my knees, what was I drinking, all
Surrounded by tender hazel corpses,
In an afternoon mist, green and warm?

From that young Oise, what could I be drinking,
– Mute elms, flowerless turf, dull sky –
From yellow gourds, far from my dear hut slinking?
A gold liquor that yields sweat by and by.

I made a dubious inn-sign – Weather
Came coursing the heavens. At evening
Lost in a virgin sand the wood’s water,
The wind, of God, the ponds re-icing:
– I could not drink: I saw gold, weeping!

At four on a summer morning,
The slumber of love still lasts.
Under the hedge fade fast
Scents of the night’s feasting.

Down there and already astir
In the Hesperidean sun,
In their vast workshop, as one,
In shirtsleeves – the Carpenters.

In their deserts of foam, tranquilly,
They prepare costly panelling
On which the city
Will daub its deceitful painting.

O, for those workmen, charming
Subjects of a king of Babylon,
Venus! Leave the lovers sleeping,
Whose souls a crown have on.

O Queen of the Shepherds
Take strong drink to the workers too,
So their efforts may be deferred
As they wait to bathe in the sea at noon.

Song of the Highest Tower

Let it come, let it come
The day when hearts love as one.

I’ve been patient so long
I’ve forgotten even
The terror and suffering
Flown up to heaven,
A sick thirst again
Darkens my veins.

Let it come, let it come
The day when hearts love as one.

So the meadow
Freed by neglect,
Flowered, overgrown
With weeds and incense,
To the buzz nearby
Of foul flies.

Let it come, let it come
The day when hearts love as one.

It’s found we see!
What? – Eternity.
It’s the sun, mingled
With the sea.

My immortal soul
Keep your vow
Despite empty night
And the day’s glow.

Thus you’ll diverge
From the mortal weal
From the common urge,
To fly as you feel…

– No hope, never,
No entreaty here.
Science and patience,
Torture is real.

No more tomorrow,
Embers of satin,
Your own ardour
The only duty.

It’s found we see.
– What? – Eternity.
It’s the sun, mingled
With the sea.

I became a fabulous opera: I saw that all beings are fated for happiness:
activity is not life, but a way of wasting strength, an enervation. Morality
is a weakness of the brain.

O seasons, O chateaux!
Where is the flawless soul?

The magic study I pursued,
Of happiness, none can elude.

A health to it, each time
The Gallic cock makes rhyme.

Ah! There’s nothing I desire,
It’s possessed my life entire.

That charm has taken heart and soul
Scattered all my efforts so.

O seasons, O chateaux!

The hour of its flight, alas!
Will be the hour I pass.

O seasons, O chateaux!

That’s all past. I know these days how to greet beauty.

-------
THE IMPOSSIBLE

-------
LIGHTNING

-------
MORNING

Once upon a time did I not have a pleasant childhood, heroic, fabulous,
to be written on leaves of gold – too fortunate! For what crime, what
error, have I merited present weakness? You who claim that the creatures
sob with grief, that the sick despair, that the dead have bad dreams, try
to recount my fall and my slumber. I can explain myself no better than
the beggar with his incessant Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s. I can speak
no more.

-------
FAREWELL

(Translated by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2002, 2008 All Rights Reserved.
Reproduced under a non-commercial licence from the website: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/Rimbaud3.php)