French visionary/ singer/ poet Lizzy Mercier Descloux captured by Michael EstebaninPatti Smith’sNY apartment back in 1975.
Though to some she may appear to have been nothing more than a footnote to the careers of icons like Patti Smith, Richard Hell & Chet Baker, that audacious artist and devotee of Rimbaud&Godard was an innovator who witnessed numerous pivotal moments in musical and cultural history upon her arrival in New York, at a time when the city was becoming a melting pot for various late-’70s subcultures, such as American Punk and No Wave.
An archetypal outsider feeling suffocated in her working class family environment in France, she decided to drop out of Art School and follow her partner Michael EstebantoNew York in themid-’70s, witnessing the birth of punk and no wave with the Ramones, James Chance and Patti Smith. She always stood out from the crowd: she started a punk zine with her partner, who co-founded ZE Records,befriendedPatti Smith who shared a mutual love for Rimbaud, became a muse for Richard Hell, released poetry books, appeared in Amos Poe’s documentary ‘Blank Generation’, made five albums in various no wave/ bouncing pre-Talking Heads post-disco/ Soweto jive/ loose jazz styles and marked herself out as a globe-trotter with more passport stamps than Tintin, living and travelling all around the world from the Bahamas&Rio De JaneirotoSouth Africa&Corsica, where she died in relative obscurity in 2004 from cancer.
David Wojnarowicz, ‘Arthur Rimbaud in New York’ series, 1978-79
Arthur Rimbaud in New York, one of David Wojnarowicz’s few incursions into photography, is the articulation of a testimony to urban, social and political change in New York.
Wojnarowicz, using the figure of the accursed poet as the only way for an artist to intervene in reality, chronicles his own life and his emotional relationship with New York City in the late 1970s. The artist portrays himself wearing a mask of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, thereby taking on his identity and highlighting the parallels in their lives: the violence suffered in their youths, the feeling of being denied freedom, the desire to live far away from the bourgeois environment and the fact of their homosexuality. Wojnarowicz is juxtaposing the historical time of the symbolist poet with the artist’s present.
The series, taken in places that the artist used to frequent with photographer Peter Hujar, represents the emergence of identity politics and queer visibility in contemporary art, and the debates surrounding the public sphere as a space for individual non-conformity that were to shape the 1980s. The series also represents a contemplation of the end of the experimental artists’ collectives on the Lower East Side, as gentrification and urban speculation transformed the neighbourhood, and AIDS had begun to decimate the gay community, also causing the early death of the artist in 1992.
“If I may add something to this, the model in the photos is actually Brian Butterick, David Wojnarowicz’s friend and sometime collaborator. This series was part of Wojnarowicz’s break into the art world but also among his first explorations of art as a personally expressive medium.”
Arthur Rimbaud’s “Bal des pendus” translated into Vulcan and typed in Gotavlu-Zukitaun (Standard Vulcan Script). To read the Federation Standard script version, go here.
Somebody asked me what my favorite poem was, and if I would translate it into Vulcan. One of my all-time favorite writers is Arthur Rimbaud, and the first poem of his I ever read was Bal des pendus (Dance of the Hanged Men/Hanged Men, Dancing). I don’t speak french or latin, so I have had to rely on the translations to read his work. Unfortunately, every translation seems to be different and the meaning often gets lost or altered.
To translate this poem into Vulcan, I referenced a literal translation, and two published English translations from my books.
Tam t’Geldaik Sasular
Fi’nesh-kur geld-stau-nentu - t’hai’la k’wuh kar - nam-tor skilamular taman - taman – wonil - skilamular t’e'shua – hinek-terayalar t’Saladinlar.
Seshau osu Beelzebuhb k’talu-pla'dor Pi’nesh-kur su-leitrilar ik wa'limatau na’igen - heh k’kwul fi’patam spo’ash'ya-kwul - tor n’au tam-tor - tam-tor - bi’os gad-muf ralash-tanaf..
More or less a straight-up word list song, this one honoring Bob Dylan on his 80th birthday. The words and phrases are translations of the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. I remember having a long conversation in class about whether the word “electronic” would have existed at the time Rimbaud was writing (consensus: no—it should…
