Festivals of Patience: The Verse Poems of Arthur Rimbaud

Author: Arthur Rimbaud

Translator: Brian Kim Stefans

Publisher: Kenning Editions (2021)

Poet of "logical revolts," of sexual freedom, inveterate modernist, Symbolist, and inspiration to beatniks, conceptual artists and punks, Arthur Rimbaud wrote some of the most enduring poems of world literature. Here is a collection of all of his poems in verse, in a new English translation by American poet Brian Kim Stefans. With Rimbaud's sense of song craft in mind, Stefans has retained the French meters in his English versions. He is the first to have done this. The book opens with a Latin poem that Rimbaud wrote more than a year before his first known French poem, and it ends with a short poem he wrote a few years after leaving Paris, one which became a touchstone for Surrealist Andre Breton.

"Brian Kim Stefans sets us ablaze with his astonishing new Rimbaud, proving it takes a worldly, genius poet to translate another. This book is a masterpiece!"

–CA Conrad