Iluminaciones

Written between 1873 and 1875 -especially during Arthur Rimbaud's two stays in London, first with Paul Verlaine and a year later with the young poet German Nouveau- the prose poems in Illuminations are the corollary of a work that continues to dazzle and challenging readers for his oneirism, his prophetic radicalism and his precocious taste for unchecking dissolving irony. Rimbaud gave the manuscript of these 'illuminations' (the English word for 'coloured engravings') to Verlaine in February 1875, during one of their last meetings, but the book did not see the light of day until October 1886 in the magazine's publications. The Vogue. The poet, established at the beginning of that decade in Harar (Ethiopia) as a coffee and second-hand weapons dealer and completely removed from his literary past by his own will, did not find out about this publication or the impact it had on French poetry of his time.. This volume recovers the exemplary translation of the poet Miguel Casado, once again revised for the occasion, and offers us the admirable work of interpretation of the visual artist Frederic Amat, for whom poetry has always been an artistic axis and a vocation in life, as demonstrated by his readings of Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, J. V. Foix, Octavio Paz and Mark Strand, among others. Attentive to the evocative impulse of the poem -its ability to generate a visual impact- its images struggle to capture what underlies the text or, as Amat himself affirms, its original silence. The result is a strongly unitary work that combines expression and research and that establishes continuity, in a fruitful dialogue full of suggestions, painting and poetry.