Vers de collège

First edition, one of 10 numbered copies on japon paper, the deluxe issue. Very rare and fine copy, entirely uncut.

Extremely rare and fine full-margined copy of the first verses by the poet of the wind-swept feet.

Exponents of literary scholarship took an early interest in Rimbaud’s very first verses, the poet whose career was arguably the most meteoric in French poetry. The exceptional rarity of his works encouraged researchers to seek out previously unknown and pre-original texts: “In 1932, Jules Mouquet published, at the Mercure de France, a volume entitled Vers de collège, containing texts by Rimbaud hitherto unknown to ‘everyone’, in particular those inserted in the Moniteur de l’enseignement secondaire spécial et classique, the official bulletin of the Douai Academy. The same volume also includes articles on the ‘frauds’ and ‘poetic mystifications’ of Rimbaud during his time at the Charleville college […].” (Jean-Baptiste Baronian, Dictionnaire Rimbaud). Here are included the brilliant Latin and prose compositions of his youth, whose significance for his later masterpieces has been repeatedly emphasized.

In their seminal 1973 study, Marc Ascione and Jean-Pierre Chambon analysed the mechanisms of what they already termed at the time Rimbaud’s “secret erotic language.” The two critics identified, in Rimbaud’s French texts, the habitual use of puns and double entendres, drawing not only on French slang but also on Latinisms and French-Latin translinguistic allusions: for instance, séminariste evokes semen; menton (mentum in Latin) recalls mentula, the virile member; and rosée further alludes to semen through the Latin metaphorical sense of ros, also to be compared with the contemporary French use of rosée in popular erotic speech. (Georg Hugo Tucker, Rimbaud et la traduction libre en vers latins: de la virtuosité (et de la duplicité) à la subversion”)

Like Montaigne, for whom Latin was a mother tongue, Rimbaud began his poetic production in this ancient language, here gathered in the most desirable of copies: “Living in the age of Jean Dorat and Jean Second, he would have rivalled them, and would undoubtedly have become the foremost Latin poet of his time” (Jules Mouquet, Preface).