On 'Le Mal,' War, God, and Hurricanes
Reading a New Translation of Rimbaud in the Shadow of Disaster
Swiping across images from The New York Times, The Washington Post, the various news agencies on my iPad. Tanks. Gutted buildings, their exterior walls ripped away. A bicyclist rides along a rural road. A worker climbs atop a shattered building, seeks to repair the damaged roof. A missile launches trailing a knife of orange and yellow.
A woman walks a rubbled alley in Sviatohirsk. Eastern Ukraine. An old woman in rumpled T-shirt and tattered skirt. Heavy boots. A winter jacket. A small figure in the wider frame. She has a cap on her head. Bright white. It draws the eye, points the viewer to her weathered face. A familiar face. So much like those in old family photos. The same seriousness my Polish Jew grandparents show in their wedding photo taken two years after their arrival at Ellis Island. How old is this woman with the map of Eastern European history etched into her face? Sixty? Seventy? No much older than me. But more weathered. War weary.
The image is both familiar and beyond comprehension. Sand bags piled against what the caption calls “a severely damaged religious building.” There is an abandoned wheel chair. Debris. A gold cross, probably 12 feet tall or so, likely knocked from the roof, from its place above the city. The sun leaks through into the alley.
Here it rains, the remnants of a hurricane that chewed through Florida. The video and photos of the aftermath in Fort Meyers are grim. Like a war zone. The same gutted buildings. Men and women surveying the splintered remains of their worlds.
In a photo from Sanibel Island, where the lone bridge connecting to the mainland was washed away, the roads are littered with downed branches and trees and the houses have been left uninhabitable. Volunteers walk with a woman who is fleeing her damaged home. The men and women help her carry the few belongings she could salvage. Escort her to the mainland. To relative safety.
I am reading Rimbaud. A new translation. The great French surrealist presented in fresh language, his difficult syntax obscuring the simplicity of his images. “Le Mal,”1 translated as “Evil,” offers an image influenced by the Franco-Russian War and Rimbaud’s hostility to religion (though not necessarily God). He is angry and surprised at the same time. Lashes out.
While vermillion sparks from machine guns spit
Dawn to dusk through endless blue sky;
And red or green legions, jeered onward by Kings,
Crumble in masses under fire;
Men destroyed in a “horrible folly,” are left as “steaming heaps by the thousands and more.” This is madness, he makes clear, but how to distribute the blame is less clear. Nature creates these beings who are dying, who lie in holy Nature’s “joy” — “in summer, in the grass” — but God is there, too, laughing at the formalities, the symbolic accumulation, the materialism, and “drifts off to sleep” as the congregation offers “hosannas.”
Waking only when mothers, huddled in tears,
Grieving beneath their old black bonnets,
Hand him a coin that a kerchief unfolds!
The evil in “Le Mal” is the war, but also the institutions that have driven men to war, the kings and priests and God himself. To the speaker here, God is avaricious. Materialistic. Vain. Focused only on acclaim and flattery of his followers. Otherwise he sleeps, roused only by what Jesus in the King James Bible calls “filthy lucre,” and not by the grieving mothers of the dead. Rimbaud is angry. At God, at those who proclaim their belief but care little for mankind. Rimbaud, as Ben Ivry, in The Catholic Herald,2 is “often is depicted as a “frothing quasi-caricature of what in Catholic France is called a priest-basher,” as someone who disavows God. But this is false. Ivry says “Rimbaud believed in God,” that he is preoccupied “with the Deity, even if it is only to deny or blaspheme.” His rebellion is against “dogma and convention,” against dehumanization. “He sneers and rails against Church, God, state, and humanity with an irony which equals the mature disgust of Swift, but which a tendency to a new and evocative alchemy” of God and religion.
Rimbaud’s anti-religious attitudes appear to grow out of the anti-clerical attitudes that prevailed among many in France at the time. Rimbaud’s were far stronger and mixed with a direct assault on convention as a whole. Still, “Le Mal” resonates in our current moment, in which religious arguments are used to justify war in Ukraine, to explain the extreme damage of what we call natural disasters, and in which conservative American politicians use God to support their most egregious policies, including stripping women of their bodily rights and oppressing gay, lesbian, and trans individuals.
The “Evil” in Rimbaud’s poem is not something from outside of us, not something supernatural, but society itself and the people who arrogate power to themselves and use it to enrich themselves and demean and brutalize others. Rimbaud was standing in witness to this, at least in my reading of this poem.
I am not a religious man. I do not believe in a biblical god. Do not view this spiral of events as god’s will. War is a man-made disaster. The growing destructiveness of hurricane is, as well, even if we want to claim these storms as purely natural phenomena, We cannot ignore our role in the growing strength and frequency of extreme weather. Or ignore the impact the environment has always had on national ambitions and violence. We fight for water and oil, for food and territory. We dress these base desires up in patriotism and religion, and then mourn the dead, blame God.
Rimbaud, Arthur. “Le Mal (Evil).” The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings, trans. by Mark Polizzitti, NYRB/Poets, 2022, pp. 30-31.
Ivry, Benjamin. “The anti-clerical poet who inspired conversions to Catholicism.” The Catholic Herald, 22 Aug. 2019, https://catholicherald.co.uk/the-anti-clerical-poet-who-inspired-conversions-to-catholicism/. Accessed 5 Oct. 2022