Translation as Occupation: Simon Perril and Sean Bonney

Abstract

Simon Perril’s occupation of the lacunae represented by the fragmentary remains of the first Greek lyric poet, Archilochus, Archilochus on the Moon, allows him to adapt some ancient Greek tropes involving language, colonization, and marriage, as well as reflecting upon the figure of the poet himself, while developing a short-line measure replete with internal rhyme and suffused with pathos. Sean Bonney’s Happiness: After Rimbaud appropriates the figure of Rimbaud in the service of revolutionary politics, so that some of Rimbaud’s aphorisms are re-functioned to show the disintegration of bourgeois sensibility, for example. Prose ‘letters’ accompany a series of angry poems, some of them alluding directly to Rimbaud’s works and life, others relating to riots in Britain in 2010, all of them transforming the original texts and/or originary myths of Rimbaud.