A Rimbaud Translation and Adaptation

Sensation
par Arthur Rimbaud

Par les soirs bleus d’été j’irai dans les sentiers,
Picoté par les blés, fouler l’herbe menue :
Rêveur, j’en sentirai la fraicheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.
Je ne parlerai pas ; je ne penserai rien.
Mais l’amour infini me montera dans l’âme ;
Et j’irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la Nature,—heureux comme avec une femme.

‘Sensation’ on the Oul Rijn
After Arthur Rimbaud

In lily orange dusks o late July, I danner the loanen:
Daydreamer, I cast my eyes ayont the coastal rodden,
Pluck risps o barley, sift seeds in cottony air,
Let the wund waash my thrang soul clean. Staring

At Oul Rijn reflections, I converse throu ma eyes:
Traveller, I talk in side glences, gaither up goodbyes,
Exhale over seas wi a host o weemen by my side --
Sans mots and small whaur the poem ‘Sensation’ hides.

Rimbaud wrote ‘Sensation’ in 1870, when he was fifteen years old. The poem is well-known and celebrated for its simplicity and serenity. I came across it, not when I was studying French at university, but on a canal boat ride around Leiden in the Netherlands a few years ago. I’d lived in Leiden from 2001 to 2004, and one of my favourite things about the city was the poetry on the walls. I don’t think I noticed this particular poem, though. It’s sort of hidden away, but the canal boat moved slowly, so I had time to read it. I was a little spell-bound. It was perfect for the expression of the independence of my twenties, but it also made me think of home and the experience of walking in nature. I don’t know why precisely, but it conjured up in my mind McCarey’s Loanen in Larne, a little farm lane that sits in the midst of new housing developments, a bit like the Old Rijn in Leiden hugged by the seventeenth-century urban development. 

Leiden represents friendship to me, and I’m fortunate to have several friends still living in the city. In my adaptation, I moved from individual escape to a reflection on a collective journey. The poem ended up in Ulster Scots, as sometimes happens when I write about home, but it’s more dialectal, sitting somewhere between English and Scots. I’ve dropped the Alexandrine and just followed an instinctive dialectal voice and exchanged Rimbaud’s ‘blue evenings’ for ‘lily orange dusks’. (You might well read something into the Orange history of Leiden and the orange of a July evening in Northern Ireland). “‘Sensation’ on the Oul Rijn” was published in the Ulster Scots Community Network’s Yarns V publication in 2025.