A historian retraces Rimbaud's mysterious months in the Dutch East Indies
In a new book, Hervé Mazurel investigates what the poet was doing in Indonesia in the spring of 1876 alongside Dutch colonial troops, working from scant sources to weigh the documented against the merely possible.
According to Télérama, the historian Hervé Mazurel has published "Rimbaud, l'odyssée silencieuse," an inquiry into one of the least documented episodes of Arthur Rimbaud's life: his brief passage through the Dutch East Indies, in present-day Indonesia, in the spring of 1876, when he was enlisted alongside Dutch colonial soldiers.
Télérama describes the book as a wager: with only meager sources available on this period, Mazurel chooses to narrate these few months anyway, rather than pass over them in silence. The result, the newspaper writes, is less a conventional biography than a reflection on the boundary between what can be established as fact and what can only be proposed as plausible.
Télérama calls the book a stimulating investigation into a mysterious chapter of the poet's itinerant life, one that has long resisted the kind of documentary certainty biographers usually rely on.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
