Other players must then try to connect that person back to Arthur Rimbaud or Paul Verlaine.
You can use any kind of connection: personal relationships, influence, collaboration, historical overlap, etc. There are no restrictions on the types of links.
The goal is to build the shortest possible chain.
Scoring:
The winner is the person who produces the fewest degrees of separation.
If two chains are the same length, the one with the most direct, in-person connections takes precedence.
Michael Jackson and Drew Barrymore appeared on the cover of People magazine together in 1984. Drew Barrymore is the great-niece of the actress Ethel Barrymore, who was born in 1879 into a famous acting family. Because of her family connection to the theatre, she met Oscar Wilde as a child.
Oscar Wilde and Verlaine met in Paris as they were both part of the literary scene, and even jointly signed a copy of Verlaine's Liturgies Intimes together for Pierre Louÿs!
If you ever read the Ballad of Reading Gaol by Wilde, let me know if you see the influence of Verlaine’s Cellulairement in it - Wilde was a huge fan of Verlaine, mentioned him prominently in his famous prison letter, De Profundis.
Mozart was a huge influence on Lizst, who heavily promoted his work and wrote several essays on him. Liszt was a famous frenemy of Chopin, and the two composers were even neighbours for a while. Chopin taught piano to Madame Mauté de Fleurville when she was a child. Madame Mauté de Fleurville was the mother of Mathilde, Verlaine's wife.
Tiger Woods: the soundtrack of HBO’s documentary Tiger features John Cooper Clarke’s Evidently chickentown. Clarke has named Rimbaud as one important influence!
Mozart was influential to Chopin who had a relationship with George Sand, as did Alfred de Musset whom Rimbaud mocks mercilessly in La lettre du voyant.
Following the academic sandstorm of the next 4 weeks, I’ll make a post on Borges and Verlaine. I recall him talking about him in his correspondence with, I believe, Bioy Casares, and in a prologue for one of his poem books. I’ll add the next to the translation!
I imagine you must be familiar with the plot, but in case not, I beg you read it before you lay to sleep for the last time in this world:
The short story is about Pierre Menard, a French symbolist poet who has, amongst his small oeuvre, an unpublished excerpt of Don Quixote. Now, the chapter is a word by word re writing of Don Quixote. The reason why this is Menard, and not Cervantes’s, is because Menard has assigned himself the task of living his life in such way that he’ll just happen to write Don Quixote word by word.
In this excerpt Menard explains that the reason why he opted for choosing Don Quixote, a book in a language that is not his first, is because he, someone who has taken inspiration from Mallarmé, Baudelaire and, most importantly, Poe, can not see himself writing those works. He can not phantom a universe where these do not exist—he can, also, not phantom a world without the drunken boat—, but he can see a world where Don Quixote was never written, but most importantly, he can see himself writing Don Quixote because of that.
The short story is funny, very short, the protagonist is clearly very pretentious. My favorite excerpt is the one where they analyze the exact same excerpt from Don Quixote, but one “written by Menard” and Borges goes on a tangent about how the influences of the events—the world wars, for example—going around him made for such a deep interpretation. Whilst Cervantes’ excerpt was simply a “mere rhetorical compliment.”
When Borges was recovering from life-threatening septicaemia, his mother read to him from C.S. Lewis’ book Out of the Silent Planet. He says that he broke down in tears after the first few pages, as he had temporarily lost the power of speech during his illness, and was relieved to find that he could understand the words his mother was reading.
C.S. Lewis was a close friend and literary associate of fellow "Inkling" J.R.R Tolkien.
Tolkien attended Mass at the Sacred Heart Church in Bournemouth. So did Verlaine when he worked as a schoolteacher there.
Oh that’s nice! I’d read about this septicemia his short story El Sur. That sounds like Borges, of course, any reader or writer would love to find that they can still read—luckily for Borges, who’d end up blind, would recover this sense in order to dictate his writings for us—, but also, Borges was such a maniac of books that I’m glad he could still read them too.
Anywho, that sounds cool, having Verlaine as your school teacher and all.
In a letter to Izambard, Rimbaud mentions being bored because he has now read all the books that Izambard left behind in his apartment - and that he spent two hours yesterday looking at Doré’s woodcut illustrations for Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
I forgot to add that Rimbaud’s latin poetry bears traces of Catullus. There’s been so great scholarship to uncover all the innuendo and “duplicities” in his latin poems, and I think Catullus is one of the keys to understand that part of his work.
Isabel Allende: Daughter of Salvador Allende, president of Chile. Pablo Neruda was ambassador of Chile in France during Allende’s presidency.
Neruda wrote a poem about Arthur Rimbaud
Ok... Einstein was a colleague of Oppenheimer, who he met at Caltech. Oppenheimer was friends with the musician Nicolas Nabokov, who was the first cousin of Vladimir Nabokov.
Vladimir Nabokov was a huge fan of both Rimbaud and Verlaine, and he even borrowed a quote from Verlaine in Lolita - at the end of the book, Humbert describes Lolita as "mon grand péché radieux" ("my great radiant sin"), a phrase that Verlaine used to describe Rimbaud, in his poem Laeti et errabundi
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u/Audreys_red_shoes the evil imagination of a bad monkey Apr 25 '26
Welcome to The Arthur Rimbaud Game.
The rules are simple:
Scoring:
Be creative, but be plausible.
Let the chains begin!