I still remember a maybe 13 years old girl who stole a book of poems from the shelves in her mother room. They were, as I read on the preface, poems that Paul Verlaine has written during his relationship with Arthur Rimbaud. Really I didn't find any clue of this relationship in that book, but I cherished the memory of this love. I remember that the preface underlined the age difference between Verlaine and Rimbaud (10 years) but said nothing about the fact that Arthur was 16 years old when he met Paul. When he coscientely and willingly seduced the older poet.

In Ardennian Boy, Arthur admits that he didn't find Paul physical attractive, seems an excuse, but in this case we can absolutely believe when Arthur says that he is attracted by the genius of Paul Verlaine, the greater poet in Paris, excluse himself of course. Even if Arthur is younger, he is the why and the how of the story. He is him who drags Paul out of his bourgeois life. But what they have together is not a romance, a pure love to leave to posterity. It is a selfdestructive relationship, brings forward by a selfish and genial boy and a whining and genial man, who apart are nothing but together are a vulcan of poetry.

And while Wayne Gunn translates for us rhymes that I truly find difficult to believe are been written more than 130 years ago (but it seems so, according to the detailed chapter where he explains how he has done the work), William Maltese tells us the life story of these two men, with a force and a writing style that make them alive again. Story and rhymes alternate themself in the book, and you can't say if it is the story which brings alive the rhymes or if they are the rhymes which give a sense to the story. During sex Arthur and Paul exchange poems as others exchange grunts and moans.

It's not a romance, all us know what the end of this real story is, and if you still believe it's a romantic story, the everyday life describes by William Maltese will remove you of any lingering dream. But even if there isn't romance, you will find a lot of love: even if Arthur says he loves only Paul's dick, and not the man, that he loves only his poetry, and not the coward man who seems not to be able to give up to his bourgeois life, even if Paul tries to set himself against the way of life Arthur wants to coax him, he only can follow this man everywhere he wants to bring him, until...

Now they say you are dead. May the devil
Torment for all eternity
The messengers who just rendered me
This news dreamed up by an imbecile!

Dead, you? No. I cannot take it in,
You, a God among lesser gods.
Those who mouth such are clods!
Dead, you, my great and radian sin,

Memories of whom still burn in my brain
And ceaselessly set my blood afire,
You it is alone who can inspire
And guide me to such feverish heights again.

Dead? Our thriumphant break-out
Raging without check, never coming to an end,
Impossible now or ever to rescind
While it lives in my heart forever devout!

You might as well say that poetry,
All philosophy, my patrimony,
And ever possibility of originality
Are dead. No; no way! You live in me.

('Les courses furent intrepides' (Laeti et Errabundi) by Paul Verlaine, collected in Parallelement, 1889. Traduzione di Wayne Gunn)

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