‘A l’adolescent que je fus.

A ce saint vieillard, ermitage ou mission. A l’esprit des pauvres . . .’

‘To the youth I once was. To this holy old man, hermitage or mission.

To the spirit of the poor . . .

‘I had long had a soft spot for Rimbaud. Many years ago on the Karakorum Pass between China and Pakistan, one of the highest roads in the world, I had met a man whose father was a CIA operative. I was taking the bus, he was cycling, and we were staying in an overnight hostelry. We became friends and over the years he would write to me from various hotspots in the world – Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chile. Coups and shattering events would follow wherever he cycled and I developed a theory that he had followed his father’s profession and his cycling holidays were not entirely innocent. During his travels he carried a book of Rimbaud’s poetry and, on the rare occasions when he did return, home was a boat called Rimbaud moored on the Pacific. There would always be a moment of tension as he approached the dock after an absence of months or years, the suspense of whether the boat would still be afloat, although with the advent of email he hoped someone would inform him if she ever actually sank. My friend would don a mask and swim under the keel to inspect the hull. Then he would work at varnishing other people’s boats for a few weeks and earn enough for a few links of chain or some caulking materials or whatever he most needed for his dilapidated home. Having done the bare minimum to keep her afloat, he would take off again on his bicycle around the world. As far as I knew, Rimbaud never sailed anywhere, and my friend is cycling still, but at the time the romance of his life and his reading matter had encouraged me to investigate the poet.

‘The formula is used with great ingenuity in this poem by Rimbaud,’ the Professor continued. ‘“Dévotion”, as an act of paying tribute, and also as a semantic, lexical exploration of the possible meanings of the preposition “à”. Now something similar is going on in the opening of this letter; that is to say the writer is simply listing the intended recipients, “A tous les navires . . .” [“To all ships . . .”] but she is doing it in a way that brings disparate strands together, so that there’s a sense of them being threaded up, of different things being brought together in a new pattern, and this straightforward syntactic pattern is being complicated – complexified, one might say – as these phrases unfold. So that from the very beginning we are presented with something that reads like literature as distinct from something that reads like a simple confessional.’