[Rose Kelleher]

Enlightening comments, Julie, thank you! What a lot of work you've put into this. And what a lovely poem about something so yecchy. Sex aside (the thought that this had anything to do with molestation never occurred to me, so I was surprised to see you preemptively arguing against that interpretation), there's just something relaxing about having someone work on your hair. Something to do with scalp massage and blood flow to the brain. Or maybe it goes back to those monkey grooming rituals you mentioned. My mother used to have to pick burrs out of my hair when I was little, and you'd think it would have hurt, but it didn't, it was soothing, it's a fond memory.

Rimbaud is often cited as an influence by rock poets whose own work is very different from his, plus he has a reputation for being a badass who died young, and I suspect a lot of people are drawn to him for that reason alone, with the result that he's the nominal favorite poet of a lot of jerks, plus a lot of people have probably read only unrhymed translations of his poems, so it's easy to get a distorted impression of his poetry through a kind of osmosis. A poem like this reminds me how important it is to ignore the hype and go straight to the source.

I like the title "Head-hunters," it's clever, but I don't know if I'd have understood what the poem was about if I hadn't seen "Rimbaud's lice" in the subject line of the thread. Maybe if the word "lice" was used explicitly in the original title, it should be preserved in the translation. "Head-hunters" also has a literal meaning which wasn't present in the original, and that image doesn't correspond perfectly with what's happening in the poem. Head-hunters are killers, and the girls are hunting and killing the lice, but there's no decapitation going on. But the image of the girls hunting for prey in the forest of the boy's hair is such a good one, I'm torn.

"fragile hands and silver fingernails" and "thin fingers" made me think of the lice themselves with their fragile, silvery little legs, and of course lice "tiptoe" silently into one's hair. So at first I thought the two sisters were a metaphor, that this was about a boy delirious with fever who can feel the lice crawling around on his scalp, and hallucinates the sisters grooming his hair. That reading falls apart in S2 - what does the scent of flowers have to do with lice - and in S3 it's obviously a couple of actual girls who are hissing when they spot the hated lice... but then the boy is feverish, so it does make a kind of sense for the line between dream and reality, image and meaning, to be blurred, or at least for Rimbaud, in describing the sisters, to make appropriately "lousy" word choices. (I'm getting so itchy as I type this!)

"Dourly" is right, Julie! Translators have to juggle many competing priorities, and the fact that this translator was able to keep half the rhymes is (to me) an amazing feat, not a failing.