Translator’s Note
If there is such a thing as a decadent right today, Baudelaire should be one of its patrons. Implacable enemy of bourgeois democracy, habitué of the night worlds of the metropolis and the mind, wounded healer, truthful illusionist, priest of the cult of energy and spirit in a dawning age of Last Men, martyr to the middle-class hatred of excellence, as disdainful of social convention as he was rigorously obedient to the laws of poetic form, detested by the puritanical communists of Sartre and his school, and cherished by the pious aesthetes around Eliot, this tormented wanderer deserves to be acclaimed as the Vespucci of the psychogeography of the modern megacity and the Amundsen of the icy wastes of the modern soul.
The more I read Baudelaire, the more I feel that the worshipers of beauty at the immoralist extremes of our politics, with their mythopoetic consciousness, their troubled affinity for the disorderly pleasures of an urban and commercial society, their fatal attraction to chemical ecstasies, their mommy issues and otherwise twisted erotism, their joyful nihilism, and above all their admirable longing to submit to the constraints of a severe and serious good taste are, for better or worse, inhabitants of a poetic country that was discovered by Baudelaire.
Les Fleurs du mal has been translated into English many times. I have made my own renderings of these two poems out of a simple, affectionate gratitude for Baudelaire’s song and for his strange, harsh, arousing images. I have tried to maintain, above all, the spikiness of his language, its ragged edge. I have also tried to hold on to something of the music of his verse and, to keep that task as simple as possible, I have done what I could to preserve the rime, the meter, and the natural tempo of the originals.
The two poems I have chosen appear consecutively near the end of Les Fleurs du mal. Each is a despairing dream-vision that inverts an image from the canon: a mocking Béatrice, companion to devils, and a desolate Cythera, naked of gods, love, and life. These poems make manifest what I love most in Baudelaire, even more than his musicality or his harshness: the ceaseless battle to be faithful to the daemon. In “Béatrice” and “Cythère,” the resources of the Tradition, the transhistorical canon of forms and themes, do not merely let the poet down but trample him. Yet he keeps the faith: he struggles and, most importantly, he writes. If any truly serious art is to emerge from the great disillusionment of recent years and from the thrashing around in search of a contemporary ideal, it will be the work of spirits no less tenacious than Baudelaire’s own.
CXV. La Béatrice
Dans des terrains cendreux, calcinés, sans verdure,
Comme je me plaignais un jour à la nature,
Et que de ma pensée, en vaguant au hasard,
J’aiguisais lentement sur mon cœur le poignard,
Je vis en plein midi descendre sur ma tête
Un nuage funèbre et gros d’une tempête,
Qui portait un troupeau de démons vicieux,
Semblables à des nains cruels et curieux.
A me considérer froidement ils se mirent,
Et, comme des passants sur un fou qu’ils admirent,
Je les entendis rire et chuchoter entre eux,
En échangeant maint signe et maint clignement d’yeux:
- “Contemplons à loisir cette caricature
Et cette ombre d’Hamlet imitant sa posture,
Le regard indécis et les cheveux au vent.
N’est-ce pas grand pitié de voir ce bon vivant,
Ce gueux, cet histrion en vacances, ce drôle,
Parce qu’il sait jouer artistement son rôle,
Vouloir intéresser au chant de ses douleurs
Les aigles, les grillons, les ruisseaux et les fleurs,
Et même à nous, auteurs de ces vieilles rubriques,
Réciter en hurlant ses tirades publiques?”
J’aurais pu (mon orgueil aussi haut que les monts
Domine la nuée et le cri des démons)
Détourner simplement ma tête souveraine,
Si je n’eusse pas vu parmi leur troupe obscène,
Crime qui n’a pas fait chanceler le soleil!
La reine de mon cœur au regard nonpareil
Qui riait avec eux de ma sombre détresse
Et leur versait parfois quelque sale caresse.
In fields of grey cinders, scorched clean of all verdure,
As I was complaining one day against nature,
And, roaming at random, I sharpened the point
Of my thinking upon the slow stone of my heart,
I saw in broad daylight descending before me
A billowing cloud-mass, funereal, stormy,
Upon it rode demons, an iniquitous crew,
Squinting at me like dwarves as they hove into view.
As passersby gaze at a drunk in the gutter
They took me in coldly, and I heard them mutter
And chuckle and whisper, with a nod and a wink,
And they said to each other, “Lads, what do you think?
- “Take a moment and look at this fantastic creature,
This shadow of Hamlet now aping his posture,
The wavering look and the wind-ruffled hair.
Now ain’t it a pity, boys, seeing him there,
This beggarly mountebank, man about town,
Has gotten his part in the play so well down,
That he’s come here to cry out the song of his sorrows
To eagles and locusts, to creeks and to flowers,
And even to us, who wrote that old role,
He yelps his soliloquy—isn’t that droll?”
And I could—for my pride, as high as the peaks
Towered over that crowd and their scurrilous shrieks—
Have turned from their ridicule, calm as a prince
Had I not, gazing back, caught a terrible glimpse—
O, why didn’t this crime shake the sun in its heaven?
The queen of my heart, with eyes flashing like diamond,
Laughed and joked with the demons at my sore distress,
And sometimes would give one a filthy caress.
CXVI. Un voyage à Cythère
Mon coeur, comme un oiseau, voltigeait tout joyeux
Et planait librement à l’entour des cordages;
Le navire roulait sous un ciel sans nuages;
Comme un ange enivré d’un soleil radieux.
Quelle est cette île triste et noire? - C’est Cythère,
Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons
Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons.
Regardez, après tout, c’est une pauvre terre.
- Ile des doux secrets et des fêtes du cœur!
De l’antique Vénus le superbe fantôme
Au-dessus de tes mers plane comme un arôme
Et charge les esprits d’amour et de langueur.
Belle île aux myrtes verts, pleine de fleurs écloses,
Vénérée à jamais par toute nation,
Où les soupirs des coeurs en adoration
Roulent comme l’encens sur un jardin de roses
Ou le roucoulement éternel d’un ramier!
- Cythère n’était plus qu’un terrain des plus maigres,
Un désert rocailleux troublé par des cris aigres.
J’entrevoyais pourtant un objet singulier!
Ce n’était pas un temple aux ombres bocagères,
Où la jeune prêtresse, amoureuse des fleurs,
Allait, le corps brûlé de secrètes chaleurs,
Entre-bâillant sa robe aux brises passagères;
Mais voilà qu’en rasant la côte d’assez près
Pour troubler les oiseaux avec nos voiles blanches,
Nous vîmes que c’était un gibet à trois branches,
Du ciel se détachant en noir, comme un cyprès.
De féroces oiseaux perchés sur leur pâture
Détruisaient avec rage un pendu déjà mûr,
Chacun plantant, comme un outil, son bec impur
Dans tous les coins saignants de cette pourriture;
Les yeux étaient deux trous, et du ventre effondré
Les intestins pesants lui coulaient sur les cuisses,
Et ses bourreaux, gorgés de hideuses délices,
L’avaient à coups de bec absolument châtré.
Sous les pieds, un troupeau de jaloux quadrupèdes,
Le museau relevé, tournoyait et rôdait;
Une plus grande bête au milieu s’agitait
Comme un exécuteur entouré de ses aides.
Habitant de Cythère, enfant d’un ciel si beau,
Silencieusement tu souffrais ces insultes
En expiation de tes infâmes cultes
Et des péchés qui t’ont interdit le tombeau.
Ridicule pendu, tes douleurs sont les miennes!
Je sentis, à l’aspect de tes membres flottants,
Comme un vomissement, remonter vers mes dents
Le long fleuve de fiel des douleurs anciennes;
Devant toi, pauvre diable au souvenir si cher,
J’ai senti tous les becs et toutes les mâchoires
Des corbeaux lancinants et des panthères noires
Qui jadis aimaient tant à triturer ma chair.
- Le ciel était charmant, la mer était unie;
Pour moi tout était noir et sanglant désormais,
Hélas! et j’avais, comme en un suaire épais,
Le cœur enseveli dans cette allégorie.
Dans ton île, ô Vénus! je n’ai trouvé debout
Qu’un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image...
- Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon cœur et mon corps sans dégoût!
My heart, like a bird, fluttered upward and swung
In a free-flying turn round the cords of the mast;
The ship pitched and rolled on a sea clear as glass;
Like an angel grown drunk on the light of the sun.
What is this isle, sad and black? – they say it’s Kythera,
Land sung of sweetly in epics and lays,
A banal El Dorado for lost boys gone grey.
But look, after all that, there’s not much to say for her.
- Island of love-feasts, delectable murmurs,
The classical ghost of great Venus the fair
Still lingers like perfume upon your sea-air
And makes spirits heavy with languid desire.
Isle of green myrtles, of blossoming flowers,
Honored forever among all the nations,
Where sighings of hearts breathing forth adoration
Hover like fragrant smoke in a roseate bower
Or like the soft cooing of a dove in the night!
- But in truth Kythera’s a cadaverous terrain,
A rocky waste haunted by hoarse cries and screams.
Yet there my eye fell on a curious sight!
It was not a shrine in a shadowy grove,
Where a blooming young priestess, in love with the flowers,
Would go, body burning with taciturn ardors,
To let breezes caress her through a half-parted robe.
No, look—as we skimmed by so close in the shallows
That our billowing sails made the vultures take flight,
We saw, like a tall cypress against the sky’s light,
The ebony frame of a three-branching gallows.
Ravening birds were destroying a corpse,
With their claws in its shoulders, their filthy beaks searched
Every bleeding recess of that horrible mulch,
Which hung ripe from the frame as they furiously gorged.
The eyes were two holes; from a rent in the gut,
The ponderous entrails slid over the thighs,
And the torturers, sated with grisly delights,
Had pecked, torn, and clawed the dead man to a pulp.
At his feet danced an envious canine brigade,
With muzzles uplifted they prowled and they tumbled;
And one hulking beast in the middle resembled
A headsman surrounded by odious aides.
You Kytheran, child of this vast shining sky,
You suffer these insults in silence unbroken
A fit recompense for your infamous customs
And the sins which forbade you a last place to lie.
Ridiculous sufferer, I’ve known your scourge!
I feel, at the sight of you dangling there
The yellow-green flux of remembered despair,
Mounting up to my teeth in a vomitous surge.
Looking on you, poor devil of much-beloved memory,
I felt all the beaks and the strong snapping jaws,
Of the sharp-stabbing crows and the black jaguars
Which once loved so much to excruciate my body.
- The water was placid, the sky blazed with glory;
For me all was nonetheless bloodstained and dark,
Alas! and as if in a thick shroud, my heart
Was wrapped up and buried in this allegory.
To your island, O Venus! I came and found nothing
But a symbolic gibbet from which hung my image …
- Ah! Master! Now grant me the force and the courage
To look on my body and heart without loathing!