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- Herausgeber: Arc Publications
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Serie: Arc Classics: New Translations of Great Poets of the Past
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
The poems of The Flowers of Evil were written in Paris at a time of revolution and accelerating change – the beginning of mass culture, the rise of consumerism and the middle-class, the radical redevelopment of the city by Haussmann – and they provide many parallels with the malaise and uncertainties of contemporary capitalist societies. Here we find poems about love (and love-hate), birds and beasts, Paris scenes and street people; about spiritual revolt, wine, death, travel and faraway places. The poet's voice is by turns ironical, angry and compassionate, his words charged with anguish, desire and rapture.
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SELECTED POEMS FROM
Les Fleurs du Mal
Published by Arc Publications,
Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road
Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK
www.arcpublications.co.uk
Translation copyright © Jan Owen 2015
Copyright in Translator’s Preface © Jan Owen 2015
Introduction copyright © Rosemary Lloyd 2015
Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications 2015
978 1908376 40 4 (pbk)
978 1908376 41 1 (hbk)
978 1908376 42 8 (ebk)
Design by Tony Ward
Cover design by Tony Ward & Ben Styles
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these translations first appeared: AALITRA Review, Acumen, Agenda, Ezra, Cerise Press, Cordite, Mascara, Meanjin, Metamorphosis, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry International,Quadrant, Shearsman, Southerly, and Transnational Literature. A number of these translations were broadcast on the ABC Radio program Poetica and two versions were used in The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature, edited by Brian Nelson (CUP, 2015).
The translator warmly thanks Susan Wicks, John Lucas, Brian Nelson and Rosemary Lloyd for their heartening support and
constructive comments.
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without
the written permission of Arc Publications.
‘Arc Classics:
New Translations of Great Poets of the Past’
Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier
Charles Baudelaire
SELECTED POEMS FROM
Les Fleurs du Mal
Translated by
JAN OWEN
with an introduction by
ROSEMARY LLOYD
2015
In memory of
Balázs Bajka
(1935-1999)
CONTENTS
Translator’s Preface
Introduction
Au Lecteur
•
To the Reader
L’Albatros
•
The Albatross
Correspondances
•
Correspondences
Le Guignon
•
The Jinx
Bohémiens en voyage
•
Gypsies on the Road
La Géante
•
The Giantess
Les Bijoux
•
Jewels
Hymne à la beauté
•
Hymn to Beauty
Parfum exotique
•
Exotic Perfume
La Chevelure
•
Your Hair
Je t’adore à l’égal de la voûte nocturne…
•
I Worship You
Tu mettrais l’univers entier dans ta ruelle…
•
You’d Have the Universe
Sed non satiata
•
Still Not Satisfied
Avec ses vêtements ondoyants et nacrés …
•
Her Gown
Une charogne
•
A Carcass
Le Vampire
•
The Vampire
Le Chat: Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon cœur amoureux…
•
Come Here, My Pretty Cat
Le Balcon
•
The Balcony
Je te donne ces vers afin que si mon nom…
•
I Give These Lines to You
Semper eadem
•
It’s Always So
Harmonie du soir
•
Evening Harmony
Le Flacon
•
The Flacon
Le Poison
•
Poison
Le Chat: Dans ma cervelle se promène…
•
Cat
Le Beau Navire
•
The Lovely Vessel
L’Invitation au voyage
•
Invitation to the Voyage
Causerie
•
Causerie
Chant d’automne
•
Autumn Song
Mœsta et errabunda
•
Sadness and Wandering
Les Chats
•
Cats
Les Hiboux
•
Owls
La Musique
•
Music
La Cloche fêlée
•
The Cracked Bell
Spleen: J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans…
•
Spleen: Memories
Spleen: Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux…
•
Spleen: King of a Land of Rain
Spleen: Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle…
•
Spleen: The Long Low Sky
Le Gout du néant
•
Death Wish
L’Héautontimorouménos
•
The Self-Tormentor
Le Gouffre
•
The Abyss
Les Plaintes d’un Icare
•
The Lament of an Icarus
L’Horloge
•
The Clock
Le Cygne
•
The Swan
Les Petites Vieilles
•
The Little Old Women
À une passante
•
To a Woman Passing By
Le Crépuscule du soir
•
Twilight
Le Jeu
•
The Game
Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville …
•
I Haven’t Forgotten
La servante au grand cœur dont vous étiez jalouse…
•
The Servant
Le Crépuscule du matin
•
Dawn
Le Vin des chiffonniers
•
The Ragpickers’ Wine
Le Vin de l’assassin
•
The Murderer’s Wine
Le Vin du solitaire
•
The Loner’s Wine
Le Vin des amants
•
The Lovers’ Wine
Femmes damnées: Delphine et Hippolyte
•
Delphine and Hippolyte
Femmes damnées: Comme un bétail pensif…
•
Damned Women
Un voyage à Cythère
•
A Voyage to Cythera
Le Couvercle
•
The Lid
La Voix
•
The Voice
Le Rebelle
•
The Rebel
Les Litanies de Satan
•
The Litanies of Satan
La Mort des amants
•
The Death of Lovers
La Mort des pauvres
•
The Death of the Poor
La Mort des artistes
•
The Death of Artists
Le Voyage
•
The Voyage
Recueillement
•
Meditation
Translator’s Notes
A Baudelaire Chronology
Biographical Notes
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
Great classics are absolutes; translations are interim hybrids. That’s a rationale for this new attempt to approximate the incomparable. My real reason for translating this selection is that Baudelaire’s voice is compelling, and the poems of The Flowers of Evil captured my imagination decades ago. So did the personality of their enigmatic creator with his sensitivity and fire, his tenderness and acerbity, his aloof and often outrageous behaviour. Yet it was chance as much as intention that led me to begin – my old red copy of Les Fleurs du Mal caught my eye the day I was offered a residency in Paris. I decided to brush up my French, and what Baudelaire called ‘a passionate taste for the difficult’ soon took over. My choice of a first poem – ‘The Lament of an Icarus’ – was testing fate perhaps. Baudelaire said he translated Poe ‘because he resembled me’. I was drawn to Baudelaire not through any intrinsic resemblance but by his ‘sorcellerie évocatoire’: the distilled power and daring images, the combination of intensity and grace, and the unpredictable mix of formality and intimacy. Those memorable first lines and resonant last lines, that shifting emotional terrain between!
I was spurred on by the fact that Charles Baudelaire’s work is of immense importance in world literature. With his urban attitude and subject matter, and his blending and balancing of the romantic and classical traditions, Baudelaire was the forerunner of modernism, the first truly confessional poet, speaking in his own voice in all he wrote. For this ‘father of modern poetry’ was also a visionary art critic, the progenitor of the prose poem, a pioneer of symbolism, and the influential translator of Edgar Allan Poe. He has been popularly known as a poet of decadence through his treatment in French poetry of new and often disturbing subject matter – sex, drugs, death, self-disgust, sin and satanism. The ideal of beauty was his guiding principle, however, and his work has an uncompromising allegiance to truth in its concern with the failure of relationship – personal, social, and religious. It has courage; ‘I have put my whole heart into this atrocious book’, Baudelaire declared in an 1866 letter to Narcisse Ancelle. Proust helped balance the record when he wrote of Baudelaire as ‘the most tender, most cordial, most human, most ‘popular’ of poets’.
The poems of The Flowers of Evil were written in Paris at a time of revolution and accelerating change – the beginning of mass culture, the rise of consumerism and the middle-class, and the radical redevelopment of the city by Haussmann – so they provide parallels with a number of present-day ideas and with the malaise of contemporary capitalist societies. Baudelaire experienced the new concept of ‘the modern’ as rapid social and urban change, a disorder mirrored in the self, and also as an essential element of art. ‘Modernity’, he wrote in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, ‘is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent, one half of art, the other half being the eternal and immutable’, and in his Intimate Journals there is the observation: ‘In certain almost supernatural states of mind, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, of what is before our eyes’. This sizing up of reality through the immediate and the everyday is what invests so many of his sensuous images with symbolic validity and relevance for our own time. In some sense, great writers such as Baudelaire are always before their time since they must elicit the change of perception needed for their own future reception. The path is created with the act of travelling over it, Bergson said of life evolving its future. Although Baudelaire distrusted the idea of progress into the future, he wrote that ‘poetry is a sort of investment that pays deferred, though very high, dividends’, so in his writing, if not in his difficult, painful existence, he banked on the future and won. His influence on succeeding poets is inestimable.
Translation has clearly had a role in spreading this influence. A pessimistic view of translation emphasizes what is lost by the inevitable compromises, and it is certainly disappointing to forgo fine shades of meaning or the subtle effects of certain sound patterns, but then, the greatest leap of translation is from the author’s mind to the words of the original text, and not all of that first nuanced, imagined experience is conveyed. More optimistically, literary translation may be viewed as re-creation, a difficult balancing act relying on receptivity and empathy. Unfortunately, the relationship of the translator to the originator, though complex (intimate, admiring, exasperated, celebratory), is not telepathic. You have more freedom when the author is dead, but no assistance. Or only a little: the translator has been called a medium, and I sometimes imagined Baudelaire as a sardonic presence behind my left shoulder – ‘Singerie!’ Living in Paris while I began the task was an inspiring distraction; for each page drafted I would cross the Pont Marie to the pâtisserie on the Île Saint-Louis then stroll past the Hôtel de Lauzun with its famous attic window.
I aimed to turn Baudelaire’s French poems into convincing English poems while keeping as close as I could to the original texts. His diction has an inspired clarity and plainness so I wanted to guard against wrenched syntax and metrical jolts, and to keep a natural-sounding effect. When facing choices of what to sacrifice, I often wondered how he himself would have written a line, a stanza, a poem, in English, in our time. I reckon it would have rhymed. Baudelaire believed that poetry was close to music and he was passionate about rhyme and rhythm as part of the poetic alchemy which transmutes ‘mud to gold’. The sensuous and often erotic nature of his subject matter is certainly heightened by the verse form and the musicality of diction. In adopting rhyme and metre, I hoped to achieve a similar effect, and, as well, to catch something of the ironic contrast that Baudelaire’s poems offer through their presentation of romantic and subversive subject matter in a coolly classical form. Iambic pentameter seemed a better choice for English verse than the alexandrine line, and I have often settled for a sensible half-rhyme over an unconvincing full rhyme or inversion. Some phrases or images have been dropped or adapted to fit the metre, and line order has occasionally been varied to reach a rhyme. The exigencies of verse do narrow the translator’s options and necessitate these sorts of compromises and sacrifices, but they can also make for persistence and allow for serendipity. The use of contractions such as ‘I’ll’, ‘you’d’, ‘isn’t’, and so on, may help to suggest the informality of ‘tu’ or ‘toi’ and the intimacy of tone. A number of exclamation marks were subdued to full stops, and some capitals were demoted, but the dash had free rein. Perhaps because of the so-called Platonic nature of French and the Aristotelian bent of English, a number of abstractions became concrete nouns in transit; less often, I represented an object as an idea. These sound rather like rules of play, but then, translating poetry is not only a serious endeavour but a kaleidoscopically infinite game – poem translations are not finished, only abandoned.
Once I had a viable draft of a particular poem, I looked at versions by other translators and was impressed by the many ingenious or elegant solutions – one result of a translation may be to persuade or provoke others to the challenge and camaraderie of the task. With the benevolent rivalry which that entails, revision can become an obsession.
This selection includes many of the best known poems as well as some less familiar ones. There is a wide span of subject matter, from love and love-hate relationships, birds and beasts, Paris scenes and street people, to spiritual revolt, wine, death, travel and far-away places. The tone ranges through irony, anger and anguish to desire, rapture and compassion. In arranging the poems, I have followed the 1861 edition, with the banned poems inserted according to the 1857 edition, and the few post-1861 poems inserted according to theme. This allows the volume to lead up to Baudelaire’s great long poem, ‘The Voyage’, and to finish with the much loved sonnet ‘Meditation’.
Many of the late drafts of these English versions have benefited from the astute suggestions of Susan Wicks and John Lucas, and from Rosemary Lloyd’s fine critiques of other translators’ versions. I thank them all heartily. My warm thanks also extend to Brian Nelson for his interest and support.
My treasured copy of Les Fleurs du Mal was given to me in 1963 by Balázs Bajka, and I dedicate these translations to his memory.
Jan Owen
INTRODUCTION
The translation of poetry is as difficult as it is essential. To translate from French to English, for example, demands not only extensive knowledge of French but also considerable skill in using English. The need to bridge the gap between languages and cultures is often most closely aligned with creativity. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that we owe some of the best translations to writers who are also poets. Jan Owen is a fine poet in her own right, so I was delighted when I heard she had translated a selection of poems from Les Fleurs du Mal, the highly influential volume of the French poet Charles Baudelaire. It is obviously a labour of love, but above all it is a great gift to any reader of this vital and powerful poet.
I first encountered the poetry of Charles Baudelaire in the revolutionary northern spring of 1968, a time of student uprisings, widespread strikes, and barricades across the cobbled streets of Paris’s Latin Quarter. I was in France, studying the language, in what was not yet called a gap year, between school and university. I vividly remember walking along the quays of the river Seine, with the poetry of Baudelaire running through my mind like wine, poems like ‘Meditation’, ‘Your Hair’, ‘The Swan’. What filled me with such intense delight was not only that I could read these poems in French, although, of course, I realised there were parts of them I didn’t fully understand. The joy came above all from the awareness of an encounter with an exceptional mind, and one that seemed extraordinarily in tune with the world I was inhabiting. Here were poems about revolt, about change, about love and beauty, about the natural world and the big city, about dreams and about disappointments.
The grimy lodging-house rooms he evoked in his poems reminded me of my student digs. His nostalgia for a world of exotic beauty recalled the sights I’d seen on my sea voyage to France. His complex relationship to Paris, its power to repel and attract simultaneously, its long history and its rapid adoption of the modern – this, too, I could share in my own way. I was overwhelmed by the power and complexity of his love poems, recalling in their intensity, and in the way they so often hover between adoration and hatred, admiration and contempt, nothing I had yet read in English. The language of the poems was powerful without being pretentious, their range of reference through myth, history and Baudelaire’s present was both exhilarating and accessible, and they covered a range of metaphor that allowed him to move from the most banal to the most exotic in a heartbeat. The tiny grain of incense that can fill a church standing in for the way memories of fleeting moments can expand to fill the mind; the eyes of old women made of thousands of tears; night thickening to form a wall; the child’s spinning top and bouncing ball evoking the way we are driven and tormented by curiosity: these images and many more aroused both excitement and envy in a reader who had long wanted to be a poet herself.
Baudelaire has remained an integral part of my life ever since. I studied him more closely as an undergraduate, I devoted my doctoral thesis to him, I have taught countless classes with Baudelaire as a central figure, and I have written about him and translated his prose and poetry into English. Few days go by even now when I am not reminded of a line of his verse poetry, a sentence of his prose poems, or comments he makes in his art and literary criticism or his diaries. A writer who believed it was our unwritten right to contradict ourselves, he offers a complexity that never grows dull. He can enrage us, move us, irritate us, he constantly challenges us, but he never bores us.
Born in Paris in 1821, he lost his elderly father when he was only six. His mother’s remarriage at the end of the following year came to strike him as a profound betrayal, bringing to an abrupt end a time of exceptional closeness between mother and child. His stepfather, a military man who had no time for poetry, at least realised that if the young Charles was nevertheless determined to be a poet, he should have experiences about which to write, and when he was 20, sent him on a sea voyage intended to take him to India. Instead, he broke off the journey at Reunion Island and returned home, claiming intense homesickness for Paris. While he may have insisted he hated the journey, it nevertheless provided him with a rich fund of memories and images that recur in many of his poems and prose poetry. When he turned 21 he inherited the money his father had left him, and spent it so quickly – on fine clothes, a beautiful apartment on the Isle Saint Louis, and works of art – that his relatives established a family council, removing the money from his control and placing it instead in the hands of a long-suffering accountant. Too proud to show his debts to the accountant, Baudelaire spent the rest of his life in relative poverty, moving from lodging house to lodging house, borrowing from friends to try to pay others what he owed them, and frequently beseeching his mother to help him out. Despite these difficulties and the degree of perfection he demanded from himself, he published accounts of the art Salons of 1845, 1846 and 1859, analyses of the comic in both literature and the visual arts, a beautiful study titled ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ exploring the evocative power of the sketch and its ability to capture the evanescence of modern life, appreciations of many of the writers who were his contemporaries, and a ground-breaking response to the music of the young Richard Wagner.
In 1857 he published the first version of the volume that would make him famous, Les Fleurs du Mal, only to find that the conservative government, having failed in its bid to censure Gustave Flaubert for his novel Madame Bovary published that same year, was charging him with affront to public morality. Baudelaire lost the trial, both he and his publisher were fined, and he was forced to withdraw six poems from his book. In fact, this would be the trigger for him to revise the collection, making its internal structure tighter, and adding some of his finest poems to a second edition published in 1861.
The following year, he ominously noted in his diary: “Today, January 23, 1862, I experienced a strange warning, I felt pass over me the wing beat of imbecility.” Four years later, while he was living in Belgium, he suffered a stroke which left him all but speechless. His mother brought him back to Paris, where, on August 31, 1867, he died. His prose poems, which had appeared in various reviews, would be collected and published in volume form in 1869.
