Translations of Baudelaire's Last Poems
Selected late works of Charles baudelaire translated and adapted by Gregg Glory (Gregg G. Brown).
From website gregglory.com
EPIGRAPH IN A BURNED BOOK
Viewer, passive and bucolic,
Sober and naive man of simplicity,
Eject this book of Saturnality,
Orgiastic and melancholic.
Unless you licked up your rhetoric
At Chez Satan, that sly boy doyen,
Eject! you won't comprehend an ounce and
You'll think me a flaming hysteric.
But if, without falling under charms,
Your eye can plunge in the gulfs:
Tolle, lecte, and apprehend my love's alarms.
Soul, curious and suffering,
And lost searching for Paradise,
Caress me... or else: Sinon je te maudis!
THE THIRST FOR NOTHINGNESS
Mourned spirit, once so in love with absolutes,
Hope, whose spur once enchained your ardor
Won't saddle you now! Lay you down, father,
Old shamed stud whose hoof trips on every obstacle's butt.
Resign yourself, my heart; drown in the sleep of the brute.
Vanquished spirit, out-worn! For you, old marauder,
Love gives no more pleasure than dispute;
Adieu, chants of bronze, and adieu, sussurations of the flute!
Pleasures no longer tantalize this heart, somber brooder.
The adorable Spring has lost its odor!
And Time engulfs me minute by minute
Like the stiffening corpse the immense snow swallows....
I watch with contempt the round globe below
And search for no arbor or hut.
Avalanche, will you take me with you when you start down the chute?
CORRESPONDANCES
Nature is a temple of living pillars
Which sometimes utter a word from the whirl;
Man passes and traverses through forests of symbols
That observe him with a look that's familiar.
Like long echoes that distance confounds
In a dark and profound unity,
Vast as night and as light's clarity,
Perfumes, colors, and sounds respond.
Cold perfumes, fresh as the bodies of infants,
Docile as oboes, verdant as prayers,
--- And others, corrupt, rich, and triumphant,
That have the expansiveness of things in infinity,
Like amber, musk, benjamin, and incense,
Which chant the transport of the spirit to the sense.
OBSESSION
Great woods, I fear you as I fear cathedrals;
You hurl roars like organs; and in our hearts' condemned pits,
Chambers of eternal dark in which vibrate still the old death-rattles,
Bleat the echoes of your De Profundus.
I hate you, Ocean! the leaps and tumults
Your mind brings to the brink; and I hear
Vanquished Man, his blasphemies and insults,
In the intended, enormous laughter of the sea.
How many more pleasures you'd bring, O Night! without the stars
Who speak my language with tongues that are luminous!
For I search for emptiness, blackness, and bareness.
But even the shadows are canvases, are
Alive, where,--- jumping from my eyes in millions,---
Departed beings stare with a look that's familiar.
AN ANTERIOR LIFE
I have lived a long time among vast porticoes
Which the marine suns have tinged with a thousand flamelets,
And whose immense pillars, straight and majestic,
Renders the appearance, at evening, of grottos of basalt-- oh!
The waves rolling images of the skies
Mixed with the solemn and the mystic
Puissant concords of their rich music
With the colors of sunset reflected in my eyes.
And there I lived among voluptuous calms,
In a milieu of azure, and waves, and splendors,
And naked slaves impregnated with sweet odors
Who refreshed my forehead with undulant palms,
And whose unique job was to make more profound
The secret pain for which I fell in languor.
PARTS OF A VOYAGE
For a child, squinting his face over maps and prints,
The universe curve equals his mind's gnaw.
Aaa! how large the world unfolds in the lamp-glow, clarity of light---
In the eye-circle of recollection, how small!
Day came, we departed, our brains bright with the fire-buds,---
Coarse the heart's weight, heavy with rancor; bitter frost crags desire.
Along, along, rhythm yclept of the wave-flash,
Infinite us grinding our selves' crust on the sea-edge:
Some men fly country's calumny, happy the hearts within them;
Others, the horror of their infancy banishing; and some
Are astrologers drowned by woman's eyes,
Circe's, tyrranitrix of olibaum's dart, the nose-tang.
Beast-change upon them, pawing, they dodge, the keen scent imbibing
Of space, the great O-void, glamour of light, sky-blaze inhaling;
The ice-wasp bites, pallor of suns strips bodies bronze, --- they thus efface
With gradual hands the scars her kisses make.
Sailors in verity are those who set spar
For spar's sailing's sake; balloonlike hearts as sunlight
Over grass, from fate's dark turning none such swerve---
Mind-blank, ecstatic, the cry for always: Allons!
True, those whose longing puffs as cirrus-scud,
Whose dreams take color of conscript's wishing (cannons clamour hoping);
The dream-form vast, voluptuous, renewing wheel, unknowable,---
Dreaming spirit-shapes humans never named.
I I
Black imitations, we our crusts canter, apeing tops and balls---
Waltzing whirl and bounce benumbing; sleep upon our eyes as rain,
And the Curosity still quilts torments, and us does urge--- goad
Like angel's lash stinging in rose-wrath ten suns' froth.
With us abides strange fortune, here the target shifts
In nothing, thin aim going nowhere--- everywhere!
Here we gyre, hope-flushed, tireless as sea-plaint, seeking rest,
Rest; rushing always; our mad eye-glints the gloom encloses.
Ivory canvassed, bellying, our soul shifts, 3-masted ship, lusting Icaria;
Booms the bridge-voice between the ears: "Pry ope' thy eyes!... Else!"
One voice, aloft the tense air, lets fall quick the sick cry:
"Amore... glorie... happinaas!" Hell break bones! Port, the reef-blade rises!
Each mast-man on his vigil makes all islands
Fore-mated Eldorado, sworn so from Destiny's singing, the hinged lip;
Conjures cruelly each wight's wondering, orgies imagining,
Where dawn-light cuts only the naked coral's shade.
A poor lover of the mist-lathed lands and ghosts! O what
Should we do? Cast him in irons? Clamps? Or hurl him at the sea-foil's
Clashing, this drunk sailor tossing, who invents Americas in triplets:
He who's mirage-rage only renders more acid the blue abyss?
As an old tramp he dreams, caught in the pawing mud,
High nose arched, dreams brilliantly of paradise,--- emeralds gems empleaching.
Eye tricked by the gold-glint he sees clear Capuas hovering
Above every waxy candle-end; the hut's ceiling singes.
I I I
Astounding voyagers! What high histories we read
In thy dazed eyes, deep as the sea-purr;
Show us from the stuffed tombs rich caskets of memory---
Those star-carved diamonds, gems shed of the aether.
We would as wishes go: sans sail, sans the steam-pull.
To quicken one hour of our cell's pacing
Strike brand to our spirits, stretched like one sail,
Press you memories on us that only the sunset shutters.
Speak, what have you seen?
V
And then, and then what?
V I
"O, minds of infants!
Lest we obliterate the capital point let us speak:
Of how we saw everywhere, and without hard search,
From the highest to the lowest in the fatal scale,
The tedious spectacle of immortal sin:
"The Woman, vile slave, proud and stupid,
Adorning herself unmockingly, without disgust loving herself,
And Man, fat greedy tyrant, merciless and lewd,
Slave of the slave, a rivulet of the sewer;
"The hangman delighting himself, and the martyr sobbing;
The feast that is seasoned and perfumed with blood;
The poison of power enervating the despot,
And the people loving the stupefying whip;
"A plurality of religions, semblances of our own,
Were there, all ladders to heaven; the sainted,
As if in a bed of feathers delicately wallow
In pools of nails and coarse horsehair shirts;
"Humanity chattering, drunk on its own wit,
The same today as for Socrates,
Crying to God in their insane agony:
O mon semblable, my master, Fuck you!
"And the least sotted, the ardent lovers of Dementia,
Scramble from the terrifying herd penned-in by Destiny,
Trying to find some refuge in the opium of immensity!
---That is the entire globe's eternal account."
V I I I
O Death, old capitaine, it is time! Lift all anchors.
Of this red sand we tire, O Death! Batten down thyself.
And if sliced sky and scarred sea are India ink, scuffed
As tires, our hearts, as you are aware, rain light.
Pour poison by teacups, glad gallons:
We crave the acetylene arsenic
That burns of beings and flames brains, we crave
To belly-dive into the Gulf, plunge stiff
Into negative Heaven, or is it Hell? Who cares!
We plummet the stark Unknown to find the crass nouveau!
HORREUR SYMPATHIQUE
From the sky, bizarre and livid,
As tormented as you are destined,
What thoughts into your soul, empty and vivid,
Descend? Respond, Libertarian!
---Insatiable, avid
For the obscure and uncertain
I shall not simper like Ovid
Chased from his paradise of Latin.
Skies divide like the sea-shore's seam;
My dull pride glows in you;
Those vast clouds in dead-men's blue
Are the wet hearses of my dreams,---
And your luscious shafts but reflect
The Hell in which my heart is set.
CHEMIC SIN
(THE ALCHEMY OF PAIN)
The first man stretches you transparent with ardor,
The next man compacts you to tears. Nature!
What to one will whisper: here's your sepulchre...
To the other announces: life and splendor!
Unknowable Hermes you must assist,
Who every day in timid fear I pass,
In making me the equal of Midas
The saddest alchemist.
Through you I change gold to iron,
Switch Paradise off and Hell on;
And when a winding-sheet of clouds impinge
I discover the corpse of love gone,
And high up on the celestial ridge
I build a heaven of sarcophaguses.
L'HEAUTONTIMOROUMENOS
I'll strike you without malice,
Without hate, like a butcher,
At work like Moses on the rock---
And from under those eyes' lids
To drown my Saharas
I'll draw the suffering waters.
My lust, inflated by hope's effulgence,
Over your plush salt tears
Will swim, an expectant ship at sea;
While in my heart, by your weeping elated,
Your loved sobs still reverberate,
Battle-drums just reaching the lee!
Am I not just a false breath,
A wrong chord in the Divine Symphony,
By grace of voracious Irony
Who slavvers after my death?
That woman is in my voice, the spitfire!
And all my bloods, her black drugs, beat clearer!
I am the sinister mirror
In which the witch regards her desires.
I am the wound and the cutter!
I am the fist and the jowl!
I am the body and the rack's howl,
And the victim and the torturer!
Of my own heart I am the vampire,
---One of the greatly abandoned---
To eternal laughter condemned,
I, whose sick lips can never smile!
THE LID
Wherever he runs, on land or sea,
In flaming climates or under an arctic sun,
Servant of Jesus, or prostitute of Cythera,
Dark Medicant or resplendent Croesusan,
City citizen, farmer, vagabond, sedentary,
Whether his stunted brain moves staccato or lento,
All men submit to the terror of mystery
And regard the High with a trembling eye-hole.
And over us is: the Sky! the cave wall that chokes,
A ceiling illuminated by a comic opera hoax
Where bad actors tread a blood-soaked scene;
Terror of libertarians, hope of hermits:
The Sky! the black lid of the immense pot
Where boils imperceptible and vast Humanity.
THE PIT
Pascal had his bottomless pit, which here and there he carried.
--Helas! all is abysm,-- actions, dreams, lusts,
Words! And in my hair that stands on end,
I feel Panic passing in gusts.
High and low, everywhere, I find deeps and deserts;
Silence, space that affrights and captivates...
Across the cloth of my nights, God with his hand savant
Draws nightmares, multiform and without relent.
I fear sleep as I fear some immense trough
Full of vague horrors; tending towards what gulf?
I can see only infinity through these windows,
And my spirit, always obsessed by vertiginiousness,
Is jealous of Nothing's insensibilness.
---Ah! Is there nothing but beings and numbers!
SHOCKING THE MOON
O Moon, adored discretely by our fathers,
From high in the blue fields, where radiant stars
In harems serve you in delicate attire,
My venerable Cynthia, lamp of our warm waters,
Can you see lovers in their beds that prosper,
Showing in sleep their mouths' cold enamel?
The poet butting his forehead on his travail?
Or under the dry grass the coupling vipers?
Under your citron dominion, with clandestine step,
Do you, like yesterday, from night to day's lip,
Stoop to kiss Endymion's shifting graces?
---"I can see your mother, child of an age impoverished,
Tilt with a loaded mass of years above the mirror's glass,
And paint the tit that once did nourish!"
THE SKELETON LABORER
On old book-plates of anatomy
Discarded near the ponderous quay-yard
Where many volumes' cadavers
Languish like antique mummies
However depressing the gravity
Some savour of the dead artist
Comes through his drawings like a bitter taste,
Communicating Beauty...
And you can see, to make more complete
These mysterious horrors,
Digging pits like laborers,
Scorched men and skeletons.
LAST CRY OF AN ICARUS
Lovers of prostitutes
Are blessed, lie blissed and forlorn;
But me--- my arms are torn
Trying to hug clouds at altitude.
By grace of the unparalleled stars, or one,
That burns the sky from heaven's remotest court,
My blind eyes are consumed by the void,
Seeing nothing but souvenirs of the sun.
In vain have I moved in space,
Trembling after the end and the center;
I know not by what eye of fire in winter
I feel my dissolving wings unlace....
And, broiled by the love of Beauty,
Shall I not have as a sublime honor this:
To donate my name to this vast abyss
That will serve as my tomb when my grave is dirty?
PAGAN PRAYER
Aaa! release not the flame or the spit!
Re-light my engorged heart,
Voluptuosity, torturer of spirits!
Diva! My supplication grant!
Goddess, who, spread through the air,
Casts fire in our basements,
Grant the prayer of a mordant man
Who breaths the sacred bronzen chant.
Volupte, forever my queen!
Pull on the mask of the Siren,
Heavy flesh and velour,
Or on me your tarry somnolents pour
As shapeless wine, and mystic--
Volupte, phantom elastic!
LA FIN
Soused in anemic sunlight
Stands, dances and turns, without reason,
Life, shrill and impudent.
Then, as on the bulked horizon
Night voluptuously mounts,
Appeasing all, even famine,
Effacing all, even hurt,
The Poet says: "At last, the end!
"My spirit and my spine
Inveigle ardently for repose;
With my heart full of funeral songs,
"I shall lie on the couch in my house,
Roll myself up, and in your curtains drowse,
O ever-freshening shadows!"
