Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) Read online

  Rhyming in French poetry is also bound by rules much stricter than in English. In general, rhyme plays a more conspicuous part in overall poetic effect, no doubt because French tonic stress, such as it is, always falls on the last syllable of a word, making the last syllable of every line a stressed syllable. Rhyming in French, an English-speaking person might think, must be extremely easy, given all the verbs that end in -er and -ir, and all the participles that end in -é, -i, -u, and -ant. But such easy effects are in fact avoided. A rhyme based on a single sound, as in English bay/day, is to French ideas not a rhyme at all. For a full rhyme at least two sounds must coincide (bait/date, bray/dray, fleuve/veuve) and rhymes where three or more elements coincide (rime riche) are particularly sought after. Finding rhymes has always been a struggle even for the most accomplished French poets, and Baudelaire refers several times to their search. In his essay ‘Du Vin et du Haschisch’ he speaks of rag-pickers ‘stumbling over the paving-stones, like young poets who spend their whole day wandering and hunting for rhymes’, while in the poem ‘Le Soleil’ in Les Fleurs du Mal he describes himself in a deserted city under the cruel sun of high summer, practising

  … ma fantasque escrime,

  Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,

  Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés

  Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés.

  [… practising my fantastical fencing skills, scenting in every corner the chances of rhyme, tripping over words like paving-stones, sometimes bumping into lines I had long dreamed of.]

  The rhyme escrime/rime occurs more than once in Baudelaire’s verse, and the reason no doubt is that escrime is one of the few ‘rich’ (three-element) rhymes the French language affords for rime. Another happy example of the ‘chances of rhyme’ is the lack of rich rhymes for soir (evening). Those that there are come almost exclusively from the realm of the liturgical: encensoir (thurible), ostensoir (monstrance) and reposoir (altar of repose). The whole religious (or religiose) atmosphere of ‘Harmonie du Soir’ (33) comes from these ‘found’ rhymes.

  Did not Baudelaire resent the arbitrary power exerted over his writing by the demands of rhyme? It seems that he did not. In the same draft preface to Les Fleurs du Mal that we quoted before, he grandly states that ‘… tout poète qui ne sait pas au juste combien chaque mot comporte de rimes est incapable d’exprimer une idée quelconque’ (… any poet who does not know exactly how many rhymes are available for each word is incapable of expressing the simplest idea).

  For whatever reason, Baudelaire wrote little verse after 1862 and the project on which he was engaged when he became hopelessly ill was a book of prose poems (then a very novel idea; the very title Petits Poèmes en prose appeared deliberately paradoxical). This new departure would have posed radical new problems of organization and formal character. Certainly, Baudelaire did not intend simply to write pieces of everyday, discursive or journalistic prose. His ideal, as he expressed it in the preface to Le Spleen de Paris, was

  le miracle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience.

  [the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without fixed rhythm or rhyme, flexible and irregular enough to match the lyrical movements of the soul, the wave-motions of dream, the sudden starts of consciousness.]

  Critics have disagreed about the meaning of these expressions and whether or not Baudelaire achieved this desired new form in his lifetime. What is clear, however, is that at every period of his life he attached the greatest importance to formal mastery in writing, and saw it as perfectly compatible with originality. As he himself wrote in his review of the annual Salon exhibition of painting in 1859:

  il est évident que les rhétoriques et les prosodies ne sont pas des tyrannies inventées arbitrairement, mais une collection de règles réclamées par l’organisation même de l’être spirituel. Et jamais les prosodies et les rhétoriques n’ont empêché l’originalité de se produire distinctement. Le contraire, à savoir qu’elles ont aidé l’éclosion de l’originalité, serait infiniment plus vrai.

  [it is evident that rhetorics and prosodies are not arbitrarily invented tyrannies, but a collection of rules required by the very organization of the spiritual being. And prosodies and rhetorics have never stopped originality from making itself clearly apparent. The opposite, that is, that they have helped originality to blossom, would be infinitely more true.]

  This translation does not pretend to be anything but an aid to reading the poems in French. It does not (and, I believe, could not) aspire to convey the rhythms and melody of the originals, but at most to avoid outright cacophony. To help the reader whose French is not strong, I have followed wherever possible the grammatical constructions of the original; where I have not, it is because I judged the order in which words appear in a line more important than the precise syntax.

  Baudelaire’s own definition of une poésie bien faite, a well-made poem, was that it should be

  … explicative par elle-même, tant toutes choses y sont bien unies, conjointes, réciproquement adaptées, et […] prudemment concaténées.

  [self-explanatory, so well joined and brought together are all its elements, so matched to each other and carefully concatenated.]

  The reader of such a poem, in my view, should not be constantly distracted by biographical or speculative editorial notes. Baudelaire was also fanatically particular about the look of his poems on the printed page; I cannot believe that it would have given him pleasure to see them pock-marked with superscript numbers. The modern reader, however, does need some additional factual information if he or she does not have immediate access to reference books. Baudelaire is not a learned poet, but he takes for granted the classical and literary knowledge which his original readers, predominantly men of the middle or upper class with a lycée education, would have had. Not all modern readers have such knowledge, and I have tried to supply the want with a glossary of proper names and foreign phrases.

  I have tried as far as possible to translate each word by a word of similar register; the incongruities to which this sometimes gives rise are, in general, present in the original also. In Baudelaire’s lines there are quite often echoes of other kinds of discourse, notably religious but sometimes, for example, journalistic, and these I have tried to keep. Echoes of the Bible and the Prayer Book are intentional.

  There are, however, certain characteristics of Baudelaire’s language, and of the French language in general, that cannot be translated into English. One is word order: the poet’s blanche maison is not the same as a maison blanche or the swan’s blanc plumage as a plumage blanc. Still more important is the availability of two words for ‘you’, tu and vous. We are told at school that vous is polite and tu familiar, but the truth is much more complex. Vous, in Baudelaire’s time, was the form used in writing and public speech between all adults of the middle class and above; even husbands and wives of this class called each other and their children above infancy vous. Tu was reserved for private speech; in public it was only used to small children, animals and people of definitely lower class; polite people called even servants, waiters and the like vous. For a man to call a woman of his own class tu would have indicated a sexual relationship between them. This is brought out very clearly in a letter from Baudelaire to Madame Sabatier (the dedicatee of poems 27–32), written on 31 August 1857. Previously he had always addressed her as vous; in this letter, written after they had spent the night together for the first and only time, he fluctuates between tu and vous, eventually settling for vous, which he uses in all subsequent correspondence.

  The tone of the love poems in ‘Spleen et Idéal’ is strongly influenced by the form of address used: poems XXII to XXXIX (our 13–26) with the exception of ‘Une Charogne’ use tu, XL to XLV (our 27–31) vous, XLVI to LIV (our 32–9) use tu again, while LV to LXIV (our 40–43) v
ary according to no discernible pattern. There is no way of rendering this distinction in English.

  But the problem does not end here. As well as the tu used to children and mistresses, there is the tu used in prayer. French Catholics of this period, and for a hundred years afterwards, did most of their praying in Latin; Protestants had prayed in French since the sixteenth century. Latin prayers address God in the singular, tu, and this practice is followed in French in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus Protestants, using a sixteenth-century translation, have always prayed ‘Notre père, qui es aux cieux…’ and Racine’s devotional poetry uses tu to God. By the nineteenth century, however, this was considered undignified, and Catholics prayed ‘Notre Père, qui êtes…’ However it was not unknown for God the Father to be called tu in poetry and Jesus was regularly so addressed. The Virgin Mary, on the other hand, was usually called vous, no doubt because of the disrespect implied by using tu to a woman. The Ave Maria was, and is, always rendered ‘Je vous salue, Marie…’ (Protestants of course do not pray to the Virgin.) Baudelaire uses vous to God the Father (67), but tu to Jesus (69), Satan (71) and the Madone addressed in 41. I have used Prayer Book ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ in 71, as suiting the deliberate perversity of the piece, but not in 69, where the stress is on the vulnerable humanity of Jesus. I was tempted to use it in 41, but felt that I would thereby have lost the mixture of perversity and intimacy in a poem addressed to a woman whose own name was Marie.

  Grevisse’s Le Bon Usage, the bible of French usage, states with no apparent sense of incongruity that

  Tu, te, toi et les possessifs correspondants expriment l’intimité, la supériorité, l’arrogance ou le dédain. Ils peuvent aussi prendre un caractère pathétique ou noble.

  [Tu, te, toi and the corresponding possessive adjectives express intimacy, social superiority, arrogance or disdain. They can also take on an emotional or elevated (i.e. conventionally poetic) character.]

  Clearly this grammatical form is highly suited to addressing someone who is thought of at the same time as a child and a mistress, a goddess and a frail woman, a fallen angel and a protective divinity, a God and a broken man. But English has no tu.

  French speech and writing is also affected by grammatical gender. All nouns in French, including the names of objects and abstractions, are either masculine or feminine; there is no grammatical neuter, no ‘it’ but only ‘he’ and ‘she’. Most abstractions are in fact feminine (la Nature, la Beauté, la Mort) and this makes it natural for French poets, when personifying them, to give them the characteristics traditionally regarded as feminine. Baudelaire does seem to go further, however, when he personifies Beauty as a flirtatious female using her eyes to fascinate her docile lovers (9) or, in 65, Debauchery and Death as two good-hearted girls (‘deux aimables filles’ – but fille had the meaning ‘prostitute’ as well as ‘girl’ at this period). Beauty’s first words, in 9, ‘Je suis belle, ô mortels’, make it clear, simply by the form belle, that a feminine character is speaking, in a way that English cannot do.

  Less stereotyped and more affecting is the way in which, in 89, Baudelaire addresses his Sorrow (ma Douleur) in a patient, gentle voice as if coaxing a little girl, or, very strikingly, in 31, figures the note he suddenly hears in his mistress’s voice (la note) as an unloved girl-child hidden away by her family and singing a song of despairing resignation.

  The reverse process seems to be at work when the old women of ‘Les Petites Vieilles’ (55), unsexed by age, are first called ‘des êtres’ (beings) and ‘des monstres’, both masculine nouns; grammar requires that they should then for the next four stanzas be called ils and not elles, and that any adjective applying to them (brisés, bossus, tordus, cassés: broken, hunchbacked, twisted, crippled) should be in the masculine and not the feminine form. This is poetically most appropriate to the opening section of the poem, where the reader’s attention is first directed towards the strange, barely human aspect of these still living creatures; as the poem develops and human sympathy, understanding, and even love are expressed for them, they are allowed once more to take on their appropriate gender.

  In Baudelaire’s own, chosen poetic vocabulary the chief problem for the translator is a group of short, extremely simple words that recur with great frequency, several of which cover a whole range of English meanings. French is not, in general, a monosyllabic language, but of the forty most often repeated words in ‘Spleen et Idéal’ no fewer than sixteen are monosyllables, and another three (âme, ange, charme) would be counted as monosyllables in everyday speech but count as disyllables in certain verse contexts. The sixteen ‘true’ monosyllables (by the rules of French metre) are all either open syllables or end in ‘r’ and it is nearly impossible to render them by anything so phonetically unobtrusive. How is one to translate the endlessly recurring beau (fair, fine, beautiful?), grand (great, grand, large?), doux (sweet, soft, gentle, quiet?)? The worst nightmare is ivre, which when it does not mean drunk, and it usually does not, has the translator hesitating between ‘high’ (too slangy) and the impossibly prissy ‘intoxicated’. ‘Intoxication’ for ivresse is dreadful, but ‘rapture’ makes one think of the hymn-book or of Elinor Glyn. Even mal is a problem, for it means both ‘evil’ and ‘sickness’.

  Baudelaire wrote that ‘Manier savamment une langue, c’est pratiquer une espèce de sorcellerie évocatoire’ (to use a language with superior knowledge and skill is to practise a kind of conjuring). Conjuring in the strong sense, that of calling up visions or spirits. A plain prose translation can never have such powers, but must simply try to put the reader in touch with the magical original.

  NOTES ON THE TEXT

  Of the ninety-three verse poems printed here, ninety-one come from Les Fleurs du Mal. This collection, first printed in 1857 in an edition of 1,100 copies, contains all but a very few of Baudelaire’s poems in verse. A good many of them had appeared previously in magazines, some as early as 1850–51. On publication, Les Fleurs du Mal was the subject of a prosecution for offence against public decency and the court required that six poems should be expunged before any copies were put on sale. These six poems were finally published in 1866 in Belgium, together with some other short pieces, to make a pamphlet called Les Epaves, which was printed in 260 copies. In 1861 a second edition of Les Fleurs du Mal appeared, still missing the six banned poems, but including thirty-five previously unpublished ones. Like the first edition, it is organized in sections, but some poems have been moved from one section to another and an important new section has been created, the ‘Tableaux parisiens’. This edition, the last to appear in the author’s lifetime, is the one usually followed in modern French texts of Baudelaire.

  A third edition appeared in 1868 as Volume I of Baudelaire’s complete works: it included some previously unpublished poems, not all of them obviously intended for Les Fleurs du Mal.

  The poems printed here are taken from the text, and printed in the order, of 1861, up to ‘Le Voyage’. As well as our own numbers, we have given in brackets the number of each poem in the original (1861) edition, so as to make it easier for the reader to locate poems in a French text. The remaining poems are taken from Les Epaves and the edition of 1868; here the sections are short and the numbering varies from one modern French text to another, so we have given only our own numbers.

  The Petits Poèmes en prose (for which Baudelaire’s working title was Le Spleen de Paris) first appeared separately in magazines between 1855 and 1867. The first collected edition, including a further five previously unpublished poems, was in Volume V of the Œuvres complètes, in 1869. Our selections follow the text and give the numbering of this edition.

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  WRITINGS BY BAUDELAIRE

  Œuvres complètes, edited by Claude Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris, Gallimard, Editions de la Pléiade, 1975 and 1976)

  Les Fleurs du Mal, edited by Jacques Dupont (Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1991)

  Le Spleen de Paris and La Fanfarlo, edited by Dav
id Scott and Barbara Wright (Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1987)

  TRANSLATIONS

  Baudelaire, Volume I: The Complete Verse and Volume II: The Complete Prose, with introductions and translations by Francis Scarfe (London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1986)

  Baudelaire as a Literary Critic. Selected essays introduced and translated by Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop Jr (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964)

  Flowers of Evil and Other Works, edited and translated by Wallace Fowlie (New York, 1964; reprinted London, Dover Books, 1992)

  Intimate Journals, translated by Christopher Isherwood with an introduction by T. S. Eliot (1930; reprinted London, Black Spring, 1989)

  Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire, translated and edited by Rosemary Lloyd (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986)

  My Heart Laid Bare and Other Prose Writings, translated by Norman Cameron with an introduction by Peter Quennell (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1950; reprinted London, Soho Book Company, 1986)

  The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo, translated with an introduction by Rosemary Lloyd (Oxford, Oxford University Press, The World’s Classics, 1991)

  Selected Writings on Art and Literature, translated by P. E. Charvet (London, Penguin Books, 1972)

  BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES

  Hemmings, F. W. J., Baudelaire the Damned: A Biography (New York, Scribner, 1982)