the portrait of a corpse

[stormsewer]

I've been reading Baudelaire like mad the last little while. I'm thinking he may dethrone Eliot as my favorite poet if this keeps up. Most poetry doesn't do much for me unless I read it many times, but somehow, even though it's in French, I seem to immediately understand and appreciate what Baudelaire is trying to do. I love his attitudes on death and love, and I love the expressions he uses. I don't think I'm a particularly big fan of free verse*; I like the rhythm you get from Baudelaire's strict attention to meter, and I like the rhyming. It just sounds beautiful, like music. Ça "me prend comme une mer." I love his fascination with words like "oasis" and "gouffre" (etymologically probably closest to the English word "gulf," but it's more like "abyss" or "chasm"). He's got a very poetic name, too; I was pleased as punch to find that the main characters in A Series of Unfortunate Events had the same surname. His life is romantic and Bohemian in classic style, as well. (I read elsewhere that he actually jumped ship on that trip to India and more or less hitchhiked back to France.) He was obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe, translated a bunch of his stuff, and was largely responsible for his rise to fame in France. Of course, that speaks very well of his taste. He's so cool.

*Eliot is an exception because he was a frickin' genius, and in my opinion most free verse is a clumsy, failed attempt to imitate him. I liked e.e. cummings a lot in high school, but a lot of his stuff seems gimmicky and artificial to me now. But it's been a while since I read it.



So, I was reading Baudelaire and thinking, "Boy, I'd sure like to share this stuff with people I know. It's so great!" But most people I know don't speak French. And translations of poetry just don't get the original across, you know? The rhythm and sound is just different. But then for some reason I decided to try translating some myself. I decided to start with a small one. Here's the original French version:

Le Portrait

La Maladie et la Mort font des cendres
De tout le feu qui pour nous flamboya,
De ces grands yeux si fervents et si tendres,
De cette bouche où mon coeur se noya...

Here's my translation:

The Portrait

Sickness and Death will make cinders
Of the fires we watched from the start,
Of those eyes so fervent, so tender,
Of that mouth wherein drowned my heart...

I was pretty pleased with that, actually. So I got ambitious and had a go at the best love poem ever written. Here goes:

A Corpse

My love, remember the thing that we found
On that beautiful summer morn
Off of the path was a corpse on the ground
On a bed of stones it was born

Its legs in the air like a randy bitch
Burning and staining the pure ground
Nonchalant just like a cynical snitch
Its belly was bloated and round

The sun it shone down on that nasty mess
As if to cook it for dinner
And to return to Nature nothing less
Than all She had put together

And you, you will be like this piece of shit
Like this horrible infection
You, star of my eyes, the muse to my wit
My angel and my affection

Yes, such will you be, oh queen of my hours
After the final sacrement
When you go beneath the grass and the flowers
Your body a failed investment

My dearest, tell the lords of putrescence
Who will eat you with soft kisses
That I was loyal to the true essence
Of my dead romantic blisses

(I have an alternate to the second to last verse. In version one, line 2 is translated fairly precisely, whereas line 4 is modified to get a good rhyme, and in version two it's the other way around. Tell me which you like better, should you have an opinion:

Yes, such will you be, oh queen of my hours
After your final plaintive moans
When you go beneath the grass and the flowers
Decaying among all the bones)

So, what do you think? I can see now that a lot of stuff first gets translated so that people can share the stuff they love with their friends who don't speak the lanugage that it's written in. I also see how translation is a work of recreation, and how it reflects the spirit of the translator, who uses the process of translation to express what they think is so nifty about the original. Theoretically, there will be more to come... (Geez, I wonder if I should stake a copyright claim on these... I hereby claim these translations for ME! You can spread them around as long as I'm credited, I guess.)

[Note from the future: Eventually I realized that this version of the poem leaves out several verses in the middle. Oh well.]

Comments

[margrietta.livejournal.com]

R. S. Thomas wrote a poem about Baudelaire. Here:

Prayer

Baudelaire's grave
not too far
from the tree of science.
Mine, too,
since I sought and failed
to steal from it,
somewhere within sight
of the tree of poetry
that is eternity wearing
the green leaves of time.

[stormsewer]

Thank you.