Selected Poems from 'Les Fleurs du Mal'

by Charles Baudelaire, Jan Owen (Translator)

Overview

Jan Owen's masterly translation captures all of Baudelaire's passion and anguish in a selection that includes many of Baudelaire's best known poems - including those banned from 1857 edition - as well as some less familiar ones, with the volume leading up to his great long poem, 'The Voyage', and finishing with the much-loved sonnet 'Meditation'.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781908376404
Publisher:	ARC Publications
Publication date:	05/01/2015
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.44(d)

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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.

Great poet of love though he was, Baudelaire's relationships with women were complex and often difficult. Like many of the young men of nineteenth-century France, he frequented brothels in late adolescence, probably contracting there the syphilis that most likely led to his stroke. In 1842, soon after his return from his sea voyage, he met the minor actress Jeanne Duval, with whom he would have a tempestuous liaison for most of the rest of his life. Some of his most beautiful and powerful poems are inspired by her: 'Exotic Perfume', 'Your Hair', 'The Balcony' and many more. Despite her frequent infidelities and his own poverty, he repeatedly gave her money and his letters to his mother often express the fear that in the future he might not be able to support her. Two other women provided the raw material for two further cycles of poems: Apollonie Sabatier, to whom he sent such poems as 'Evening Harmony' and 'The Flacon', and Marie Daubrun, who is usually associated with poems such as 'Causerie' and 'Autumn Song'. Whatever intimate relationships he may have had with these women, they were brief: Baudelaire seems to have been an essentially lonely person, who preferred to transmute his experience into poetry rather than work at either love or friendship. Drawing on his experiences, real and imaginary, with these three women and no doubt others, he was able to create three main cycles of love poems: one that evokes the intensity and volatility of erotic passion, a second in which the poet longs for a purifying, spiritual love, and a third in which the older poet turns to a younger woman to find an intensity of experience that will allow him to lose all sense of self and of the humdrum nature of reality.

Baudelaire's other great gift to poetry, in terms of themes, was his exploration of the modern city. He possessed a remarkable ability to show how the alley-ways and back streets of a great metropolis were rich in modern metaphors for the human condition. He was able to link the rapidly changing reality of urban life both to permanent truths and to fleeting moments of the distant and recent past. Above all, perhaps, his focus on the poor, the ill, the old, rather than on the rich and famous, draws sharp attention to the complexity of contemporary existence, refusing to gloss over its harshness and ugliness, even when his poetic gift transmutes it into a form of radically new beauty.

Baudelaire's poetry is all the more powerful for being succinct. For him, a long poem was a contradiction in terms, and his favourite form was the sonnet. As he explained to a young critic, Armand Fraisse, "Because the form is restricting, the idea bursts forth all the more intensely". Rhythm and rhyme he regarded not just as accessories but as vital to the deep pleasure poetry offers us. And in terms of the words he uses, he ranges exceptionally widely, drawing on his knowledge of Latin but also on his awareness of modern inventions and experiences that demanded a new vocabulary. Like ThÃ(c)ophile Gautier, the friend and fellow poet to whom he dedicated Les Fleurs du Mal, he was a lover of dictionaries, and his choice of words reflects this in its precision, its ability to shock us, but also its wonderful variety.

Translating poetry of this power, range and diversity has always posed a particular problem. The first English translators used a style and a lexicon that were stilted and formal, missing the intimacy and modernity of his writing. Over the years, translators have experimented more with both technique and vocabulary to produce English texts that are closer in feel to the originals. As Jan Owen argues, however, the rapidly evolving nature of our language and our experiences constantly demands new translations. The basic questions remain: how can you find the right balance between the literal meaning and the suggestions embedded in the sounds, the rhythms and the rhymes? In seeking equivalents for the French words, how far can you go in employing contemporary idiom before you run the risk of instantly becoming outdated or simply striking the wrong register? Jan, with her meticulous attention to a poem's meaning — both that of the surface level and that conveyed by the sonorities, the rhetorical devices, the feel of the words in the mouth — and her own considerable gifts as a poet, has achieved a remarkable transformation of the nineteenth-century original into something that strikes the reader as very much what Baudelaire would have written had he been alive now. The intense pleasure of rhythm and rhyme that he frequently emphasized is brilliantly conveyed in her translations, which often draw on half-rhymes rather than forcing a full rhyme that might distort meaning or rhythm. Her choice of vocabulary is both modern and unpretentious, allowing the images to strike us with all their original freshness. Take for instance the second verse of 'Gypsies on the Road':

The silent men, whose shouldered rifles gleam, plod on beside their people in the carts, scanning the skies, dull-eyed with regret for every hopeless plan and vanished dream.

"Plod" finely captures the gait of these travellers, the alliteration of "scanning the skies" deftly replaces the original's repetition of the sound "p", and Baudelaire's reference to "chimères" — very much part of the romantic lexicon — is beautifully and unaffectedly modernized by "plan" and "dream". Many more examples leap to mind but I have no desire to spoil the reader's pleasure by anticipating them here.

Suffice to say that reading these poems in Jan Owen's translation has been a particular delight, for if, as Wordsworth puts it, nothing will bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower, if nothing in other words will replace that first encounter with Baudelaire, what Jan does in her version is to provide an equally precious and exciting gift: the sense of a direct meeting with a foreign text, in all its density, beauty and richness.

Rosemary Lloyd

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Translator's Preface,
Introduction,
To the Reader,
The Albatross,
Correspondences,
The Jinx,
Gypsies on the Road,
The Giantess,
Jewels,
Hymn to Beauty,
Exotic Perfume,
Your Hair,
I Worship You,
You'd Have the Universe,
Still Not Satisfied,
Her Gown,
A Carcass,
The Vampire,
Come Here, My Pretty Cat,
The Balcony,
I Give These Lines to You,
It's Always So,
Evening Harmony,
The Flacon,
Poison,
Cat,
The Lovely Vessel,
Invitation to the Voyage,
Causerie,
Autumn Song,
Sadness and Wandering,
Cats,
Owls,
Music,
The Cracked Bell,
Spleen: Memories,
Spleen: King of a Land of Rain,
Spleen: The Long Low Sky,
Death Wish,
The Self-Tormentor,
The Abyss,
The Lament of an Icarus,
The Clock,
The Swan,
The Little Old Women,
To a Woman Passing By,
Twilight,
The Game,
I Haven't Forgotten,
The Servant,
Dawn,
The Ragpickers' Wine,
The Murderer's Wine,
The Loner's Wine,
The Lovers' Wine,
Delphine and Hippolyte,
Damned Women,
A Voyage to Cythera,
The Lid,
The Voice,
The Rebel,
The Litanies of Satan,
The Death of Lovers,
The Death of the Poor,
The Death of Artists,
The Voyage,
Meditation,
Translator's Notes,
A Baudelaire Chronology,
Biographical Notes,