Preface: I've selected Baudelaire's
"The Albatross"
from his The Flowers of Evil (1857)
as one of my favorite poems when compiling a Poetry Anthology for Robert Pinsky's
Stanford Poetry Workshop final project (Winter 2007). I told my friend Peter Robinson
about my auditing Professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy's seminar The Problem of Evil
this Spring Quarter at Stanford. When I sent him some
of my typed passages on evil from philosophers, he suggested Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal
to be included in my anthology. I found Keith Waldrop's 2006 translation of The Flowers of Evil
at the Los Altos Library, and have typed those poems with that touch of evil.
Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil:
Afternoon Song
Although your evil eyebrows lend you an air odd and unangelic,
Come-hither-eyed Witch,
I adore you, my frivolous, my terrible passion! with the
devotion of a priest for his idol.
Desert and forest are rank in your uncouth hair; your head
leans as to enigmas and secrets.
Scent prowls over your flesh as above a censer; you are
enchanting as evening, somber warm nymph.
How your sloth outdoes the stronges potion, how you know
just the caress to bring the dead to life!
Your hips are in love with your back and your breasts;
pillows delght in your languid postures.
Sometimes, to appease your mysterious rage, you lavish
earnest bites and kisses;
you lacerate me, Dark-Hair, with derisive laughter, and then
on my heart you train your eye, tender as moonlight.
Beneath your satin slippers, under your charming silken feet,
I place my highest joy, my genius, my destiny,
my soul that you heal, you: light and color! burst of thaw in
my dark Siberia.
from Poem LVIII, The Flowers of Evil (p. 79)
*********************************************************
Destruction
Always the Demon stirs at my side; he floats about me like
an impalpable air; I breathe him in and the sensation burns
my lungs, fills them with an eternal guilty desire.
Sometimes, knowing my great love of Art, he takes the form
of the most seductive of women and under specious hypocritical
pretexts, acquaints me with vile potions.
Thus he conducts me, far from the eye of God, panting, crushed
by fatigue, across the deep and deserted plains of Ennui
and thrusts before my confused eyes: soiled clothing, open
wounds, and the bloody apparatus of Destruction!
from Poem CIX, The Flowers of Evil (p. 149)
*********************************************************
Love and the Skull
Love is seated on Humanity's skull, and on this throne
profane Love with an impudent laugh
merrily blows round bubbles that rise into the air, as if
to rejoin worlds in the depths of the ether.
Each frail luminous globe takes flight grandly, bursts,
and spits out its thin soul like a golden dream.
I hear the skull, at each bubble, wail and pray:—
"When will it end, this ridiculous and savage game?
"What your cruel mouth disperses into the air, you murderous
monster, is my brain, my blood, my flesh!"
from Poem CXVII, The Flowers of Evil (p. 159)
— Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867),
from The
Flowers of Evil
translated by Keith Waldrop
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 2006
*********************************************************
Web Links to Charles Baudelaire
•
Books & Writers: Charles Baudelaire
(Biography, Selected Works)
•
Academy of American Poets: Charles Baudelaire
(Biography, Poems, Prose, Surrealist & Symbolist Poets)
•
Charles Baudelaire: Biography
(Early Writings to Later Years, Analysis, Selected Writings)
•
Wikipedia: Charles Baudelaire
(Life & work, Influence, Trivia, Bibliography, Online Texts)
•
L'Albatros (French text & 5 English translations)
•
L'Albatros (Online Text of French)
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(5-31-2009)