The Penguin Book of French Poetry Read online

Semblait roidir sa jambe nue,

  Et, sans que l’on sÛt avec qui,

  Cet émule de la Saqui

  Parlait bas en langue inconnue.

  Freed from weight, blind to their form he would have leapt up Piranesi’s stairways. The light that struck him made his tuft of hair shine like a coal in a furnace.

  He rose to such heights that the other tumblers burned up their strength in futile struggles. They found him disheartening, and murmured: ‘What quicksilver has that demon got in his veins?’

  The people all cried: ‘Bravo!’ But he, with renewed effort, seemed to stiffen his naked leg, and, with whom there was no knowing, this rival of La Saqui1 spoke quietly in an unknown tongue.

  C’était avec son cher tremplin.

  Il lui disait: “Théâtre, plein

  D’inspiration fantastique,

  Tremplin qui tressailles d’émoi

  Quand je prends un élan, fais-moi

  Bondir plus haut, planche élastique!

  “Frêle machine aux reins puissants,

  Fais-moi bondir, moi qui me sens

  Plus agile que les panthères,

  Si haut que je ne puisse voir

  Avec leur cruel habit noir

  Ces épiciers et ces notaires!

  “Par quelque prodige pompeux,

  Fais-moi monter, si tu le peux,

  Jusqu’à ces sommets, où, sans règles,

  Embrouillant les cheveux vermeils

  Des planètes et des soleils,

  Se croisent la foudre et les aigles.

  It was with his precious springboard. He said to it: ‘Theatre, filled with uncanny inspiration, springboard quivering with emotion when I launch myself, make me leap higher, elastic board!

  Slender machine with powerful loins, make me leap, sensing as I do that I am more nimble than the panthers, so high that I cannot see these grocers and these lawyers with their cruel black coats!

  By some magnificent marvel, make me rise if you can to those peaks where, beyond all rules, entangling the rosy red hair of the planets and suns, lightning bolts and eagles cross paths.

  “Jusqu’à ces éthers pleins de bruits,

  Où, mêlant dans l’affreuse nuit

  Leurs haleines exténuées,

  Les autans ivres de courroux

  Dorment, échevelés et fous,

  Sur les seins pâles des nuées.

  “Plus haut encor, jusqu’au del pur!

  Jusqu’à ce lapis dont l’azur

  Couvre notre prison mouvante!

  Jusqu’à ces rouges Orients

  Où marchent des Dieux flamboyants,

  Fous de colère et d’épouvante.

  “Plus loin! plus haut! je vois encor

  Des boursiers à lunettes d’or,

  Des critiques, des demoiselles

  Et des réalistes en feu.

  Plus haut! plus loin! de l’air, du bleu!

  Des ailes! des ailes! des ailes!”

  Up to those ethers filled with noise where, mingling in the dreadful night their exhausted breaths, the stormy blasts drunk on wrath sleep, dishevelled and wild, on the pale breasts of the clouds.

  Higher still, up to the pure sky! Up to that lapis whose azure covers our prison in motion! Up to those red Easts where blazing Gods march, mad with anger and terror.

  Further! higher! I can still see brokers with gold-rimmed glasses, critics, spinsters and realists with flushed faces. Higher! further! air! blue! wings! wings! wings!’

  Enfin, de son vil échafaud,

  Le clown sauta si haut, si haut,

  Qu’il creva le plafond de toiles

  Au son du cor et du tambour,

  Et, le coeur dévoré d’amour,

  Alla rouler dans les étoiles.

  At last, from his base scaffold, the clown leaped so high, so high, that he burst the canvas ceiling to the sound of horn and drum, and, with his heart consumed by love, he went tumbling among the stars.

  Charles Baudelaire

  (1821–67)

  Baudelaire has a pivotal place in the history of French poetry, and his influence extends far beyond the borders of France, particularly into modern British and American verse. Though he wrote some interesting prose-poems, his importance rests principally on a single volume of verse entitled Les Fleurs du Mal. This constitutes a remarkable distillation of an artist’s entire moral, emotional and intellectual experience; it is a work, in the words of Arthur Symons, ‘made out of his whole intellect and all his nerves’.

  As an adolescent, Baudelaire acted in ways guaranteed to enrage his stepfather, a diplomat and military man, and was expelled from his Paris school after a homosexual incident. By eighteen he had already contracted the recurrent venereal disease that would eventually combine with a stroke to kill him. His parents sent him to India, but he ‘jumped ship’ at Réunion and returned to Paris. He began to write, and lived as a bohemian dandy, with a half-caste mistress, Jeanne Duval, to answer his strong sexual drive, and a succession of society ladies who played more idealized roles in his aesthetic drama. Later in his life there was a more integrated if still ambiguous relationship with Marie Daubrun, the subject of ‘L’Invitation au Voyage’. Surviving on a low parental allowance administered by trustees, and on fees for his excellent art criticism, Baudelaire lived a nocturnal life of physical indulgence, including experimentation with opium. He identified quite strongly with the personality of Edgar Allan Poe, though Poe’s literary influence on him is slight.

  Les Fleurs du Mal, a carefully planned volume with a thematic rather than chronological arrangement of poems, appeared in 1857. Baudelaire and his publisher were prosecuted, and several poems were banned as an offence to public morality. These appeared as an appendix in 1868, but the volume was not fully integrated until the middle of this century.

  His last years were lived in squalor and illness, with only posterity to acknowledge the achievement of a supremely honest, Promethean and life-changing poet who confronts his ‘hypocrite reader’ with an extreme form of moral truth.

  In Baudelaire, essentially a city-dweller, French poetry takes a new direction. With the reader’s participation a key element, the poem becomes now an experience in itself rather than a vehicle for feeling or thought. Carefully worked despite an appearance of spontaneity, it takes on an autonomous, ritualized quality as the product of the Imagination, an idealizing faculty that uses a stimulus in the real world to give it flight. The starting point may be a scent, a sound, a taste, the feel and fragrance of the hair of Jeanne, or the sight of a grotesque maggot-ridden carcass. As with the Parnassians, Beauty is the goal, and (except in early pieces like ‘L’Albatros’) moral content is implicit in the image if it is there at all. The conscious Self, however, remains entirely present and active during the experience, whereas in the work of Verlaine and the Symbolists consciousness will be little more than a passive receiver of experience.

  Sordid reality with its ‘ennui’, its banal and purposeless tedium, is transcended by art. Out of evil and suffering and even failure come artistic profits (‘les fleurs du mal’), created by the poet-alchemist whose receptive and creative spirit is in excited contact with a mysterious harmony of symbols beyond reality, an enigmatic mental dimension linked with our perception by synaesthetic ‘Correspondances’ between our different senses. Experience is transferred intuitively between different planes of our awareness and across different art-forms, as we take with Baudelaire the first tentative steps into that ‘temple of Nature’, that ‘forest of symbols’ in which Rimbaud, a more dispassionate explorer, will later lose himself.

  Baudelaire’s poetry is full of fluctuations and dualities which produce a range of creative tensions: love and hatred, desire and disgust, the attractiveness of sin and the indulgence of remorse, sensuality and asceticism, oblivion and lucidity, idealism and baseness. Every experience engenders an awareness of its opposite, and ‘Le Voyage’ dramatizes the compulsion to continue despite the failures of desire and knowledge and the hostili
ty of society. The major oscillation is between ‘Idéal’, a heightened state of perception and fertile creative energy, an artistic salvation, and ‘Spleen’, a condition of claustrophobic nervous tension, angry restlessness and uncreative self-disgust (out of which, paradoxically, he creates poems as memorable as those recording the ‘Ideal’ state, by projecting himself and his nausea on to his physical surroundings). Sometimes the germ of one experience can be seen in the other: in ‘La Chevelure’, for example, there is a confident succession of future tenses and even a temporary withdrawal from the ecstatic experience in mid-poem in the certain knowledge that it will be repeated. But the closing lines with their exclamation marks, their subjunctive, and the final question which earlier in the poem would have been a statement, all imply an awareness of imminent disintegration. ‘Harmonie du Soir’, on the other hand, dramatizes the ritualistic creation of something out of nothing, luminous memory out of void, in a remarkable and explicit parallel with the incantatory process of the Mass.

  In terms of versification Baudelaire is not revolutionary. Like Mallarmé and the best of the Parnassians, he makes a virtue of the Alexandrine and finds in it sufficient flexibility for most of his purposes, though he also uses the octosyllable and experiments occasionally with the ‘impair’ line (an uneven number of syllables, particularly associated with Verlaine), as in ‘La Musique’ and ‘L’Invitation au voyage’. Within this mainly orthodox frame he creates sensuous rhythms and sound patterns that draw us hypnotically into the ‘magie suggestive’ he foresaw as the nature of poetry after him: ‘…une magie suggestive contenant à la fois l’objet et le sujet, le monde extérieur à l’artiste et l’artiste lui-même’ (a suggestive magic containing both object and subject, the world outside the artist and the artist himself).

  Correspondances

  La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers

  Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;

  L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles

  Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.

  Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent

  Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,

  Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,

  Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

  Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants,

  Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,

  – Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

  Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies,

  Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens,

  Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.

  Connections

  Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes release indistinct words; man passes there through forests of symbols that observe him with intimate glances.

  Like prolonged echoes mingling from afar into a deep and shadowy unity, as vast as darkness and as light, scents, colours and sounds answer one another.

  There are scents as fresh as the flesh of children, sweet as oboes, green as meadows, – and others, corrupt, rich and triumphant,

  having the expansiveness of infinite things, like amber, musk, benzoin and incense, which sing the raptures of the mind and the senses.

  L’Albatros

  Souvent, pour s’amuser, les hommes d’équipage

  Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,

  Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,

  Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

  A peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,

  Que ces rois de l’azur, maladroits et honteux,

  Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches

  Comme des avirons traîner à côté d’eux.

  Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!

  Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid!

  L’un agace son bec avec un brÛle-gueule,

  L’autre mime, en boitant, l’infirme qui volait!

  The Albatross

  Often, for entertainment, crewmen capture albatrosses, great birds of the oceans, languid travelling companions that follow the ship as it glides over the bitter depths.

  Scarcely have they downed them on the planks, than these kings of the azure, clumsy and shameful, droop their great white wings pitifully like trailing oars beside them.

  This winged traveller, how awkward and feeble he is! Not long ago so fine, how grotesque and ugly! One torments his beak with a clay pipe, another mimics, limping, the cripple who could fly!

  Le Poëte est semblable au prince des nuées

  Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer;

  Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,

  Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.

  The Poet is like the prince of the clouds, haunting the storm and mocking the archer; in exile on the ground, amidst the jeers, his giant wings prevent him from walking.

  La Beauté

  Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre,

  Et mon sein, où chacun s’est meurtri tour à tour,

  Est fait pour inspirer au poëte un amour

  Éternel et muet ainsi que la matière.

  Je trône dans l’azur comme un sphinx incompris;

  J’unis un coeur de neige à la blancheur des cygnes;

  Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes,

  Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.

  Beauty

  I am beautiful, o mortals, like a dream in stone, and my breast, where all have bruised themselves in turn, is destined to inspire in the poet a love that is eternal and wordless, like matter.

  I am enthroned in the azure like an unfathomed sphinx; to the whiteness of swans I join a heart of snow; I hate motion which displaces the lines, and I never weep and never laugh.

  Les poëtes, devant mes grandes attitudes,

  Que j’ai l’air d’emprunter aux plus fiers monuments,

  Consumeront leurs jours en d’austères études;

  Car j’ai, pour fasciner ces dociles amants,

  De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles:

  Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clartés éternelles!

  The poets, before my lofty attitudes, which I seem to borrow from the proudest monuments, will burn away their days in austere studies;

  For I have, to fascinate these docile lovers, pure mirrors which make all things more beautiful: my eyes, my wide eyes with their eternal brightness!

  La Chevelure

  O toison, moutonnant jusque sur l’encolure!

  O boucles! O parfum chargé de nonchaloir!

  Extase! Pour peupler ce soir l’alcôve obscure

  Des souvenirs dormant dans cette chevelure,

  Je la veux agiter dans l’air comme un mouchoir!

  The Hair

  O fleece, foaming down like wool over neck and throat! O curls! O perfume heavy with nonchalance! Ecstasy! This evening to people the dark bedchamber with the memories sleeping in this mane of hair, I want to wave it in the air like a handkerchief!

  La langoureuse Asie et la brÛlante Afrique,

  Tout un monde lointain, absent, presque défunt.

  Vit dans tes profondeurs, forêt aromatique!

  Comme d’autres esprits voguent sur la musique,

  Le mien, ô mon amour! nage sur ton parfum.

  J’irai là-bas où l’arbre et l’homme, pleins de sève,

  Se pâment longuement sous l’ardeur des climats;

  Fortes tresses, soyez la houle qui m’enlève!

  Tu contiens, mer d’ébène, un éblouissant rêve

  De voiles, de rameurs, de flammes et de mâts:

  Un port retentissant où mon âme peut boire

  A grands flots le parfum, le son et la couleur;

  Où les vaisseaux, glissant dans l’or et dans la moire,

  Ouvrent leurs vastes bras pour embrasser la gloire

  D’un ciel pur où frémit l’éternelle chal
eur.

  Languorous Asia and burning Africa, an entire distant world, absent, almost extinct, lives in your depths, aromatic forest! As other spirits sail on music, mine, O my love, swims on your perfume.

  I will go there, where trees and men, full of sap, swoon in a long slow trance in the burning heat of the climate; strong tresses, be the sea swell that carries me away! You enfold, ebony ocean, a dazzling dream of sails, of rowers, of pennants and of masts:

  A reverberating harbour where my soul can drink scent, sound and colour in great draughts; where the vessels, gliding through gold and watered silk, open their great arms to receive the glory of a pure sky quivering with eternal heat.

  Je plongerai ma tête amoureuse d’ivresse

  Dans ce noir océan où l’autre est enfermé;

  Et mon esprit subtil que le roulis caresse

  Saura vous retrouver, ô féconde paresse!

  Infinis bercements du loisir embaumé!

  Cheveux bleus, pavillon de ténèbres tendues,

  Vous me rendez l’azur du ciel immense et rond;

  Sur les bords duvetés de vos mèches tordues

  Je m’enivre ardemment des senteurs confondues

  De l’huile de coco, du musc et du goudron.

  Longtemps! toujours! ma main dans ta crinière lourde

  Sèmera le rubis, la perle et le saphir,

  Afin qu’à mon désir tu ne sois jamais sourde!

  N’es-tu pas l’oasis où je rêve, et la gourde

  Où je hume à longs traits le vin du souvenir?

  I will plunge my head, in love with intoxication, into this black ocean where the other is enclosed; and my refined spirit, caressed by the swell, will surely find you once more, O fertile indolence! Infinite rockings of perfumed leisure!