Baudelaire Retranslated
Because He’s Worth It
While perhaps too many of Muddle’s posts have made use of anger as a point of departure (or is that just mine?), one should never underestimate its motivating power… the Clash did after all have a point (“Let fury have the hour / Anger can be power!”).
That said, today’s topic, poetry, is usually considered pretty tame — in fact about as liable to excite passions as, say, maritime law or accountancy. Yet I recently found a small part of it to be particularly irritating. Namely, the absolute butchering of one of France’s greatest poets (and easily the most influential) by his English translators. That these attempts are appalling — always either sacrificing meaning or beauty (and mostly both) for some unfathomable reason — is one thing, but that they’ve been allowed to live on unchallenged for so long is another, much more sinister matter.
Why Baudelaire?
Simply enough, he is one of the greatest. Inspired by the English Romantics — and a brilliant translator of Edgar Allan Poe — Baudelaire became, after his death, the main model for the late 19th century’s most important literary movement: Symbolism. According to Edmund Wilson, this led him to be extremely influential over English literature, as exemplified by the successive waves of Irish avant-garde (from the symbolist W. B. Yeats to the decadent Oscar Wilde, and of course the modernist James Joyce), who all clearly bore symbolist, and sometimes just purely Baudelairian, tendencies. What’s more remarkable, perhaps, is the fact that in the 1930’s he came to be seen as something of an ideal in more conservative circles, under the likes of W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot (who saw him as a very spiritual Catholic, obsessed with morality), and Christopher Isherwood (who translated his journals) — his love of sin, devil-praise, and all of what Roland Barthes calls his “passion atroce de la vulgarité” (“atrocious passion for vulgarity” ?… damn translations!) seemingly forgotten — thereby cementing his immense influence on all sides of the literary spectrum.
As you’ve probably guessed, all the writers above spoke French, and so didn’t really need much of a translation — which is why only the second-rate apparently bothered about it.
Methodology
It is impossible to ever translate a poem exactly like the original, that much is sure. Yet there are ways to get close to it; Nabokov, while working on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, identified three methods of translation: the paraphrase, which allows omissions and additions depending on form and/or stylishness (and so, according to the man, “no reader [ought to] be fooled by it”); the lexical, which renders the basic meaning of each word in exact order (“this a machine can do”); and, finally, the literal, which aims to get as close to the exact contextual meaning as possible (“only this is a true translation”).
The problem with that last method is that the result no longer pays any attention to form; in other words, the work is no longer a poem — something which becomes apparent in his Eugene Onegin. In poetry, the appeal and specificity is aesthetic… to get rid of it seems too easy, not to mention incredibly irritating (if you know the original, anyway). To me, the proper translation involves the careful balance of original meaning with an approximation — at the very least — of the original musicality. Then, and only then, can the reader understand the poem’s emotional tone… and isn’t that the point?
To that end I’ve translated three of Baudelaire’s best. Sacrificed is his metre (which besides Allégorie are very much classical), some of his rhyme structure, as well as, more rarely, the exact imagery (when the corresponding meaning was just too ugly). My trump card here is the occasional half-rhyme, whose judicial use gives greater flexibility in achieving the proper meaning while depriving almost nothing of musicality. The result, while not as powerful or beautiful as the source, should be very similar in both tone and meaning.
For example, the following stanza:
Je suis de mon coeur le vampire,
— Un de ces grands abandonnés
Au rire éternel condamnés
Et qui ne peuvent plus sourire!
Translated awkwardly by William Aggeler (1954):
I’m the vampire of my own heart
— One of those utter derelicts
Condemned to eternal laughter,
But who can no longer smile!
And uglified by George Dillon (1936):
I murder what I most adore,
Laughing: I am indeed of those
Condemned for ever without repose
To laugh — but who can smile no more.
I’ve rendered thusly, retaining the third line’s ambiguities (is it ‘condemned to laugh forever’, or ‘whose laughter is condemned forever’?) and near-exact meaning, except for the slightly obscured last line:
Of my heart I am a vampire,
— One of those great abandoned
Who with laughter damned
Never more may pleasure!
Heautontimorumenos (The Self-Tormentor)
I’ll strike you without anger
Without hate, like a butcher,
Like the rock Moses undid,
And I will, from your eyelid,
So I may quench my Sahara,
Spur the waters of suffering.
My desire, stirred and hoping
Shall bathe in the salty delta
Like a vessel sailing large,
And your tears will resonate
In the heart inebriate
Like a snare beating the charge!
Am I not a dissonance
In the divine symphony,
Shaking prey to the presence
Of ravenous Irony
She’s in my voice, the squealer!
All my blood this dark liquor!
I am the sinister mirror
Where the shrew sees her stalker.
I am the wound and the steel!
I am the skull and the lead!
I am the limb and the wheel,
Executioner and dead!
Of my heart I am a vampire,
— One of those great abandoned
Who with laughter damned
Never more may pleasure!
Like a feral-eyed angel,
I’ll return to your hollow
And in silence crawl
Along the nighttime shadows;
I will give you, my brune,
Kisses as cold as the moon
And the caresses of a snake
Around a ditch come awake.
When at last the morning’s freed,
You will find my spot emptied,
Cold tenant till nightfall.
What others through tenderness,
Your life and youthfulness,
Through fear I shall control.
It is a woman of beauty pure,
Whose wine drapes the allure.
A venom, like love’s claw,
Who off her figure slithers in awe.
Death, the depraved she mocks,
While the fiend’s hand always stalks,
A game that respectfully
Treats this body’s firm majesty.
Sultana at rest, she walks a goddess,
For in pleasure alone she has faith;
Amid open arms filled with breasts,
Her eyes call upon the human race.
She knows, she believes, the sterile virgin
Without whom none should be living,
That beauty is a gift sublime
That bears pardon from crime.
Ignoring Hell or purgatory fire,
When at last comes the nightly hour
She will face the final Foe,
Like a newborn — with neither hate nor sorrow.
