I took the above selfie while a quarter way into The Enemy - Transversions from Charles Baudelaire which was eventually published by Lapwing in Belfast, 2015. I was quite sick at the time, having been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis the year previous. I was not able to work, so bad had my condition become, and one way of keeping busy at home was translating-transversing Baudelaire.
I kind of grew up in France during the nineties, having moved there first to Paris, where I spent five years, and then moving south to Bordeaux. So France, and French culture, became incredibly important to me. I suppose this is what sets me apart from other writers in Ireland. Whereas they would mostly be relying on W.B. Yeats or Seamus Heaney as principle sources of influence, Baudelaire was my go to poet.
After finally finishing The Dark Pool, a book which took me over 15 years to write, I felt I had to try and translate him. I owed him so much, after all in that book I had tried to transpose Baudelaire's 19th century aesthetic onto 21st century Dublin, and it had worked. After this experiment I was totally able to concur with Slajov Zizek, when Russia annexed the Crimea, that we were actually living once again in the 19th century. Baudelaire's poetry feels so right for the times, the appalling abuse of power and violence which one sees everywhere. Just look to the recent elections in the UK and the rise of populism, might is right once again. This is Vico, the cyclical nature of empires, what he would call in his Scienza nouva the heroic age.
Baudelaire is one of the few poets who injected the spleen of his times into his poetry, he was one of the first to totally seize on the negative side, totally, and to use it as a poetic force, or power, and the results are still as unsettling as they were when Les Fleurs du Mal was first published back in the mid to late 19th century.
In my transversions of his work, I wanted to give a contemporary spin to his work. So I brought in Francis Bacon, Heidegger the holocaust and other such phenomenon that I thought would not be too far out of place. In fact Bacon's reworkings of Velasquez and Van Gogh were my inspiration, rather than any other writer. I wanted to experience the same freedom of violent expression. I was so tired of reading trite platitudes typically associated with Anglo-Saxon poetry. I was so tired of the hypocrisy. Hence the anger and frustration, to be harnessed like a force.
For example, who has not experienced the anger of being the jilted lover? The rage of jealousy, when Love turns poisonous? When one merely experiences Hate when one formerly felt Love? These are the extremely powerful emotions that Baudelaire wanted to tap into, the reverse side of the mirror. It was an incredible experience working on this book, finally I had to abandon it. But, I still come back to him. One day, perhaps in another ten years, I hope to publish my complete transverions of Les Fleurs du Mal.
XXXIX. – The Exquisite Cadaver
Remember
the ideal object which you discovered
That
beautiful summer morning, Dear soul:
By
way of the path where you found that exquisite
Cadaver
lying on a bed of pebbles,
Her
legs in the air, like some old tart,
Burning
and stewing in poisons,
Her
belly slit, almost nonchantly,
Pouring
forth all manner of noxious gasses?
The
sun burns down on the decomposing
Body,
as if searing a steak,
Rendering
back a hundred- fold to Mother Nature,
What
she herself had first conjoined.
And
the sky looks upon the superb carcass
As
it would upon a flower of Evil,
The
rigor mortis encroaching to such a point
That
the very earth around it has been scorched.
Great
Blue Bottles swarm in convoys,
Buzzing
out of the gaping cave, Cyclopean...
While
a treacle of feasting larvae thickly drip,
Making
of the stain a macabre Persian carpet.
The
process of decomposition rose before me,
Falling
in waves, and which I perceived in a kind of
Pointillism,
so that, wave-borne,
The
corpse seemed to come alive and multiply before me!
This
alternate universe was announced in atonal chords,
And
hit me with all the fever of a jungle humidity,
Or,
like the sporadic grains, scattered by a winnower,
Whose
rhythmic movements spun me in a dervish.
The
effaced shapes and forms were as if but a dream
From
a preliminary sketch, slow to arrive,
And
which the artist, not being able to rely on memory,
Had
then to resort to the magnetism of specific photographs.
Behind
the rocks an unnerved dog
Looked
at us both with a ravenous eye,
Trying
to deduce the auspicious minute
When
he could rip apart some rotting flesh from the bones.
-
And yet, You now would appear to be not so
dissimilar to this horror,
This putrid infection,
At one time Star de mes yeux,
You my one time, all consuming passion!
Yes!
After the last rites have long ago been pronounced upon us,
O
You, my once graceful Queen,
When
will you now, in your own time,
Wallow
with these bones upon the grass?
So,
my great Beauty! Whisper then to the vermin
How
you will cherish their kisses,
While
I guard for eternity this sublime image,
Of
all of our decomposing Love.
To order a copy of The Enemy - Transversions from Charles Baudelaire click on the link below.
https://sites.google.com/a/lapwingpublications.com/lapwing-store/peter-o-neill
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