Helmut Newton for Wolford 1995
The Greatest Sonnet of the 19th Century
For RJ Dent
XCIII. – A UNE PASSANTE
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le festoon et l’ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec ca jambe de statue.
Moi, je bouvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son œil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le Plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair…puis la nuit! – Fugitive beauté
Don’t le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loijn d’ici! Trop tard ! jamais peut-étre!
Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!
XCIII. – TO A WOMAN PASSING
The deafening street about you screams.
Majestic suffering, a great dual;
Tall and slim a woman passes with a fastidious hand,
Balancing and raising it with the hem of her skirt.
Agile and noble, and with statuesque limb.
You drink her in, overcome like some fool.
In her eye, exists a livid storm where hurricanes
originate;
The gentleness which fascinates, the pleasure which
kills.
Lightning bolt…then night! – Fugitive beauty
Whose look makes you suddenly come alive,
Will you never see her again?
Elsewhere, far from here! too late! Perhaps never
to see her again!
Pretending not to see you, she who also doesn’t know
where you are going.
O you whom I could have loved, o you who knew it!
This is one of the most famous
French sonnets of the 19th century, it is the flaneur poem par
excellence and, without any doubt, one of Charles Baudelaire’s most -best
loved poems and so contributed to what made him so popular with everyone. It is
also one of the poems by him which I have struggled the most with to translate.
I have made numerous attempts, none really completely satisfy, but this is the
latest version of mine and which I am reasonably happy with. It is a testament
to the poem’s perfection, rendering all my efforts so imperfect!
My wife, who is Sardinian, has
a phrase which perhaps best explains the phenomenon which I am trying to
explain that all translators must recognise - A furi di - literally meaning ‘at fury of’, by doing
something repeatedly and with insistence – passionately insistent, I would add.
The fury is important particularly with the poem above which I very much can’t
help but seeing some of my other abiding passions along with Baudelaire and those
would be; Heraclitus, Heidegger and Samuel Beckett.
So, what am I referring to
exactly with the above tripartite of references? It is in the very aphoristic phrase
which ends the second verse, here.
Agile et noble, avec ca jambe de statue.
Moi, je bouvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son œil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le Plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair…puis la nuit! – Fugitive beauté
Don’t le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,
Agile and noble, and with statuesque limb.
You drink her in, overcome like some fool.
In her eye, exists a livid storm where hurricanes
originate;
The gentleness which fascinates, the pleasure which
kills.
Lightning bolt…then night! – Fugitive beauty
Whose look makes you suddenly come alive,
The reference to the lightning
bolt is what I find incredibly reminiscent of Heraclitus’s fragment number 64,
which Baudelaire must have been aware of, as Les Fleurs du Mal is full
of references to Greek antiquity.
τὰ δὲ πάντα οἰακίζει κεραυνός[1]
Lightning steers the universe.[2]
Lightning has
always been associated with violence, and illumination at the same time. So,
fitting so appropriately into Heraclitus’s unifying philosophy where
everything, each apparent opposite, seamlessly binds with its opposing nature;
be it death or life, or indeed man or woman. Un coup de foudre is what the French say when you have been
struck to the core by someone’s beauty, comparing it to being hit with a bolt of
lightning. I seem to recall that Mario Puzzo uses the expression also in the
popular novel The Godfather to explain how Michael Corleone feels when
he sees his future wife to be. “ You go hit by the thunderbolt, eh?” Fabrizzio
says, clapping him on the back. The scene in the novel takes place in Sicily. Colpo
di fulmine – or, love at first sight. But which strikes one violently, like
a bolt of lightning. It is this twin register which Baudelaire plays upon, the
symbolism is at once classical and popular, hence his eternal appeal. As
ordinary people and more specialist readers alike can see what they wish to see
in the symbolism. Of course, the metaphor of violence is evoked also in the
beautifully aphoristic phrase which prefigures the lighting.
La douceur qui fascine et le Plaisir qui tue.
The gentleness which fascinates, the pleasure which
kills.
All of which further adds to
the element of danger to the encounter. The danger being of course, and which
so abruptly happens to the poet at the end of the poem, that the woman will get
away from him. ‘Fugitive beauty’. The symbolism is further heightened raising
the element of the whole encounter itself metaphoric – the divine apparition being
representative of eternal desire itself. In this particular reading, Baudelaire
is prefiguring Lacan by almost 100 years. But, this poem is placed deliberately
in the Tableaux Parisiens section which follows immediately on from Spleen
et Idéal which would suggest that this is no ideal but an actual event, or
encounter, happening on the streets of Paris. So empirical reality, as opposed to
Platonic idealism. This is where Baudelaire’s sublime Aristotelian system of categorisation
comes in, Les Fleurs du Mal being nothing less than a complete
phenomenological exploration of the human condition itself, prefiguring Husserl
and Heidegger by half a century. Besides, anyone who has ever experienced the
phenomenon will be able to testify to its existence. I remember literally
jumping off a bar chair when I saw my wife for the first time dressed up on a
Friday night!
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le festoon et l’ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec ca jambe de statue.
The deafening street about you screams.
Majestic suffering, a great dual;
Tall and slim a woman passes with a fastidious hand,
Balancing and raising it with the hem of her skirt.
Agile and noble, and with statuesque limb.
The danger then being in the
dual, that for one fleeting moment in time, there on the street, a perfect
stranger appears to you, and the clock is ticking. You must act fast and
decisively. The only thing that matters is pure surface.
Agile et noble, avec ca jambe de statue.
The eye roams, picking out
furtive details. Statuesque limbs! This is when I reminded of Helmut Newton and
his Giantesses marching along the street in those great black and whites. Once
again Art and Life collide, and where one begins and the other takes off is
anyone’s guess! Personally, I am transported back to Place de la Concorde. Its
1995, and the Viennese hosiery company Wolford have just launched their new
advertising campaign Support & Forming – la sensation luxueuse d’une
silhouette plus mince, and the advertising company JC Decaux have inserted
Newton’s black and white Goddesses into the transparent billboards which are
lit up like great masters in the nearby Louvre. I am on a passing train, and
can only see them from afar. They appear to me there in the night like interior
visions of my won desire exhibited there in the great open public space before
me. And there is another great 20th century philosophical conundrum,
all evoked in this 14 line poem!
[2] Heidegger & Fink: Heraclitus Seminar, Translated by Charles
H. Seibert, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1993, p.4.
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