CORRESPONDENCES - POET AS PHENOMENOLOGIST - 3 POEMS BY BAUDELAIRE

 

                                                                                

IV.             – L’ALBATROS

 

 

 

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

Prennent des albatross, vates oiseaux des mers,

Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,

Le navire glissent sur les gouffres amers.

 

A peien les ont-ils deposes sur les planches,

Que ces rois de l’azur, maladroit 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 !

 

Le poète est semblabe au prince de nuées

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

Exile sur le sol au milieu des huées,

Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher. 

 

 

 

 

IV.             The Albatross

 

 

 

Often, to amuse themselves, ship crews

Brought aboard Albatross, those great birds of the sea,

And who often were their indolent companions,

As their ships glided upon the bitter waves.

 

And, almost as soon as they let them out on deck,

How these great sky kings suddenly then appeared ungainly and awkward,

Trailing piteously their great white wings

Like proud useless oars behind them.

 

These winged voyagers, how they appeared so out of place.

Once the superb plungers, now they looked only comical and stupid.

One shakes her beak about in frustration;

Another mimes, as she clumsily walks, the infirm who fly.

 

The Poet is rather like these Princes of the Clouds,

Those who would fly above the eye of the storm, smiling

As they look down. Yet, exiled upon the earth,

Their great wings impeding even the most local movements.

 

 

We come to L’Albatros, the most ungainly bird alive used by the poet as an unforgettable metaphor for when s/he is confined to the earth, but when it enters the sky, its most natural element, it is said that it can glide for hours without flapping its great wings which, of course, is analogous to the great invigorating feeling of the poet when they are actually in the act of composition. Verse Junkies was the name of a publication I came across some years ago which would appear to get across the idea, at least in English. Most poets, proper ones I mean ( as there are so many pretenders these days),  would see in this act, the creative one, a power or force which gives them the greatest sense of personal achievement so much so that they would come to see themselves, at least in their most fundamental sense of self, as intrinsically linked to the role of the poet/artist.

Of course, the thematic link with the preceding poem Bénédiction is clearly evident which is another singular element to Les Fleurs du Mal in that the poems follow a very close chronological order, almost like a novel. I can think of no other work, barring Dante’s Commedia and Shakespeare’s sonnets, which can compete on the scale of Baudelaire’s ambition. Petrarch, Pushkin, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson come near in terms of scope, I would agree, but there is something all -consuming in Baudelaire’s project which somehow, at least for this reader, leaves those other illustrious poets somewhat trailing.

Perhaps, it is the rather systematic way in which Baudelaire goes through the different topics. The complexity of the interplay between the poems, the famous correspondences. I mean, one reads L’Albatros with all its invocation of the simulation of flight, you turn the page, and then you come across Élévation.

  

 

 

 

IV.             – ÉLÉVATION

 

 

 

 

Au-dessous des étangs, au-dessous des vallées,

Des montagnes, des bois, des nuages, des mers,

Par-delà le soleil, par delà les éthers,

Par-delà les confins des spheres étoilées,

 

Mon esprit, tut e meus avec agilité,

Et, comme un bon nageur qui se pâme dans l’onde,

Tu sillonnes gaiement l’immensité profonde

Avec une indiscible et male volupté.

 

Envole-toi bien loin de ces miasmes morbides;

Va te purifier dans l’air supérieur,

Et bois, comme une pure et divine liqueur,

Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces limpides.

 

Derrière les ennuis et les vastes chagrins

Qui chargent de leur poids l’existence brumeuse,

Heureux celui qui peut d’une aile vigoureuse

S’élancer vers les champs lumineux et sereins;

 

Celui don’t les pensers, comme des alouettes,

Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor,

-          Qui plane sur la vie, et comprend sans effort

Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes !

 

 

 

 

 

IV.             Elevation

 

 

 

 

 

High above the ponds, high above the valleys,

The mountains, the woods, the clouds, the seas,

Out there by the sun, out there by the ether,

Out there beyond the confines of the starred planets,

 

My spirit, bound with great agility,

And, like a superb swimmer it balms in the waves,

 Plunging happily into the immense profundity

With an inexpressible and male voluptuousness.

 

Fly out far beyond the noxious air;

Go and purify yourself in the stratosphere,

And drink, as if from a divine and pure liquor,

The clear fire which replenishes the limpid spaces.

 

Leave behind the boredom and the vast sorrows

Which super charge our so unclear existence,

Happy is he who with a vigorous wing can

Fly upward to the luminous and serene fields;

 

Those which certain thinkers, like larks,

Converge to in the morning to partake in the flight to freedom,

- Who glide through life, understanding effortlessly

The language of flowers, and other mute things.

 

 

        

  

 

IV. – CORRESPONDENCES

 

 

La Nature et un temple où de vivants piliers

Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;

L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de nites

Qui l’obervent avec des regards familiers.

 

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent

Dans une ténébreuse et profonde nite ,

Vaste comme la nuit et comme la claret,

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, corrumpus, riches et triomphants,

 

 

Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies,

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

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

 

 

 

 

IV. Correspondences

 

 

 

 

Nature is a temple where living pillars

Utter at times confused words;

Man passes through the forest of symbols

Which observe him with familiar eyes.

 

Deep echoes from afar become mixed up

In a dark and profound unity,

Vast like the night and lit through with

Perfumes, colours and sounds respond.

 

And, they are as sweet as the scent off children,

As soft and as sonorous as the notes emitting from an oboe,

Verdant as prairies, and just as richly corrupted and triumphant.

 

Having the expanse of infinity,

Like amber, musk, benzoin and incense

Whose songs transport both the body, and the mind.

 

 

Correspondances is, without a doubt, one of the most discussed poems by Baudelaire, and perhaps one of his most influential, as it prefigures the psychoanalytical schools of Freud, Jung and Lacan which were to have such a profound effect on 20^th century art and thought. This gives one, in just this one short poem, a very clear idea of how far ahead of his time Baudelaire was. The only poet to come anyway near him, in terms of such mind-expanding conceptualism, was Rimbaud who was to completely embrace the idea which is embodied in the poem; that of poet as savant and visionary.

The influence of hashish and other hallucinogens , such as opium which Baudelaire was to graduate to taking, are in clear evidence in the poem which would in turn explain Baudelaire’s rise in popularity in the English speaking world during the nineteen sixties with the advent of the whole counter culture movement and when hashish and LSD were the drugs of choice among the hippies and beatniks of the time.

In fact, I was to come across the name of Baudelaire for the very first time while I was smoking hashish on a pretty regular basis just after leaving school when I was listening to the psychedelic music of poets, musicians and bands like Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and Pink Floyd. Perhaps, with the increasing rise in popularity of cannabis, having been finally legalised in numerous states in the USA and in certain countries elsewhere, we will see a return of interest in the poet.

Baudelaire wrote extensively on his drug usage, very deliberately following in the line of writers like Thomas De Quincey and the poet Coleridge. This is just another aspect to him, in Cork during the 1980’s, I remember reading the writings of William Burroughs, again laced with drug induced visions, mind bending in their scope, foreseeing, like Baudelaire before him, apocalyptic visions of the future. This, surely, is one of the key signs of a visionary, which Baudelaire certainly was, when you find yourself looking around you, as I have done often in the last twenty or so years of this horror infested 21^st century, and you see yourself not so much as inhabiting the world, but more like living in one of the pages written by some drug induced prophet.           

For example, in the case of Baudelaire I remember very clearly, while I was living in Paris during the nineties, the extraordinary images taken by the German photographer Helmut Newton for the Austrian hosiery company Wolford. They had been lovingly framed encased in the bus stop shelters which advertising companies used illuminating them in such a way at night so that when you looked at them from a distance, from the perspective of a passing train or bus, for example, the modern day Amazons in black and white appeared like visions before you, ghost like in Place Concorde from out of the smoking haze of one of Baudelaire’s joints, clarifying your young eroticised mind. In these singular images, one could say Baudelaire’s ideal vision of Woman had become realised, and so the world to a certain extent, had become Baudelaire’s. This is another aspect of his genius, most of us walk around completely unaware of how his vision has shaped the world around us, particularly through the artifacts of the everyday such as the advertisements for women’s tights. It is through such details that his poetry becomes manifestly evident in the world, just like when you hear snatches of a song by Léo Ferré emanating from a café, or when a black cat sidles up to you on the street, or when, for example, you hear the ticking of an alarm clock and you imagine the two hands strangling you…

( All of the above poems are taken from The Enemy - Transversions from Charles Baudelaire published by Lapwing, 2015)