I have been working on a collection of poetry, believe it or not. I thought I had given up, my last published collection was published in France four years ago. Without a doubt it was the best thing that I ever produced in the 40 or so years that I have been engaged in the art, a mere 90 copies were published and after receiving but two reviews, both done by friends, it then disappeared onto my bookshelf and nothing more was heard about it.
Such is the all common tale of the poet. So, I decieded to turn my attention to prose and have spent the last few years writing novels, a trilogy in all and I will statrt a fourth in the summer, when I am on holidays once again. But, in the meantime, I started writing some sonnets much to my own surprise. I have been writing sonnets now for years. I love the form, it suits me. The fourteen lines can adequately explore any wealth of problem, before just as easily departing once again into the deep night.
Baudelaire has been one of my major sources of influence, I grew up in France during the nineties and this experience has really set me apart from the majority of Irish writers who are writing today. It's a solitary exercise, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
The purpose of the current post is to introduce the sonnet The Giantess. It's poem number X1X in Les Fleurs du Mal, appearing in the Ideals and Spleen section at the start of the book. This collection, for those of you who do not know me, is without a doubt the collection which has had the most lasting impact on me, and that is mainly to do with my sexuality. As a poet, like most artists, I am deeply masochistic and so strong women have always been my main source of inspiration and strenght. I grew up with the photography of Helmut Newton, for God's sake during the seventies and eighties.
I have written before about the inlfunece of Baudelaire on the former 'King of Kink', as he used to be known as. What a boring world we live in now, looking back. Mediocrity spawned by sheer morality...! How the west has become such an altogther boring and tedious zone.
Let's not go there, we were doing so well.
Back to Baudelaire... Yes, the point I was trying to make about this wonderful sonnet is the hallucinatory quality of the vision. Baudelaire was a great smoker of Hashish, and this poem, The Giantess, has a wonderful hallucinatory fantasy that all men have when they are consumed by the vision of some woman with whom they have become obessed by. For women it must be equally the same.
You meet someone and they start filling your head, Freud, I think described it as a form of madness. Baudelaire, the hashish smoker, would appear to be likening it to a stone when the hallucinatory aspect of the woman takes on the giant proportions in your mind and you see the very parts of her blown up in your mind rather like a pin up or a model on an advertising billboard on the street. Perhaps more closer to today, certain pornography platforms online use clearly the idea that Baudelaire is conjuring up here particularly when prmoting dominatrixes. These incredible giants dominate the men whom they simply dwarf in sheer size and scope.
It is an incredible thought, imagining a poet in France in the 19th century having such an impact still on society today! Of course Baudelaire was a complete visionary. His work is still streets ahead in terms of style and vision than the awful content that you see being spawned particularly today when poetry has become so synonymous to ideological trends promoting diversity and other such lamentable platitudes which people in the west seem to have become completely obsessed with.
The poetry collection that I have been at work on, The Rose Garden, is divided up into three parts. The first part, de Vowels and Maximum Extension have both been posted on this blog; scroll back if you are interested. Then part two is devoted to Denis de Rougemont and the troubadour poets of the 12th and 13th century when the notion of courtly love first appeared in Europe, and which is the origin of modern notions of romance today.
Well, after completing this section, I will post some of the poems from this section on this blog at a later date, I had the brainwave to continue translating Baudelaire. One of my life long ambitions has been to translate Les Fleurs du Mal in its entirety. I am more than half way there now and this seemed like the perfect occassion.
The
Giantess
After
Baudelaire
As
long as Nature with her all powerful verve
Conceives
monstrous prodigies daily,
I’d
like to live beside a young giantess
Like
a voluptuous cat at the feet of some Goddess.
How
I’d love to see her body flower with soul
And
give free reign to its terrible pursuits;
Guessing
if the heart cradles a sombre flame
In
the humid mists where pool her eyes!
I
would run at my ease to explore her magnificent forms,
Climb
up upon her enormous limbs
And
in the summer months with the evil sun,
Ease
into the tremendous plains of her opened country
And nonchalantly nestle in the shade of her
breasts
Like
a peaceful hamlet at the foot of a mountain.
Isn't it wonderful! I don't mean my transversion, I mean the poem itself... Well, I tried to imagine writing a poem in a similar vein, as it were. Like a POV. That is the term, after all, that we would use now, no doubt. So, here is the poem that I wrote after transversing the above by.
Oh, a note for any Beckettians out there, what an accurdsed breed of failed fornicators...! I was inspired by a passage in The Unnamable, I think, in which he references the philosophy of Arnold Geulincx, the occasionalist philosopher that David Tucker has written so well about. Anyway, thought I'd throw that in to spanner up your skirts...!
Colossus
at Rhodes
Mountainous heights, the sky of hair…!
Bank then on the vast expanse of her plains;
The cool brownstone of her polished calves,
The burnished brilliance of the quartz in her
eyes
Gleaming there in the mist engulfed pupils.
The bulbous pink carnation of her lips
A rosebud flowering its gentle surrender
Rolling back the armies of my own
Assault now into the fragrance of her
Cool heights; again skyward marvelling at the
Celestial orchestrations of her hair,
Its downpouring torrents helmeting the head
Covering all thoughts in the clamp of its
shield,
Encompassing the sheer genius of her smile.
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