Baudelaire's Antisemitism

 

                                                                          

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The Seven Old Man

after Baudelaire 

To Victor Hugo

 

 

Teeming city, city of dreams,

Where ghosts in plain view can assail the pedestrian!

Mysteries, everywhere, pour out like sap

Into the powerful colossus of the narrow canal.

 

One morning, and so on the melancholy street

The houses, which the mist had aligned with in height,

Simulating the two banks of a narrow river,

And which, the décor resembling the soul of an actor,

 

A dirty, jaundiced fog inundates the space;

I follow, my nerves stiffening like a hero’s

In discussion with my already wearied soul;

The whole district is shaken by heavy loads.

 

Suddenly, an old man in rags

The colour of the mercurial sky,

And whose aspect would make any proffered alms cry,

Without any hint of malice which glimmers in his eye.

 

 

 

 

 

Appears to me. You would have thought that his pupils

Had been dipped in bile; his look was sharpening

The already frosty air, and his long pointy beard, rigid

Like a dagger, was similar to that of Judas.

 

As for his spine, it was not hunched but more broken

And with his right leg formed a perfectly straight right angle,

As straight as a stick, complementary to his mind,

And it gave to his whole demeanour something out of step.

 

From an infirm quadruped to an old Jew with three legs,

Deep in the mud and the snow they were penetrating,

As if walking over the dead beneath their feet,

And hostile to the universe rather than indifferent.

 

All of the nomenclature follows them; beard, eyes, hunch back, staff

And rags; no singular distinguishing trait alone,

But from the same hell of origin alone they originate,

This centenary twin with the baroque aspect, marching aimlessly.

 

What infamous plot is their goal,

Or which awful accident humiliates me so?

For I count several now, minute after countless minute,

This sinister old man who keeps multiplying…!

 

And who is one and the same that laughs at my unease,

And who is not seized with a fraternal shiver,

Knowing well that despite his apparent decrepitude

These seven monsters have an eternal quality about them.

   Would that I could without dying contemplate an eight;

Inexorably fatal and ironic,

Repulsive Phoenix, father and son of himself –

But I turn my back on this infernal cortege.

 

Exasperated like a drunk that sees double,

I return home closing the door behind me, disgusted,

Sick and afraid, spirit in a fever, deeply troubled

And wounded also by the mystery of the absurdity of it all.

 

Vainly my reason wishes to take to its pulpit;

But the storm all around unsettles its efforts,

And so my soul dances, and dances, dances like an old Guinness barge,

Rudderless and wayward upon the monstrous sea !

 

 

 

  I must say, the antisemitic nature of the poem threw me when I was translating this piece, asI had not noticed it before; or perhaps, rather, I had chosen to ignore it! But this is what is soimportant about translation, as when you are translating a text like Les Fleurs du Mal by apoet like Charles Baudelaire, a poet one must remember who has had nothing less than a Copernican effect on the whole way in which we see the world[1], you must expect the moststrange things, rather like as you would expect translating, or so I would imagine, a poet of a similar stature, so a poet such as Shakespeare or Dante. I myself would rank Baudelaire in the third position, with Dante on top, and the great Bard himself in numero duo. But, I realise of course that this is totally a subjective point of view, one that I have cultivated over years and years of practice.        

As an Irishman, antisemitism, or religious intolerance of any kind, I should point out, I find tobe a particularly unsettling form of prejudice as growing up in the Republic of Ireland during the seventies and eighties one saw everyday printed in the newspapers and broadcast on the television and radio the awful often violent, deadly violent, nature that such prejudice oftentakes. Indeed, I was so traumatised by witnessing such violence everyday that I have yet to visit Belfast, a city where I have had three collections of poetry published! I think Irish people in general would have notions like mine. There is a deep understanding among us, particularly with people of my own generation (I was born in 1967), that religious intolerance of any kind is despicable, as it can only lead to violence and hatred. So, when I come across antisemitic writings by someone as exceptionally gifted as a poet like Baudelaire, or LouisFerdinand Céline for that matter, I tend to take a step back as I realise that I am now seeingthe man, and by this I mean his weakness, and not the artist. What do I mean by thisstatement? Even as I have written this, I realise how quintessentially contemporary this whole issue is, just one reason more why Baudelaire is so relevant to people today!

Often when I see debates of this kind, and they happen more and more these days, I often find myself referencing Caravaggio. Caravaggio, as well as being an extraordinary painter who revolutionized not only painting but, again like Baudelaire, also influenced how we actually perceive the world. His celebrated Chiarascuro technique is analogous with how we see the world; contrasted in light and darkness, good and evil. And so, when someone, like the other day, asks me whether I can distinguish between the artist and the man, someone was making this remark in relation to Céline’s antisemitism, I tend to dismiss the argument as being infantile, as people are typically non-binary. What we used to call Grey! We are far more complex than to be described in such narrowly defining terms, one only has to look to the whole gender debate for further proof of this. And yet, when I translated the above poem,which is clearly antisemitic, I did so with some foreboding. As I am not in favour of antisemitism, and would be at pains now to distinguish the term antisemitism as opposed to antizionist, particularly in the context of today ( 2026) when Israel, which is being led by Benjamin Netanyahu, is conducting a genocidal war against the people of Palestine and Lebanon and also Iran, in cahoots with the USA  should add, I while many countries, though not all, idly stand by. I am glad to see that my own government have taken a stand, along with Spain and have chosen to boycott importing products from Israel as indeed was done in the eighties against the apartheid regime in South Africa when Nelson Mandela was still in prison. I remember it well.           

You see, because of the historic context in which I am now reading this poem, which is historically of course a context that is totally unlike that of Baudelaire’s or even Céline’s time, it still allows me to read into it a meaning that is specific to me, in other words one that I can live with; one that is making the distinction between antizionist, as in the meaning of the current genocidal context, as opposed to antisemitic. You see, I actually love Jewish culture and writers. My library is full of books written by great Jewish writers. Only just recently I bought books by the Jewish novelist Paul Cohen, the political scientist John Mearsheimer and the Nobel Prize winning physicist Roger Penrose. I regularly refer to theworks of Walter Benjamin, particularly in relation to Baudelaire, and Hannah Arendt. Kafka, Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig are also novelists that interest me, so, you see, I have been deeply, profoundly influenced by Jewish writers and thinkers, and so have come by association to love also the history and culture of European jews particularly. So, when I read a poem like this above, and particularly by a poet like Baudelaire who is one of my all time favourite poets, I am not going to simply cancel him. Are you nuts! No, I am simply going to take it on board that he was a human, and so – terribly flawed, like most of us. And, this weakness that I have discovered in him is merely going to make me love and understand him more. Not less.  

      

Peter Sean O’Neill

Spring, 2026

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[1] When I was organising the Baudelaire@ 200 literary festival for the Alliance Francaise ( 2021), I was surprised that a number of the poets whom I had invited, and who were coming from totally different linguistic and so cultural backgrounds, were in fact ignorant, and by their own admission, of the enormous influence that Baudelaire had had on their own culture, and these were world class poets who had reputations as being deeply cultured and so knowledgeable about such literary matters, and they were in respect to their own particular literary heritages, but, once again, confessed to me their ignorance of their knowledge of the influence that Baudelaire had had on the poetry and poets of their own countries, and yet, I could see it clearly, I who had far less insight and knowledge into their respective literary figures, I could see without any doubt the influence that Baudelaire had had on the literary figures of every writer on the globe who was born after 1900. Baudelaire died in 1867, so it would take a generation, at least, for his influence to spread. I would liken his influence spreading across  the globe to that of a virus.