XCV PAYSAGE / CITYSCAPE AND DEREK MAHON'S ADAPTATION THE YELLOW BOOK

 

XCV

 PAYSAGE

 

Je veux, pour composer chastement mes églogues ,

Coucher auprès du ciel , comme les astrologues,

Et, voisin des clocher, écouter en révant

Leurs hymnes solennels emportés par le vent.

Les deux mains au menton, du haut de ma mansarde,

Je verrai l’atelier qui chante et qui bavarde ;

Les tuyaux, les clochers, ces mats de la cité ,

Et les grands ciel qui font réver d’éternité.

 

Il est doux, à travers les brumes, de voir naitre

L’étoile dans l’azur, la lampe à la fenêtre,

Les fleuves de charbon monter au firmament

Et la lune verser son pâle enchantement.

Je verrai les printemps, les étés, les automnes ;

Et quand viendra l’hiver aux neiges monotones,

Je fermerai partout  portières et volets

Pour bâtir dans la nuit mes féeriques palais.

Alors je rêverai des horizons bleuâtres,

Des jardins, des jets d’eaux pleurant dans les albâtres,

Des baisers, des oiseaux chantant soir et matin,

Et tout ce que l’Idylle a de plus enfantin.

L’Emeute, tempêtant vainement à ma vitre,

Ne fera pas lever mon front de mon pupitre ;

Car je serai plongé dans cette volupté

D’évoquer le Printemps avec ma volonté,

De tirer un soleil de mon cœur, et de faire

De mes pensers brûlants une tiède atmosphère.

 

XCV 

CITYSCAPE[i]

 

In order to compose more chastely my eclogues, I wish

To sleep under the sky like the cosmologists,

And listen while dreaming under the bells

Upon their solemn hymns transported on the winds.

Up in the attic, with both hands under my chin,

Where I’d see in the atelier those who’d sing and talk ;

The pipes, the bells, those staples of the city,

And the great skies which make you dream of eternity.

 

Among the fog, it is only natural, to see come alive

The stars in the azure, the lamp at a window,

The streams of coal smoke rising to greet the firmament

And the moon then versing its enchantment.

I’ll see the spring, summers and autumns ;

And when the winters come with their monotonous snow,

Everywhere I’ll close up the doors and the shutters

In order to construct my dreamy palace.

And then I will be able to see bluer horizons,

Gardens, jets of water spurting from the alabaster,

 Kisses, the birds singing night and day,

And all that is idyllic and most infantile.

Mutely, storms raving at my window

Will not force me to lift my head from my desk;

For I will be lost in that voluptuousness

Evoking the spring at my bidding,

Taking the sun from my heart, and making

My burning thoughts gently acclimatise.

 

---

[i]

 

 

 

What I love about this poem by Baudelaire is the completely unexpected innocence of it, situated particularly after the tumult of splenetic poems which completes the first section of Les Fleurs Du Mal, this poem, as the instigator of a completely new section of the book – Tableaux Parisiens – it allows us the readers, and no doubt the poet or author too, time to recalibrate and start anew. Remember, section II Tableaux Parisiens unlike section I, Spleen et Idéal, will be grounded in the real world, as it were, as opposed to the ideal projections which we encountered in the first section, and this is an aspect of Les Fleurs Du Mal which must really be taken into account. Baudelaire really is ahead of his time, predating phenomenology by over half a century, and yet what is the book but a complete phenomenological exploration of the human soul, in all its many diverse aspects. This is why Baudelaire needs to be continuously assessed as a poet, particularly today, as the almost two-dimensional image of him as the eternal poète maudit  simply does not stand up to scrutiny. Again, the ‘lazy’ reading which has become endemic of our times is all too easy and futile. Rather, when you engage with the book, over a series of readings, which often take place a numerous times during your life ( typically youth, middle-age, and old age ), what one in fact finds, as with all canonical works, is that the truth of a work of art of the calibre of Les Fleurs Du Mal, rather like the author who composed it, is far more complex than one might have ever expected and which is why Re-readings are so important. And of course, one could add to that, as are Re-translations – or transversions. 

 Another thing I wish to point out here is Derek Mahon’s treatment of the same poem, which he curiously translates as The Yellow Book. The reference can only be to the famous literary periodical that came out in Britain during the late nineteenth century after Baudelaire had died and whose influence thanks to writers and artists like Verlaine, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley would, the two latter were both published in The Yellow Book and whose aesthetic was very much French decadence, which I found a rather interesting device by Mahon to evoke the old demi-monde of Victorian Britain in the context of the poem by Baudelaire. But once again, rather like Ciaran Carson and Ulick O’Conor, Mahon insists on trying to maintain the rhyming scheme in English which again I find so utterly pointless.

French is a vowel based language where all the vowel sounds need to be accentuated when you are speaking it, indeed as with all Romance languages such as Italian and Spanish. However, English, being a Germanic language, is stress based. So the emphasis is no longer placed on the vowels but on the content words, and this is a profound change on the emphasis and of course music and cadence and rhythm of the particular languages. It is all important. So, that when you read a stanza or even a couplet in a poem by Baudelaire , you simply can never expect to retain the same serpentine melody which is so hypnotic in the French original, which is why I made the very conscious decision not to try and retain the rhyme, unless of course it happened naturally, and sometimes it does, but never to force it. This is what I find so disagreeable with rhyming Baudelaire in English. Let me show you what I mean. Here is the first verse of the poem again in French.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Je veux, pour composer chastement mes églogues ,

Coucher auprès du ciel , comme les astrologues,

Et, voisin des clocher, écouter en révant

Leurs hymnes solennels emportés par le vent.

Les deux mains au menton, du haut de ma mansarde,

Je verrai l’atelier qui chante et qui bavarde ;

Les tuyaux, les clochers, ces mats de la cité ,

Et les grands ciel qui font rêver d’éternité.

 

Now, here is Derek Mahon’s adaptation taken from his Collected Poems ( Gallery Press, 1999.)

 

Chastely to write these eclogues I need to lie,

like the astrologers, in an attic next the sky

where, high among church spires, I can dream and hear

their grave hymns wind-blown to my ivory tower.

Chin in hand, up here in my apartment block,

I can see workshops full of noise and talk,

cranes and masts of the ocean-going city,

vast cloud-packed photographs of eternity.

 

Okay, so if you read the French first, paying attention to the punctuation, Baudelaire uses non-defining relative clauses, like most poets, to great effect, and these break up the cantering rhythm which the English just seems to run off with. However, there is something else going on here and that is in the actual content itself, now Mahon in all fairness does reject outrightly Ted Hughe’s claim to remain literal rather than depart; Mahon never called his versions translations, but ‘adaptations’ rather. And that is fine with me, unless you are going to alter a perfectly good line in French which translates rather perfectly literally, which is the case with the last line, I believe, of the sonnet above and which is actually one of my favourite lines in French by Baudelaire.

 

Et les grands ciel qui font rêver d’éternité. ( Baudelaire)

vast cloud-packed photographs of eternity. ( Mahon)

And the great skies which make you dream of eternity. ( O’Neill)