Selected Translations

from Charles Baudelaire’s

Les Fleurs du Mal

Helen Palma

Acknowledgments

The Enemy..........Iambs & Trochees
Spleen (IV)..........The Formalist
Correspondences..........Pivot
To The Reader..........Iambs & Trochees
De Profundis Clamavi..........Iambs & Trochees
Obsession..........Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies website,
and Iambs & Trochees
The Cracked Bell..........Iambs & Trochees
My Beatrice..........Iambs & Trochees
The Lid..........Iambs & Trochees
Hazy Sky..........Iambs & Trochees
The Self-Tormentor..........Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies website,
and Iambs & Trochees
The Swan..........Iambs & Trochees


Copyright © 2007 by Helen Palma
All Rights Reserved


Cover Art: Camille Pissarro, Le Boulevard Montmartre, 1897


Published by The New Formalist Press


XHTML & CSS design by Leo Yankevich

The Enemy / L’Ennemi

My youth was nothing but a hurricane,
Though now and then I glimpsed the eye of heaven;
Thunder and rain so ravaged my domain
That in my garden I saw few fruits redden.

Now at the autumn of ideas I stand,
And I shall have to work with rake and spade
In order to restore the flooded land,
Which has collapsed in holes the size of graves.

Can flowers of May that only dreams now reach
Acquire from this soil, scrubbed like a beach,
The mystic food to fortify their parts?

Alas! Alas! The life that Time devours!
And that dark Enemy who gnaws our hearts
Grows strong in blood as he drains us of ours!

Spleen (IV) / Spleen (IV)

When the low, leaden sky weighs like a lid
Upon the mind that old vexations bite;
When the horizon in black bile lies hid,
And pours a dark day down, sadder than night;

When the earth turns into a prison cell
Where Expectation, like a frightened bat,
Thrashes against the humid walls pell-mell,
Until it is concussed and lying flat;

When like the bars of a gigantic jail
Rain splashes down in a cascading train;
When silently a spider’s silken trail
Stretches its web from the root of my brain;

Then all at once bells ring out angrily,
And hurl into the sky a ghastly din;
As spirits, doomed to roaming aimlessly,
Let their interminable wails begin;

Then long hearses, no drums or bagpipes seen,
Move slowly in procession through my soul;
Defeated Hope sobs, while the despot queen,
Anguish, upon my head sets her black scroll.

Correspondences / Correspondences

Strange Mother Nature is a temple, where
The living pillars speak confusing words;
We enter in through its symbolic woods,
Beneath an enigmatic, ancient stare.

As prolonged echoes merging far away
In a profound and opaque unity;
As vast as darkness, vast as clarity,
The colors, textures, sounds and perfumes play.

Some perfumes are refreshing as a child,
And some mellow as oboes, green as grass,
While others are triumphant, rich and wild,

For they contain the age that shall not pass;
Of such are amber, musk and dried incense:
These chant the ecstasy of mind through sense.

To The Reader / Au Lecteur

Illusion, avarice and lust compound
To make our bodies and our minds unsound;
We feed ourselves on false remorse for vice,
As dirty beggars nourish their own lice.

In sin we’re stubborn, in repentance weak,
Contrite because of the rewards we seek;
We relapse quickly to our paths of slime,
As if our tawdry tears could clean the grime.

It’s thrice-great Satan at our bed of pain,
Who soothes with patience our bedazzled brain;
The precious metal of our mind, thus kissed,
That able alchemist transmutes to mist.

The Devil pulls the strings that make us dance:
Through him the most repugnant act enchants;
As step by step, each day towards Hell we sink,
And take no notice of the mounting stink.

As a penniless roué will lick and paw
The tortured breast of a decrepit whore,
We steal clandestine pleasures passed en route,
And squeeze them dry as dessicated fruit.

Thick as a million intestinal worms,
Within our brain a host of Demons squirms;
While with each breath, invisibly Death streams
Deep down our lungs, yet we offer no screams.

If dagger, fire, arsenic and rape
Have not yet painted their pathetic shape
Upon the dreary canvas of our fate,
It’s that our daring is inadequate.

But ’midst the jackals, panthers, bitches, monkeys,
Insects, vultures, goats, rats, snakes and donkeys
That grunt and screech in the infernal noise
That our menagerie of vice enjoys,

There is one uglier, more wicked and defiled;
Neither his gestures nor his words are wild,
Yet gladly he’d reduce the world to rubble—
Engulf it in a yawn with little trouble.

He’s Tedium! A lachrymosal type,
Who dreams of gibbets while he smokes his pipe;
You know him, Reader—frail, yet monstrous, too,
Hypocrite Reader, he is me and you!

De Profundis Clamavi / De Profundis Clamavi

I ask your pity, You, my only love,
From deep within the pit where my heart lies,
This mournful place beneath dull leaden skies
Where I, with dread and blasphemy, now move.

The sun is pallid six months of the year—
The other six, pitch darkness drapes the earth;
This land’s a frozen waste of death and dearth;
No bird, no stream, no bright green thing is here.

The seven deadly plagues would not suffice
To match the horror of this sun of ice,
And this vast darkness older than Creation.

I envy beasts their thoughtless hibernation;
They’re unaware, deep in October beds,
How slow the skein of time unwinds its threads.

Obsession / Obsession

Forest, as fearful as a huge cathedral,
You roar like an organ while, in our damned hearts,
Dark chambers where death’s rattle is primeval,
Echoes of De Profundis speak their parts.

Ocean, I loathe your useless fluctuations
For they’re a mirror of my own! That wheeze
Of finished men, their sobs and imprecations,
Are mocked with monstrous laughter by your seas.

You’d please me better, Night, without your stars,
Whose twinkling is a tongue known everywhere;
For I seek out the void, the black, the bare!

Though now even the darkest shadow jars,
For legions thrive, inside its murky haze,
Of vanished dead who haunt my waking days.

The Cracked Bell / La Cloche Fêlée

Upon a winter’s night, how bittersweet
To sit beside a smoking, crackling fire;
To hear the past rise up on distant feet,
As churchbells echo through the fog and briar.

How fortunate is that strong-throated bell
Which is, despite its age, alert and hard;
It faithfully rings out its pious knell,
Like a veteran commanded to stand guard.

Whereas my soul is cracked beyond repair,
That when it tries to fill the cold night air
Its feeble voice is like the thick death rattle

Of a forgotten soldier shot in battle,
Who, unable to move despite his tries,
Beneath a pile of bloodied corpses dies.

My Beatrice / La Béatrice

Through fields of ash, whose greenery was spent,
I walked and made to Nature my lament;
And as I roamed, directionless, apart,
I honed my daggered thoughts upon my heart.
But then, at noon, a sinister black cloud
Descended over me, bearing a crowd
Of hellish fiends upon its heaving shoals.
These peered at me like curious, cruel trolls
And scrutinized me coldly, like the sick,
Or idlers who abuse a lunatic;
And as they winked and made some scornful jests,
I heard the giggling whispers of those pests:

“Let’s take our fill of this homunculus,
This Osric aping the Lord Hamlet thus
With eyes distracted and with tousled hair.
How pitiful to watch this epicure,
This bum, this oddball actor on the dole
Who, because he’s learned to fake his role,
Thinks he can sway the eagles, crickets, streams,
The very flowers, with his woe-filled themes;
Even at us, who wrote these worn clichés,
He bellows forth rhetorical displays.”

I could (since by a thousand mountain peaks
My pride stands higher than these dwarfish freaks)
Have simply turned my head away unbowed,
Had I not seen among that loathsome crowd
(O sooner should the sun fall from his sphere!)
My queen, my shining light without compeer,
There laughing with them at my dazed distress,
And granting, here and there, a vile caress.

The Lid / Le Couvercle

Go where we will, be it on land or sea,
Beneath a sun that’s searing or cold-white,
As votaries of Christ or venery,
Possessed of millions or a widow’s mite,

Provincial, urban, settled, young and free,
Whether our trifling brains be dull or bright,
We all endure a fear of mystery,
And looking upwards, tremble at the sight

Up there, the Sky! A crypt that smothers all,
The flood-lit ceiling of a music hall
Upon whose blood-drenched stage each actor toils;

Atheist’s dread and hermit’s hopeful prayer,
The giant and black-lidded cauldron where
Humanity, immense, unnoticed, boils.

Hazy Sky / Ciel Brouillé

Your face seems hidden by a parchment screen;
Your mystic eyes (but are they blue or green?)
Alternatively tender, cruel or sly,
Are paisley patterns in a lazy sky.

You call to mind the sultriness long past,
Days, like a lover’s temper, overcast,
When in the restlessness and grip of pain
His sleepless nerves upbraid his torpid brain.

You are the sea’s edge, which the sky has kissed,
Lost in the gauziness of autumn’s mist,
And splendid, as a landscape well-endowed,
Aglow, like an illuminated cloud.

Dangerous woman, with your changeling clime,
Shall I adore as well your frost and rime,
And learn to draw from that pitiless winter
Joys keener than its ice-and-steel-tipped splinter?

The Self-Tormentor / L’Héautontimorouménos

I shall strike you without anger,
Without hate, just like a butcher;
Just as Moses struck the rock!
On your eyelids I shall slake

My unquenched Saharan thirst,
Till your suffering waters burst;
My desire, swelled with hope,
Sails your salt tears like a ship

When it’s setting out to sea;
All my heart in ecstasy
As your sobs reverberate,
Like a war drum’s rolling beat;

I am the cacophony
In the divine symphony;
Me, whom Irony has ravaged,
Shaken by the throat and savaged;

She has made my voice turn loud!
She has poisoned all my blood!
Making me the dreadful glass
Where that shrew beholds her face.

I’m the wound and I’m the knife!
I’m both wife-beater and wife!
I’m the rack and I’m the limb,
Executioner and victim!

I’m my own heart’s Dracula,
One of those spectacular
Cynics, doomed to laughter while
They’ve forgotten how to smile.

The Swan / Le Cygne

I.

Andromache, I think of you. That stream,
The tarnished glass that once shone back at you
Your widow’s griefs, so regal and supreme,
That second Simoeis, which from your crying grew,

Has suddenly enriched my fertile mind,
As I was crossing new-built Carrousel.
The old Paris is gone! Alas, I find
A human heart outlasts the sights it knows so well.

Only my inner spirit now discerns
The makeshift huts, the capitals, the tiles,
The puddle-circled greenish rocks, the ferns,
The merchandise in shop-fronts jumbled up in piles.

That sprawling sight was a menagerie.
And once, upon a cold, clear morning there
As Toil awakened from night’s lethargy
And as the din of roadwork rent the silent air,

I saw a swan that had escaped its cage.
It rubbed the arid road with its webbed feet,
Dragging its gaping beak in frantic rage
Along a gutter that was drier than concrete,

Then used the dust to water its white plumes.
At last, all heartsick for its lake, it cried,
“Where are you, Rain? Thunder, where’s your boom?”
I still can see that bird, in myth so dignified,

Fatal and strange, interrogate the sky,
Which shone that day a cruel, ironic blue.
With neck convulsed, expecting a reply,
The wretched thing from God tried to demand its due.

II.

Paris is changing, but my melancholy
Remains. The mansions, scaffolds, housing blocks
And neighborhoods are now an allegory;
And my dear memories grown heavier than rocks.

Thus here before the Louvre I feel oppressed.
I think of that swan, crazed but yet sublime;
And like all exiles gnawed by unredressed
Injustice. Then I think of your ignoble prime,

Andromache. Torn from brave Hector’s arms
To be the slave of Neoptolemus;
Beside a grave you wept away your charms.
Great Hector’s widow! Then mere wife of Helenus.

I think of the consumptive, lean physique
Of the negress seeking with her haggard eye
The absent cocoanut, date palm and teak
Of Africa, beneath this fog-bound Paris sky.

I think of those who’ve lost what can’t be found,
I think of those whose tears must quench their thirst;
Who suckle Sorrow and in gall are drowned,
I think of starving orphans, buds by the canker cursed.

The forest of all thoughts, my domicile,
Makes memory rise up from my heart’s core;
I think of sailors on a desert isle,
The captured and the conquered… and of many more!

About the author

Helen Palma holds advanced degrees in the Classics and in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Over twenty-five of her translations from the poetry of Baudelaire have been published in several journals. She lives in New York City.