French poetry 101 – Charles Baudelaire

[foudebassan]

1857 is a very important year in the history of French literature. The Second Empire is in full swing: Napoléon III is a businessman at heart, and he implements the law and order ticket that got him in power in the first place. People make money, and spend that money on booze, theatre and prostitutes (high-class girls were also actresses, which made going to see a play not as much a cultural statement as a refined brothel visit). The tension between the prosperous, middle-class conservative thinking and the debauched attitudes of the same was palpable, and two authors portray it with acute intensity.

The first in Flaubert - Madame Bovary is published, you guessed it, in 1857. Even if you do not read French, it is a milestone in world literature that you should get acquainted with – the cynicism of the writing, together with the virtuosity of the form, make it a character study of the human soul several notches above a Balzac.

And the second is Baudelaire (1821-1867).

His father is an elderly man who bought himself a young wife in his late days; he introduces Charles to art in general and painting in particular, and promptly dies. His mother re-marries an officer, the general Aupick, perhaps a bit sooner than social conventions would have considered proper; he takes the education of his step-son at heart and this means discipline, discipline, and more discipline for the unruly pupil – Baudelaire gets expelled from his school, passes the baccalauréat in extremis and shows a marked desire to begin a proper life of debauchery, heavy drinking and pretty girls. His parents want to avoid that; he is shipped of to the Pacific colonies against his will, hoping that lots of hard physical work will be the cure.

Baudelaire enjoys the travelling, but escapes at the Île Maurice and comes back to Paris, where he sues his mother to get his hands on his father’s money. He wins, and Real Life begins. He meets Jeanne Duval, a metis actress with whom he will share a 15-year-long passionate relationship; drinks a lot; spends a lot. He discovers Edgar Poe, whom he translates (the result being, IMHO, superior to the original).

The Aupicks get wind of it, and have him placed under judiciary tutelage, a lovely Napoleonian invention that means that grown people can be retrograded to a child’s status, complete with parental authority limiting their freedom and a fixed allowance. Baudelaire will never forgive his mother for this.

From then on, all goes downhill. The fascination he had for the beautiful Jeanne turns sour. They have screaming matches, break up, make up, and break up again for good. Jeanne’s health takes a turn for the worse. When she suffers a stroke of apoplexy that leaves her paralysed, Charles pays for her medical treatment and keep.

He falls in love twice more, but none strong enough to take Jeanne’s place in his heart.

He publishes Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, but the book is promptly seized, judged “obscene”, and censored. The trial leaves Baudelaire a moral and emotional wreck. He moves back to his now widowed mother’s; he writes, feverishly, more poems, defending the book. Giving up hope to be published again, he crosses the traditional line between verse (for the dramatic, the refined) and prose (for everyday concerns) and writes “poèmes en prose”. He suffers a first, mild heart attack that leaves him physically diminished; a second attack, while he in Brussels, in a last attempt to get a Belgian publisher take interest in the banned book, leaves him lucid but incapable of communicating with the world. He cannot take it any more and lets himself die, in his mother’s arms, forgotten by most.

Baudelaire’s entire production is haunted by a tension between the Beautiful, the Noble, the Ideal, and melancholia, reality, and depression. He calls that state, the state people too sensitive to make money and sleep soundly are perpetually in, “spleen” (in English in the text). This state is only illuminated by brief glimpses into the Ideal that only geniuses are allowed; the transition from the one to the other being travel, reminiscences, memories of past lives, correspondences between the different senses, alcohol, or sex. But such glimpses can only be fleeting, and only make the dull reality more depressing. Just living then becomes an additional “suffering” that the poet’s sensitive soul has to cope with in-between the brief flashes of Beauty.

Today’s poem is

Recueillement

Sois sage, ô ma Douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille.
Tu réclamais le Soir; il descend; le voici:
Une atmosphère obscure enveloppe la ville,
Aux uns portant la paix, aux autres le souci.

Pendant que des mortels la multitude vile,
Sous le fouet du Plaisir, ce bourreau sans merci,
Va cueillir des remords dans la fête servile,
Ma Douleur, donne-moi la main; viens par ici,

Loin d'eux. Vois se pencher les défuntes Années,
Sur les balcons du ciel, en robes surannées;
Surgir du fond des eaux le Regret souriant;

Le Soleil moribond s'endormir sous une arche,
Et, comme un long linceul traînant à l'Orient,
Entends, ma chère, entends la douce Nuit qui marche.


(Be good, O my Pain, and keep quiet now
You begged for Evening; it downs, here it is:
An obscure atmosphere wraps itself around the city
Bringing peace to some, worry to others.

While the vile multitude of mortals
Under the whip of Pleasure, that merciless headman
Goes to pluck some remorse in the servile feast,
My Pain, give me your hand, come over here,

Far from them. See the deceased Years lean
On the sky's balconies, in quaint dresses;
Smiling Regret rise from the deep waters;

The moribund Sun falling asleep under an ark,
And, like a long shroud trailing in the East,
Hear, my darling, hear the sweet Night marching in.)



You could write a doctoral thesis on this sonnet alone, and I apologise for the poor quality of the translation, but its most blatant feature is the enjambement (part of the sentence pushed into the next verse) between the second quatrain and the first tercet. It breaks the very essence of the sonnet (an opposition between the quatrains and the tercets) in a poem that is otherwise the making of a virtuoso.

This is the magical instant where the first person emerges from the crowd to start a new path in the history of ideas. Many will follow him, and go far further than he ever has; but, in those two syllables, Baudelaire has broken a century-long tradition. Poetry will never ever be the same after him.



Coming soon: you have a choice between Verlaine’s sweet decadence and Rimbaud’s revolt, gentle readers.



Georges Pérec (1936-1982) wrote a pastiche of this poem in his novel La Disparition

"Chanson"
par un fils adoptif du commandant Aupick

Sois soumis, mon chagrin, puis dans ton coin sois sourd
Tu la voulais, la nuit, la voilà, la voici
Un air tout obscurci a chu sur nos faubourgs
Ici portant la paix, là-bas donnant souci.

Tandis qu'un vil magma d'humains, oh, trop banals,
Sous l'aiguillon Plaisir, guillotin sans amour,
Va puisant son poison aux puants carnavals,
Mon chagrin, saisis-moi la main; là, pour toujours

Loin d'ici. Vois s'offrir sur un balcon d'oubli,
Aux habits pourrissants, nos ans qui sont partis;
Surgir du fond marin un guignon souriant;

Apollon moribond s'assoupir sous un arc
Puis ainsi qu'un drap noir traînant au clair ponant
Ouïs, Amour, ouïs la Nuit qui sourd du parc.

The meaning is mostly the same but… there isn’t a single –e- in the whole poem (or, for that matter, in the whole book).

Comments

[sylvanawood.livejournal.com]

Oh, you have some of them in English -- I didn't even click on the others because I thought I won't get it anyway ... now I have to shuffle back and read ...

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

All of them should be intelligible to English-speakers (I hope)