‘Lesbos’ and Other Poems

If Les Fleur du Mal had been titled Les Lesbiennes, ‘Lesbos’ might have been the title poem. The English translation of Baudelaire’s title would then have been ‘The Lesbians’ (or perhaps ‘The Good Women’ or ‘The Good Ones’). In this light, Baudelaire’s “male gaze” might be read differently, and lead us to interpret his poems as dramatic monologues.

Yeats says in Per Amica Silentia Lunae that a poet’s gaze becomes creative “by turning from the mirror to meditation upon a mask”: it “depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a rebirth as something not one’s self, something created in a moment and perpetually renewed.” Self-expression turns into acting. In Les Fleurs du Mal, the poet wears many masks, observes and plays many roles which often end with a surprising flowering of empathy. The old women in Les Petites Vieilles may at first be objects of curiosity for the flâneur (“misarranged grotesques who once were woman . . . wrenched like puppets”) but become “strange destinies . . . the ripening of eternity . . . my kindred . . . the ruins of my family . . . each of you an Eve / at eighty, in the claws of my appalling God.” A young beggar with red hair becomes a voyeur’s fantasy of sexual violence” for a lecher’s gaze to “finger” before the fantasy dissipates: “But here you are—a beggar (I, a poet) . . . with no ornament / but nakedness / for beauty.” The reader whom the poet lacerates in Au Lecteur becomes “my double, my brother.” At the end of ‘Femmes damnée‘, Delphine and Hippolyte may recall the damned in Dante’s Inferno but unlike the Inferno’s ghosts whose destinies are condemned by Heaven and the poet, or unlike Satan’s fate, his imprisonment in a lake of fetid ice, Baudelaire’s heroes (like Shakespeare’s self-creating artists) are free to create their own destinies:

Fierce sterilities, orgasmic pleasing’s
endless tongue distorts thirst, scabs
the flesh while winds of self-love
flag you like an ancient rage.

Far from the living—wandering, swerving,
damned to cross the desert like two wolves,
create your destinies, disordered souls,
who fly from the infinities within you.

Walter Benjamin responded to the traumatic shock in Baudelaire’s poetry. Perhaps what is most unsettling is its sympathy, its dissolution of the flâneur’s apparent distance.

If we imagine a narrative in which the flâneur were at first a child of Lesbos, exiled from Sappho’s island to roam the streets of Paris, might he still be imagined as Sappho’s guardian—“From childhood Lesbos raised me as her watchman…”? In the poem, the “vessel in the azure” will bring a male lover; Baudelaire’s Sappho will “die of blasphemy” by “feeding her body to brutality,” then throwing herself from a cliff into the ocean. The poet-guardian will continue to keep watch – “a sleepless eye” while “Lesbos mourns” – left “asking if the sea is generous.” In Baudelaire’s poem, for the most part written in the present tense, while Baudelaire’s flâneur may have been exiled to Paris, the poet-watchman is still watching.

While translating Baudelaire’s poetry and remaining as faithful I can be to the original, I have also tried to create a poem in English that offers the energy of the original. For me an impulse in Baudelaire’s poetry, despite its often rigorous and harsh observations, is the generous empathy of Sappho’s grown child, exiled, lost and found in an urban limbo (another alternative title for Les Fleurs du Mal was Les Limbes). The poetry is characterized by an exile’s exquisite decorum that ranges from ecstasies to identification to despair.

How to translate Baudelaire? In stanza 5 of Lesbos, Baudelaire writes:

Laisse du vieux Platon se froncer l’oeil austère;
Tu tires ton pardon de l’excès des baisers,
Reine du doux empire, aimable et noble terre,
Et des raffinements toujours inépuisés.
Laisse du vieux Platon se froncer l’oeil austère.

Literally this might translate:

Let old Plato frown with austere eyes;
You draw your forgiveness from the excess of kisses,
Queen of the sweet empire, kind and noble land,
And still inexhaustible refinements.
Leave old Plato to frown austerely.

However, English poetry is far more elliptical than Baudelaire’s French. What is exquisitely worded in French tends to be verbose in English. As an impulse, Baudelaire’s restrained excess often seems to me to translate better in English into fewer words that avoid paraphrase. For stanza 5 in the context of stanzas 4 and 6, perhaps:

…Lesbos, warm and languid—
.
though old Plato shuffles—
orgasmic excess pardons—
Lesbos, queen of the kind
Earth’s nuances,
though Plato shuffles,
.
eternities forgive you…

In one word, “shuffles” (a Shakespearean word) seems to me to characterize Plato’s unsettled disapproval, “queen of the kind / Earth’s nuances” finds an elliptical expression for “the sweet empire.” Les baisers does translate as “kisses,” but the verb baiser also translates as “fuck.” “Kisses” seems too evasive and “fuck” too vulgar. I hope that “orgasmic excess pardons” retains some of Baudelaire’s refinement. In Baudelaire’s French, stanzas 4 and 5 end with periods, but in English the poetry’s energy, its excess, seems to lead to a greater fluidity (perhaps like synapses) between stanzas.

In translating Baudelaire’s poems I have also added a number of visual images. I do not think of them as illustrations but as icons. Yeats’s thought that poems turn from mirroring self-reflections to mediations on daemonic masks with which the poet fences – at times enacts – is certainly descriptive for most of Baudelaire (in Le Soleil, he goes “alone to practice fencing / sensing accidents of rhyme on random corners, / stumbling over words like paving stones, / clashing with the poetry I dream of”). If Baudelaire’s poems turn from mirror to mask, they can also turn from mirror and mask to icon. The Russian polymath and martyr Pavel Florensky writes of icons as the appearance of an energy for which their visualization is also the leading wave. As the icon is received, the visualization dissolves but the energy remains palpable as it mingles with an inner life. Here I hope that the icons can bring reading to a momentary standstill, change reading’s gaze, and offer Baudelaire’s poems as icons as well —energies that impel and exceed their words in a reader’s inner life.

— Tony Brinkley