“ J’ai longtemps habité sous de vastes portiques / Que les soleils marins teignaient de milles feux” is rendered here as “I used to dwell beneath vast porticoes / That sea-born suns tinged with a thousand flames”. Not only do you have to keep as closely as is practical to the original verse forms – and Baudelaire was a master of these, toying with the classical structures of French verse, making it somehow both precise and fluid at the same time – you have to try to bring out his gift for nuance in the vocabulary. Translating Baudelaire is probably about as difficult as it gets. That’s the translation given here, by Anthony Mortimer and now you have much less excuse not to read Baudelaire than before, for this translation not only makes one of the best stabs yet at making him accessible to the monolingual English speaker, but comes with the original on the facing pages, so that even if all you have is school French, you can get some idea of what the poetry is really like. In the second poem, he compares the Poet – that is, himself – to an albatross, captured by mocking sailors and removed from his natural element: “exiled on earth, amid the jeering crowd, / With giant wings that will not let him walk”. This famous sequence was first published in France in 1857, and was swiftly condemned by the authorities as an offence against public morality, which did the poet’s reputation no harm at all.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |