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Les fleurs du mal

Petits poemes en prose

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Baudelaire in English

» The Flowers of Evil «

Inscription
To the Reader

Spleen and the Ideal
Benediction
The Albatross
The Elevation
Correspondences
I love the thought...
The Beacons
The Sicks Muse
The Venal Muse
The Wretched Monk
The Enemy
Ill Fortune
A Former Life
Gypsies Travelling
Man and the Sea
Don Juan in Hell
Punishment for Pride
Beauty
The Ideal
The Giantess
The Mask
Hymn to Beauty
The Jewels
Exotic Parfume
Head of Hair
I love you as I love...
You'd entertain the universe...
Sed non satiata
The way her silky garments...
The Dancing Serpent
A Carcass
De profundis clamavi
The Vampyre
Lethe
Beside a monstrous Jewish whore...
Remorse after Death
The Cat
Duellum
The Balcony
The Possessed
A Phantom
I give to you these verses...
Semper Eadem
Completely One
What will you say tonight...
The Living Torch
To One Who Is Too Cheerful
Reversibility
Confession
The Spiritual Dawn
The Harmony of Evening
The Flask
Poison
Misty Sky
The Cat
The Splendid Ship
Invitation to the Voyage
The Irreparable
Conversation
Autumn Song
To a Madonna
Song of the Afternoon
Sisina
Praises for My Francisca
For a Creole Lady
Moesta et errabunda
The Ghost
Autumn Sonnet
Sorrows of the Moon
Cats
Owls
The Pipe
Music
Burial
A Fantastical Engraving
The Happy Corpse
The Cask of Hate
The Cracked Bell
Spleen
Spleen
Spleen
Spleen
Obsession
The Taste for Nothingness
Alchemy of Suffering
Congenial Horror
Prayer of a Pagan
The Pot Lid
Midnight Examination
Sad Madrigal
The Cautioner
The Rebel
Very Far From France
The Gulf
Lament of an Icarus
Meditation
Heautontimoroumenos
The Irremediable
The Clock

Parisian Scenes
Landscape
The Sun
The Insulted Moon
To a Red-Haired Beggar Girl
The Swan
The Seven Old Man
The Little Old Women
The Blind
To a Woman Passing By
Skeletons Digging
Dusk
Gaming
Danse macabre
The Love of Illusion
I have not forgotten...
That kind heart you were jealous of...
Mists and Rains
Parisian Dream
Dawn

Wine
The Soul of Wine
The Ragman's Wine
The Murderer's Wine
The Solitary's Wine
The Lovers' Wine

Flowers of Evil
Epigraph for a Condemned Book
Destruction
A Martyr
Lesbos
» Condemned Women: Delphine and Hippolyta «
Condemned Women
The Two Good Sisters
The Fountain of Blood
Allegory
A Beatrice
The Metamorphoses of the Vampire
A Voyage to Cythera
Passion and the Skull

Revolt
St Peter's Denial
Abel and Cain
Litanies of Satan

Death
The Death of Lovers
The Death of the Poor
The Death of Artists
Day's End
Dream of a Curious Man
Voyaging

Accessories
To Theodore de Banville

The Waifs
The Setting of the Romantic Sun

Gallantries
The Fountain
Bertha's Eyes
Hymn
A Face Makes Promises
The Monster

Epigraphs
Poem on the Portrait of Honoré Daumier
Lola de Valence
On Tasso in Prison

Diverse Pieces
The Voice
The Unforeseen
The Ransom
To a Girl of Malabar

Buffioneries
On the Debut of Amina Boschetti
To M. Eugene Fromentin
A Jolly Tavern

Prose Poems

Fanfarlo




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Baudelaire


The Flowers of Evil

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Condemned Women: Delphine and Hippolyta

Within the dwindling glow of light from languid lamps,
Sunk in the softest cushions soaked with heady scent,
Hippolyta lay dreaming of the thrilling touch
That spread apart the veil of her young innocence.

She searched with troubled eye, afflicted by the storm,
For the once-distant sky of her naivety,
A voyager who turns and looks beyond the wake
To blue horizons which had once been overhead.

The heavy tears that fell from dull and weary eyes,
The broken look, the stupor, the voluptuousness,
Her conquered arms thrown down, surrendered in the field,
All strangely served her still, to show her fragile charm.

Stretched calmly at her feet, joyfully satisfied,
Delphine looked up at her with those compelling eyes
Like a strong animal that oversees her prey,
First having taken care to mark it with her teeth.

Strong beauty on her knees before frail beauty's couch,
Superb, luxurious, she breathed completely in
The wine of triumph, and she stretched out towards her love
As if to gather in a kiss of recompense.

She looked within the eye of that pale conquered soul
For silent canticles, chanting of love's delight
And of that gratitude, sublime and infinite,
Which from the eyelids spreads like a soft-breathing sigh.

- 'Hippolyta, dear heart, what do you have to say?
Now do you understand you do not need to give
The sacred offering of roses of your youth
To one who'd wither them with his tempestuous breath?

My kisses are as light as mayflies on the wing
Caressing in the dusk the great transparent lakes.
But those your lover gives dig out their cruel ruts
Like chariots, or like the farmer's biting plough;

They pass across you like a heavy, coupled team -
Pitiless horses' tread, or oxen's brutal hooves...
Sister Hippolyta! then turn your face to me.
My darling, heart and soul, my better self, my all,

Turn down to me your eyes, so blue and full of stars!
For just one charming glance, divinely healing balm,
I'll raise the veil for you of pleasure's secret depths,
And lull you fast asleep within an endless dream!'

But then Hippolyta, lifting her troubled head:
- 'My Delphine, do not think that I repent our love;
I'm not ungrateful, but I suffer in distress
As if I'd been a part of some strange feast at night.

I feel such heavy dread dissolving over me,
And black battalions of a scattered troop of ghosts
Who wish to lead me off on roads that shift and move
Beneath a bloody sky that closes all around.

Have we committed then a strange, forbidden act?
Please, if you can, explain my trouble and my fright:
I shake and tremble when you say to me "my love!"
And still I feel my mouth is yearning at your call.

My heart's-ease and my dear, don't look at me that way!
O sister of my choice, you'll always be my love,
And even though you were an ambush ready-set,
The first disturbing step along the road to Hell!'

Delphine, then, rising up to shake her tragic mane,
As if before the tripod, stamping furiously,
Flashing her fatal eye, answered in despot's voice:
- 'Who in the face of love dares speak to me of Hell!

Accursed may he be, the one with useless dreams
Who in stupidity, promoting to the world
A sterile conundrum, impossible to solve,
First sought to mix the ways of virtue and of love!

Anyone who could join within a mystic bond
Shadow with glowing heat, the night-time with the day,
Never will come to warm his paralytic flesh
At this refulgent sun, which people know as love!

Go, if you will, and find some brutish fiance;
Go give a virgin heart to torturous embrace;
And, livid, with your fill of horror and remorse,
Come running back to me with scars across your breasts...

In this world only one true master can be served!'
But the unhappy child poured out a giant grief
As suddenly she cried: - 'I feel within my soul
An opening abyss: this chasm is my heart!

Deep as the void, with a volcano's boiling heat!
This fierce and moaning monster nothing can assuage,
And nothing can refresh the Furies fiery thirst,
Who, torch in hand, will burn the flesh down to the blood!

Let our closed curtains, then, remove us from the world,
And let our lassitude allow us to find rest!
I would obliterate myself upon your throat
And find the coolness of the tombs within your breast!'

- Descend, you victims, oh lamentably descend,
Descend along the path to the eternal Hell!
Plunge on into the gulf where all the shameful crimes,
Those foolish shadows, run at limits of desire,

Seething this way and that with a great thunderous noise,
Flogged by a heavy wind that never saw the sky;
There never will you find your passion satisfied,
And your torment will be your pleasure's awful child.

Never a freshening ray will shine within your caves;
Through cracks along the wall will filter deadly mists
That cast a lantern's glow of pale and dismal flame
And penetrate your bodies with perfumes of death.

The harsh sterility of all your acts of lust
Will bring a dreadful thirst and stiffen out your skin,
And your concupiscence become a furious wind
To snap your feeble flesh like an old, weathered flag.

Far from the living world, wandering and condemned,
Across the desert wastes, go running like the wolves;
Make out your destiny, you poor disordered souls,
And flee the infinite you carry in yourselves!


Přeložil James McGowan

český překlad: Prokleté ženy



Vysvětlivky:
Sources for the names of the two women have not clearly been identified.
the tripod: the priestess of Apollo at Delphi proclaimed her oracles while seated on a three-legged stool.
Furies: female divinities who live in the Underworld of Greek mythology (Erebus) and pursue and punish human transgressors.
Descend, you victims: according to a letter from Baudelaire to his publisher Poulet-Malassis, this and the subsequent stanzas were written and revised a few days before the publication of the Flowers, in the hope of making its message more acceptable in anticipation of prosecution.






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