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The Flowers of Evil

for Victor Hugo

I.

Andromache, I think of you - this meagre stream,
This melancholy mirror where had once shone forth
The giant majesty of all your widowhood,
This fraudulent Simois, fed by bitter tears,

Has quickened suddenly my fertile memory
As I was walking through the modem Carrousel.
The old Paris is gone (the form a city takes
More quickly shifts, alas, than does the mortal heart);

I picture in my head the busy camp of huts,
And heaps of rough-hewn columns, capitals and shafts,
The grass, the giant blocks made green by puddle-stain,
Reflected in the glaze, the jumbled bric-à-brac.

Once nearby was displayed a great menagerie,
And there I saw one day - the time when under skies
Cold and newly bright, Labour stirs awake
And sweepers push their storms into the silent air -

A swan, who had escaped from his captivity,
And scuffing his splayed feet along the paving stones,
He trailed his white array of feathers in the dirt.
Close by a dried out ditch the bird opened his beak,

Flapping excitedly, bathing his wings in dust,
And said, with heart possessed by lakes he once had loved:
'Water, when will you rain? Thunder, when will you roar?'
I see this hapless creature, sad and fatal myth,

Stretching the hungry head on his convulsive neck,
Sometimes towards the sky, like the man in Ovid's book -
Towards the ironic sky, the sky of cruel blue,
As if he were a soul contesting with his God!

II.

Paris may change, but in my melancholy mood
Nothing has budged! New palaces, blocks, scaffoldings,
Old neighbourhoods, are allegorical for me,
And my dear memories are heavier than stone.

And so outside the Louvre an image gives me pause:
I think of my great swan, his gestures pained and mad,
Like other exiles, both ridiculous and sublime,
Gnawed by his endless longing! Then I think of you,

Fallen Andromache, torn from a husband's arms,
Vile property beneath the haughty Pyrrhus' hand,
Next to an empty tomb, head bowed in ecstasy,
Widow of Hector! O! and wife of Helenus!

I think of a negress, thin and tubercular,
Treading in the mire, searching with haggard eye
For palm trees she recalls from splendid Africa,
Somewhere behind a giant barrier of fog;

Of all those who have lost something they may not find
Ever, ever again! who steep themselves in tears
And suck a bitter milk from that good she-wolf, grief!
Of orphans, skin and bones, dry and wasted blooms!

And likewise in the forest of my exiled soul
Old Memory sings out a full note of the horn!
I think of sailors left forgotten on an isle,
Of captives, the defeated ... many others more!

Přeložil James McGowan

originale française: LXXXIX. Le Cygne

český překlad: Labuť

Vysvětlivky:

Victor Hugo: (1802-85); the great French poet and novelist. Baudelaire first attempted to make his acquaintance in a letter written in 1840. Later Hugo supported Baudelaire when the first edition of the Flowers was put on trial in 1857, and soon thereafter he wrote an open letter as a preface to a long essay of Baudelaire's on the poet Gautier. Baudelaire dedicated 'The Swan' and the two poems succeeding it to Hugo, in self-imposed political exile on the island of Guernsey, and he also sent Hugo a copy of the 1861 edition of the Flowers, which Hugo praised generously. Baudelaire responded by praising Hugo's novel Les Miserables, though in private he expressed serious reservations. There was, then, a tension between the older and younger poet. Still, they were not enemies, and they took the appropriate public occasions to show their mutual respect.
Andromache: wife of the Trojan warrior Hector in The Iliad. Baudelaire is drawing largely on book III of Virgil's Aeneid, which tells the story of Andromache after the death of Hector and the fall of Troy; the Greek Pyrrhus (see I. 38), claimed Andromache, since his father Achilles had killed her husband in battle.
This fraudulent Simois: Andromache, in exile after the defeat of Troy, looked at a 'meagre stream' which reminded her of the river Simois of her native land.
the modern Carrousel: this is the area between the two wings of the Louvre and the Carrousel Arch. Before 1852 it had been a warren of small streets, but in Baudelaire's time the area was cleared for a monumental square. The speaker, crossing the modern Carrousel, recalls the time when it was a building site (the 'busy camp of huts') and when a menagerie was situated there. The old Paris is gone: Paris, especially on the right bank of the Seine, was being completely done over under the supervision of Baron Haussmann (1809-91); many of the wide boulevards of present-day Paris date from this reconstruction work of the midnineteenth century.
Ovid's book: probably the Metamorphoses, book I.
wife of Helenus: Andromache. When the usurping Pyrrhus decided to marry Hermione, he gave Andromache to Helenus, Hector's brother, also Pyrrhus' slave.