Tag Archives: French Poetry

“Toward the South” by Guillaume Apollinaire [w/ Audio]

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Zenith
     These griefs
          These gardens on and on
 Where the toad croons a tender cry skyblue
 The hind of silence startled races by 
 The nightingale that love has bruised sings in
 Your body's bush on which I've picked each rose
 Our hearts hang from the same pomegranate bough
 And in our gaze pomegranate blossoms blow
 That falling one by one have strewn the road

Translator: Harry Duncan

BOOKS: “The Flowers of Evil” by Charles Baudelaire

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Les Fleurs du MalLes Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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I read the 1909 Cyril Scott translation of Baudelaire’s poetry collection. It consists of 54 poems, including “Condemned Women” but not including others of the six poems that were banned in early editions and which only came to be included in later editions. (I did look up and read a couple translations each for the six poems — because censorship can’t be allowed to prevail. Not surprisingly, they are calm by today’s standards. It should be noted that Baudelaire played in symbolism, and so his poems – while ahead of their time in subject matter – didn’t tend toward explicit vulgarity in the first place.)

The Scott translation is all in rhymed verse, the largest share of it presented as sonnets — though there are some longer pieces (longer, but not long. It’s a quick read.) “The Broken Bell” and “Spleen” were highlights for me, but the whole collection is intriguing, evocative, and readable.

I enjoyed this collection tremendously, even with such an old translation. The hedonism, eroticism, and macabre of Baudelaire’s work creates an intense tone.

I’d highly recommend this collection for all poetry readers.



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Be Drunken by Charles Baudelaire [w/ Audio]

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Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.

And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, or whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time, be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.”

NOTE: This is the Arthur Symons translation from the 1913 Elkin Mathews edition of Baudelaire’s Poems in Prose. Available via Project Gutenberg at: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/50489/pg50489-images.html#XI