Everything Is Flowers

“Paris wasn’t then what it is now,” Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1861, “a welter and waste, a Capernaum, a Babel populated by idiots and incompetents, undiscriminating in how they kill time and absolutely deaf to literary pleasures.” That sentence, larded with Old Testament hyperbole, appears in Baudelaire’s essay on the poet Théodore de Banville (1823–1891), one in a series of encomiastic considerations of his contemporaries. Baudelaire’s now was the period immediately following the publication of his Les Fleurs du mal in 1857, years when he went from being an art critic of small but serious influence whom the right people considered a genius to being a poet readers knew for the wrong reasons—shocking! depraved! banned!—and certainly not yet famous for the originality of his style, its rigor, its sincerity, its tenderness, its humors. Baudelaire’s then was 1841, when the 19-year-old Banville published his first collection of verse, Les Cariatides.

“Back then, Paris was made up of men who shape opinions,” Baudelaire continued,

an elite who, when a poet is born, know it first. So of course they hailed the author of Les Cariatides as a man with a long career ahead of him. Banville arrived with a remarkable mind, the kind which finds poetry the easiest language to speak and from which thought flows, on its own power, to its own rhythm.

Back then: for the Romantic (which is to say the depressive), there is always a Golden Age, a moment missed by a historical hair or, if lived, misremembered for the perfection it never actually attained. Baudelaire’s auric then and his leaden now cleave his period of early striving from his period of late arriving; these temporal markers segregate the era when the ideal was his polestar from the phase when spleen was the new world.

Then, now: no intervening process, no road between romance and ruin, only rupture. That violence, that severance, that idea is central to Baudelaire’s aesthetic, and it demands, for the documenting poet, a different language. “We should say straight away that hyperbole and apostrophe are the forms of language that aren’t only the most enjoyable but the most essential,” Baudelaire writes later in the Banville essay, “given they flow naturally from a place of exaggerated vitality.” Artist-critics always single out for praise those qualities they most want to exhibit. In this way, Baudelaire is the purest, least troubled example of such a critic: a poet unimpeded by his thinking on poetry.

If Baudelaire’s criticism manages this transmogrification in real time, a trick of purity that was a truth, it’s in large measure because his criticism wasn’t initially focused on poetry. “A good painting, faithful and equal to the dream that birthed it, must be made like a world.” The phrase appears in Baudelaire’s Salon de 1859, his report on the annual state-sponsored exhibition of academic painting in Paris. Exhibitions had been ongoing since the 17th century, and as a state-sponsored anything eventually will, the rites and rules of Republican aesthetics had calcified, passing down received ideas of beauty. Baudelaire saw such patrimony corseting too many artists, guiding their hands, determining their strokes. Infantilizing, these ideas of order—constrictions no less killing to the expressive force of the artist than those which American kindergartens impose on the little geniuses who, day one, arrive brightly for the work that is play only to find their lust to make and the vitality that drives it pulverized by the great grinding wheel of the republic. Such an education indoctrinates our little lambs into the cult of the accepted, teaching them to swear allegiance—but children, you mustn’t swear—to their own ruin, marooning them at their little tables—circle the pear, children; cross out the apple—and making sure that boys are bored and girls are grim, fulfilling the mandates of the Common Core.

Baudelaire rebelled against the common, against the rote, against a scholasticism that, then as now, is hard to repel. He wrote notably, at times savagely, on the salons, revolting against the restricted hand, the hampered heart, the theory that would thwart, dicta that distort. He tilted against the academic. He saw in painting, in the plastic arts, not an analogy to poetry, not a metaphor for making images in words, but a series of proofs: all art a dance of form to form, a dance behind which music plays. “There is, essentially, a lyric way of feeling,” he wrote.

Even the ugliest men, men denied meaningful freedom, have sometimes felt it, something so rich it’s as if the soul has been lit suddenly from within, so alive it rises, is made to rise. The inner life, in these mystical moments, is thrown into the air by so much lightness, expansiveness, it’s as if what is within us were seeking a higher region still.

Contemporary readers don’t much associate Baudelaire with lightness. They think dark, sense muck. True and not:

True, in our corruption we possess
beauties unrevealed to ancient times:
countenances cankered by the heart
and, so to speak, the charm of listlessness;
but subtle though they are, such artifacts
of a belated muse will never keep
our sickly race from offering to youth
its truest homage; youth we worship still,
its frank expression, its untroubled brow,
its eyes as bright as water; sacred youth
that shares—unconscious as a singing bird,
a flower, or the blue sky’s radiance—
its song, its scent, its irresistible warmth!
   —  from “I prize the memory of naked ages...”
        (Richard Howard, Tr.)

This is the trouble with a body of work. If the poet is lucky, the work that goes into the poems, completed, might see the poems go to work for the poet. But a body of work cannot march en masse. Missionaries must make sorties. So, for Baudelaire, these apostles preach “The Albatross,” evangelize for “Spleen,” homilize on “The Invitation to the Voyage.” Thus, Baudelaire has seen, as lasting poets will, from a higher region still or a lower one than wished, a corpus winnowed down by time. Atomized; anthologized.

***

There have been many English Baudelaires through the 150 years since his death, two dozen reasonably ample selected poems, and a dozen or so Les Fleurs du mal (a new one arrives next month, translated by Aaron Poochigian). Interesting poets can make a hash of foreign things (Robert Lowell, say, who tried his hand at translating Baudelaire in 1961) as easily as the less interesting can (Paul Schmidt, say). The only question to ask of a new translation of a poet already well-represented in English is: any good?

Different assumptions underlie the question. I’ve come to think there are three possible stances when talking about any translation of poetry. The first stance, the dismissive one, has reader-critics say that no translation can adequately get across the essence of what makes foreign poet X of lasting interest and thus in any new translation there is only more proof of the maxim—critic holds up example from original and example from translation and says, “See, not as good.” In the second stance, the permissive one, reader-critics say that for those discussing foreign poet X in their own language(s)—and there’s a fine, 11,629-word conversation about Baudelaire on the Poetry Foundation website—translations of his work must have adequately gotten across the essence of what makes foreign poet X of lasting interest and so the new translation is a welcome addition, etc. The third stance, the comparative one, has reader-critics turning their heads from this translation to that translation to that other translation, suggesting that this translator does that well and this other translator does that well and this other, other translator does both this and that well but not that and this. Reader-critics conclude their assessments with the drumroll of if you were to pick just one…, all of which actually leads back to stances one and two, both of which seem truer after all the back and forth: impossible, actual, debatable.

My ambition here isn’t to strike one of these poses, agreeing as I do with all three. I have come to feel that attempting a rhyming version of, in this case Baudelaire, is as noble an ambition as it is ultimately insane. Those who ape the original end up making him, a poet of uncanny sonic and metrical skill, sound like a monkey being made to dance by a very talented organ-grinder—as, too often, my own rhyming translation of Rimbaud’s complete works sounds. It’s just inevitable that those who try to use rhyme will muck up much of it with radically inferior music. Richard Howard, quoted above, forewent rhyme in his 1982 Baudelaire, excellently.

So, in place of enduring comparative exertions, let’s listen to a few little sounds together, sounds that set us on the path to hearing Baudelaire—his title, for a start. Les Fleurs du mal: the rhythm is thump-THUMP, thump-THUMP—Les FLEURS du MAL. Two iambs, unstressed/stressed, a rhythm humans know very well, the thump-THUMP we hear, at night, in the dark, when sleep eludes us and what we register is the beating of our hideous hearts. Of course, Baudelaire translated Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” turning the final words of Poe’s final line—“here, here! — it is the beating of his hideous heart!”—into “c’est là! c’est là! — c’est le battement de son affreux coeur!” making Poe’s two mono-beats (“here, here”) into iambs (“c’est LÀ! c’est LÀ!”), heartbeats that the story, and the story’s final word, wanted them to be. Le Fleurs du mal: two telltale heartbeats hiding in plain hearing, secreted there by a writer who prized exaggerated vitality in language. No rhythm could have expressed aliveness more.

The sonics in those four syllables are worth thinking about too. Speakers of French will feel their mouths and their associated muscles take on four separate, sculptable shapes as they’re made to move through the four distinct vowel sounds embedded in the four words.

The following will go slowly, until it goes quickly:

Les: the tip of the tongue starts on the roof of the mouth, a little bit behind teeth it does not touch; as it releases, flattens, falls, parachutist from plane, lips part and mandible drops slightly as a dry AY of ache (as opposed to wet AY of way) rises from the back of the throat.

Fleurs: the mouth nearly closes as the bottom lip rises to touch the bottom of the top teeth while the fallen tongue simultaneously rises to the spot on the roof of the mouth where it began. Then, a fricative exhale, originating at the front of the mouth, produces an ER sound not unlike a dry American pure but one with a gooier center, the tongue more curled, more forward, the whole mouth more closed than it was for Les and the lips, top and bottom, pooched further out, as if preparing to drink water from a fountain.

Du: the tip of the tongue returns to the roof of the mouth, as the lips, from their water-drinking pose, pooch out further as if awaiting, not giving, a kiss, a d detonating with the tongue’s release forward, more curled still, producing an EW somewhat like shoe but with more goo.

Mal: the lips withdraw, meet, make a warm-up MM, and then the mouth yawns wide into an AHH that deflates with the closing of the mouth like a balloon out of air, the tongue-tip roosting again on the roof as it produces its final, trailing, soft, clipped LL, marrying it to the L that began the whole thing.

When one says the whole, Les Fleurs du mal, the mouth buds forward and blooms open and finally wilts back and, when repeated, buds and blooms and wilts once more. The beating heart of the blooming flower, seeded by evil, thump-THUMP.

And how to get that across?

The Flowers of Evil: there’s little variance in translations of that title. It’s what’s been agreed upon by upper management. But look, it is terrible. It sounds like a large man falling down a flight of stairs. The Flowers of Evil is correct, admirably solid at the level of meaning, and so ungainly as to make it and so much of what we have of Baudelaire in English—and are grateful for—seem pretentious rather than what Les Fleurs du mal fundamentally is: innocent, lullabies played on black keys for the doomed, for the damned, for us all. Baudelaire’s is a supreme music, written by a man who could write hell because he heard heaven.

That sound, those sounds, play through the hundreds of excellent pages of Les Fleurs, a field of flowers. It’s a wonderful metaphor, isn’t it, poems bound together by their blossoming, flowers rooted in earth from which the first human was formed and briefly walked before the fall. The poem’s title asks, “What can be made of human evil? What good can come from our ugliness, cravenness, presumption, cupidity, vulgarity, cruelty, our tireless dedication to our ruin?” A field of flowers, of course, one we can cultivate, not in Eliot’s dead land but in God’s forgiving soil, even as we afflict His world with the sin and selfishness that drive our bodies and busy our minds. Baudelaire’s wildflowers fall; the seeds sleep and then rise, not again but anew, in spring, into a congregation, a church not made of hands. Eliot called Baudelaire, approvingly, a deformed Dante, saying that Baudelaire was aware of what most mattered: the problem of good and evil. Fair enough. See, in these flowers, in this response to evil, resurrection. Only Christ dared to save us from ourselves. Luke 17:20-21: “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”

How would a report from that kingdom read? How would it sound? “Necessarily,” Baudelaire wrote, “there’s a lyric way of speaking, and a lyric world, a lyric atmosphere, fields, men, women, animals, all of whom share a fondness for the lyre…. Every lyric poet, by their nature, inevitably returns to the lost Eden.”

Where everything—everything—is flowers.