Poet's Corner: Two more by Baudelaire

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Two more poems by Baudelaire. I can't find a cut-and-pasteable version of "Jewels," which is another one I liked.

The Voice by Charles Baudelaire [translator: Richard Howard]

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where
Latin ashes and the dust of Greece
mingled with novels, history, and verse
in one dark Babel. I was folio-high
when I first heard the voices. 'All the world,'
said one, insidious but sure, 'is cake -
let me make you an appetite to match,
and then your happiness need have no end.'
And the other: 'Come, O come with me in dreams
beyond the possible, beyond the known!'
That second voice sang like the wind in the reeds,
a wandering phantom out of nowhere, sweet
to hear yet somehow horrifying too.
'Now and forever!' I answered, whereupon
my wound was with me - ever since, my Fate:
behind the scenes, the frivolous decors
of all existence, deep in the abyss,
I see distinctly other, brighter worlds;
yet victimized by what I know I see,
I sense the serpent coiling at my heels;
and therefore, like the prophets, form that hour
I've loved the wilderness, I've loved the sea;
no ordinary sadness touches me
though I find savor in the bitterest wine;
how many truths I trade away for lies,
and musing on heaven, stumble over trash...
Even so, the voice consoles me: 'Keep your dreams,
the wise have none so lovely as the mad.'



Metamorphoses of the Vampire by Charles Baudelaire [translator: Richard Howard]

The woman, meanwhile, writhing like a snake
across hot coals, and hiking up her breasts
over her corset stays, began to speak
as if her mouth had steeped each word in musk:
“My lips are smooth, and with them I know how
to smother conscience somewhere in these sheets.
I make the old men laugh like little boys,
and on my triumphant bosom all tears dry.

Look at me naked, and I will replace
sun and moon and every star in the sky.
So apt am I, dear scholar, in my lore,
that once I fold a man in these fatal arms,
or forfeit to his teeth my breasts which are
timid and teasing, tender and tyrannous,
upon these cushions, swooning with delight
the impotent angels would be damned for me.

When she had sucked the marrow from my bones,
and I leaned toward her listlessly
to return her loving kisses, all I saw
was a kind of slimy wineskin brimming with pus!
I closed my eyes in a spasm of cold fear,
and when I opened them to the light of day,
beside me, instead of that potent mannequin
who seemed to have drunk so deeply of my blood,
there trembled the wreckage of a skeleton
which grated with the cry of a weathervane
or a rusty signboard hanging from a pole
battered by the wind on winter nights.