Poet's Corner: To the Reader by Charles Bauldelaire

I had a visceral reaction of joy and relief when I read Richard Howard's translation of Bauldelaire's poem about 10 days ago. I applaud everyone who is finding silver linings and thinking positive and looking for (and discovering) happies in these strange and troubling times. I am doing a bit of that myself. But I was feeling a great deal of angst, too, not just at the state of the world and my household but at all the exhortations to find the good in what's going on.

I am a dark poet (at times) and a dark person (at times) and I find a lot of comfort in Baudelaire's darkness. I mean, one only need know a little of his life (or look at his portrait) to know the fellow wasn't filling up gratitude journals or looking for happies.

And so it seems fitting (to me, for me) to begin this month of poetry on a dark note. And Richard Howard is, in his own words, a poet translating a poet, and I find his rendering of Bauldelaire very beautiful (even though it doesn't rhyme!)

And sometimes life is 'squeezing the hardest orange harder yet.' Baudelaire knew that, and I know it, too.

To the Reader by Charles Baudelaire [trans. Richard Howard]


Our sins are stubborn, our contrition lame;
we want our scruples to be worth our while—
how cheerfully we crawl back to the mire:
a few cheap tears will wash our stains away!

Satan Trismegistus subtly rocks
our ravished spirits on his wicked bed
until the precious metal of our will
is leached out by this cunning alchemist:

the Devil’s hand directs our every move—
the things we loathed become the things we love;
day by day we drop through stinking shades
quite undeterred on our descent to Hell.

Like a poor profligate who sucks and bites
the withered breast of some well-seasoned trull,
we snatch in passing at clandestine joys
and squeeze the oldest orange harder yet.

( The rest )

My Poem: Original: Portmanteau: Gen

Title: Portmanteau
Fandom: Original Work
Lines: 8
Words: 99
Rating: Gen
For: GYWO Yahtzee - Aces
Notes: this is the first half of exercise #6 of The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry which deals with anapaestic hexameter. The photo prompt made me with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's travel desk.
Prompt:

there the trunks in the bunks on the racks in the stacks, come-and-go portmanteau
the valises with creases and cases with traces of oft to-and-fro
there the marks of the larks: destination and tout, transportation and route
in the cracks of the leather, in sacks, in the whether, the monsoon and drought

in between can be seen a fine traveling desk of mahogany wood
in its folded condition it holds much perdition as well as much good
when unfolded mere notion is gilded and golded and spun into tale
there a fondness becomes correspondence, aslumber this wonder of rail