Archive
Le Chat/The Cat by Charles Baudelaire
translated by Florence Major
Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d’agate.
Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir
Ta tête et ton dos élastique,
Et que ma main s’enivre du plaisir
De palper ton corps électrique,
Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,
Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun.
*
Come my beautiful cat, rest on my amorous heart.
Restrain the sharp claws of your passage;
I will plunge into the hearth
Where your agate eyes burn with savage
Metal. While my fingers move lazily
To stroke your head and yielding spine,
My hands pulse with a frisson that fills me
And guides me; I remember my divine
Mistress. I see her in essence, her look
Just like yours, dear personable beast.
Profound and cold, it pierced and shook
Me, a captive from her head to her feet.
What perilous perfume her dusky body gives;
The brown opium of my desire still lives.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a poet, art critic, essayist and a pioneering translator of Edgar Allen Poe. He is famous for Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers Of Evil) from which he gained both notoriety and acclaim. Like Edouard Manet, the painter who was a close friend of Baudelaire, his work was a transition from the romanticism and classical idioms of the day. Baudelaire brought a sensual realism into poetry, and urban settings that were far from the bucolic or mythological allegories so prevalent in the poetry and painting of the time.
Florence Major is an artist and poet born in Montreal, Quebec, and living in New York City. She has poems in The Chaffey Review and Cerise Press. See her Rilke translations earlier in the issue for a note on her approach to translation.
Two from Rilke
translated by Florence Major
Porträt des Rainer Maria Rilke (1906) by Paula Modersohn-Becker (public domain image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)
HerbsttagHerr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr gross.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren lass die Winde los.
Befiehl den letzten Fruchten voll zu sein;
gieb innen noch zwei sudlichere Tage,
drange sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Susse in den schweren Wein.
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blatter treiben.
|
Autumn DayLord: Approach. Summer was everywhere,
Lay your dark hands across the sundials,
And across the open fields, free the coursing air.
Compel the last bounty holding to the vine:
Engorge. Permit two more balmy days’ reprieve,
Then press them to fulfillment, drive
Crowning fragrance into the heady wine.
Those without homes are too late.
Those without company will remain alone,
With books, with pen in hand till night is gone
Or searching, in the city’s corridors, a state
Of mind, as dead leaves when they blow.
|
Sonnets to Orpheus, II. XV
|
O Brunnen-Mund, du gebender, du Mund, der unerschöpflich Eines, Reines, spricht,– du, vor des Wassers fließendem Gesicht, marmorne Maske. Und im Hintergrund der Aquädukte Herkunft. Weither an vorüberfällt in das Gefäß davor. Ein Ohr der Erde. Nur mit sich allein |
O fountain mouth, unceasing passage of eternal oneness, inviolate, your speech flows through the marble mask to reach across distant peaks; a timeless message brought descending from distant graves. and falls arising in your marble bowl Earth, it is you who speaks, the ear the soul |
Translator’s note: These translations are not literal, but true to the meaning of the poems as I read and experienced them. I find that when translations are dogmatically literal, the poem often falls flat as the essence of what one feels on reading the poem is no longer in evidence. How words are spaced and arranged creates timing as in music. Compulsive rhyming in translations creates “dead meter,” and eludes the inner musical resonance of a poem that was rhymed in the original. Tricky stuff, but as the French say, à chacun son goût (to each his own taste).
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was a Bohemian/Austrian poet and art critic, famed for his critique of Auguste Rodin. He is considered to be one of the greatest lyric poets of the German language and in the lexicon of poetry. He is best known for the Duino Elegies, the Sonnets to Orpheus and a semi-autographical prose work, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
Florence Major is an artist and poet born in Montreal, Quebec, and living in New York City. She has poems in The Chaffey Review and Cerise Press.
qarrtsiluni 