Translations
Translated from the French
by Lasha Darkmoon
[LD] The poem is ostensibly about a cat. In actual fact, it is about Baudelaire’s dusky mulatto mistress, Jeanne Duval, a feline beauty with whom the French poet remained totally obsessed for roughly 20 years. He is said to have loved his half-French half-Haitian mistress more than any other woman in his life, apart from his mother who always came first.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We offer below the French original of Baudelaire’s Les Litanies de Satan (‘Hymn to Satan’), followed by two translations of the poem, the first by William Aggeler and the second by Lasha Darkmoon.
Skeptics who doubt the Devil’s real existence will obviously derive little satisfaction from reading a poem in praise of a non-existent person. They are therefore advised either to skip the poem and its translations, or, if they prefer, to display their intellectual superiority in the Comments section by poking fun at Baudelaire for his gullibility. Read More
This imitation translation of the Isha Upanishad, the first to be done in trimetrical rhyming quatrains—i.e., with three stresses per line—was composed over 10 years ago as a literary exercise by Lasha Darkmoon.
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LD: The term ‘Tathagata’ is a title of the Buddha. (See endnote). Ananda, the Buddha’s cousin, was also his closest and most devoted disciple.
Baudelaire’s first book of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal (“Flowers of Evil”), was published in 1857 when the poet was 36. Six of the poems, some of which have already been translated here by Lasha Darkmoon, were immediately banned as obscene. Au Lecteur stood as the book’s preface, containing some of the most quotable lines in French literature.
Victor Hugo was to enthuse, “Your fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars. I applaud your vigorous spirit!” Others were not so impressed. “Everything in it which is not hideous is incomprehensible,” the poetry critic of Le Figaro wrote angrily. “And everything one understands is putrid”.
Remember that thing we saw, my love,
one fine sweet summer morning as we turned
the path. Across the gravel-strewn ground
lay sprawled a rotting corpse. Its legs aloft,
kicking the air like a whore on heat,
seething and dripping with poisons,
displaying in a shameless fashion its fetid
womb, reeking with rotten smells!
The sun blazed down upon this festering
heap of putrescence, as if to toast it to a turn,
giving back to Nature with a vengeance
all the bits and pieces she had put together.
†
Strange goddess! dusky as night’s dark shadows
reeking of musk and havana cigars,
spawn of voodoo or African witchcraft,
ebony-flanked diva of darkest night!—
I prefer to opium or rich red wines
the drug of your mouth, where loves lies flaunting
itself. In the sands of sex I find an
oasis. Your eyes. There I slake my thirst.
Your eyes! the smokeholes of your soul! Don’t aim
those flamethrowers at me, you pitiless fiend!
I can’t encircle you like a river from hell
nine times . . . nor can I, lustful fury, break
you! Or bend you to my will by playing
a virgin . . . in the hellpit of your bed.
To a Passing Stranger
The deafening traffic roared round me in the street.
Tall, slim, in full mourning, noble in her
grief, a woman passed by, with one stately hand
lifting and swinging the rich hem of her gownSwiftfooted, aristocratic, statuesque.
As for me, like a maniac possessed, I drank
from her eye…livid sky, where tempests take shape,
the sweetness that enthrals, the pleasure that kills!A lightening flash . . . then night! Lovely passerby,
whose glance has suddenly given me new life,
will I see you again only in Eternity?Elsewhere—far from here! too late! perhaps never!
Where you flee, where I go, neither of us knows—
O you whom I might have loved, O you who knew it!
