Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Richard Howard, 176 pages
Here with grisly appetite
I grill and devour my heart.
In these six collections (with some additional poems appended), Baudelaire indulges in the ultimate descent into romantic degradation, treasuring each horror.
the final bag of coins in a gambler's fist;
the cavernous kisses you get from Adeline;
the maddening tune that will not let you go,
as if it echoed faintly all of human pain...
Turning the moral universe upside down, the poet composes hymns to Satan and hurls curses against God, while those made in His image and likeness are considered simultaneously pitiable and disgusting.
Woman a slave and yet vainglorious,
stupid and unashamed in her self-love;
Man a greedy tyrant, slave of his slaves,
swelling the sewer to a stinking flood...
Baudelaire casts his celebration of corruption as a bold adventure, the ultimate existential revolt.
Pour us your poison, let us be comforted!
Once we have burned our brains out, we can plunge
to Hell or Heaven - any abyss will do -
deep in the Unknown to find the new!
He manages to create beauty out of his longing for Beauty, for escape from this world and its oppressive boredom and disgust.
Who cares if you come from paradise or hell,
appalling Beauty, artless and monstrous scourge,
if only your eyes, your smile or your foot reveal
the Infinite I love and have never known?
The greatest work of the greatest of the Decadents, The Flowers of Evil is the field of an almost invisible struggle to find coherence in the "heap of broken images" where
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.
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