11/24/2023 0 Comments Club presentifyBaudelaire employs, and which is particularly extensive and particularly condensed in the two quatrains. The thought he expresses in “ Correspondances” is a subtle intuition of, simultaneously, such profound extension and such profound condensation that it can only really be apprehended and comprehended in the French formulation he gives it.Īnd I make no claims of having solved the immense problems which “ Correspondances” throws up for the English translator in selecting a unitary interpretation of those inscrutable lines which, in French, express multiple ideas simultaneously, except to say that of all the possible interpretations that I’ve read in English, mine appears (to me at least) to best convey ‘the spirit of the logic’ which is implicit in the language M. Baudelaire’s poems, including “ Le Cygne” and “ Le Voyage”, which, at some fundamental level, are basically untranslatable. I have never read a really good translation of this poem in English, and to my mind, it is one of a small corpus of M. Baudelaire advances as the set of assumptions which lead to the conclusion of the stated theory, is as oblique as between the first half of the poem and the second. It is the second in which the theory of correspondences is formally articulated, and between it and the first, the line of logic, the general premises M. Then a sort of ‘cæsura in ideas’ occurs, a disjunction after which the two tercets of the second half explain the practical implications of the theory through specific examples, albeit rather oblique ones.īut, to my mind, there is also a ‘cæsura in ideas’ between the first quatrain and the second. The philosophic statement of the theory of correspondences-which is all the more profound for being all the more profoundly condensed-occurs in the two quatrains which form the first half of the sonnet. The problem is that the poem, incontournable as it is in the œuvre of M. The second verse of “ Correspondances”, written in rhyming couplets, appears as a teaser and a taster on the back of my book of Baudelaire translations, Flowers Red and Black (2013), and I confess that for years I could not get beyond that second verse. Baudelaire’s most important philosophical statement, it is the supreme test of anyone who aspires to translate the thoughts of this poet into la langue anglaise. In it, he states his theory of ‘ correspondences’, the synæsthetic intuition that ‘es parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent’, or, as I translate it in the video above, ‘ounds, scents and colours to one another correspond.’īrief as it is, being a sonnet of just fourteen lines and 140 syllables, “ Correspondances” is a notoriously difficult poem to translate into English, and being M. Baudelaire’s æsthetic testament, the work in which he articulates his artistic cri de cœur. You will read a lot of commentary about this sonnet online, for “ Correspondances”-(poem no. Commentary on “ Correspondances” by BaudelaireĪs I prepare to introduce you more fully to my new CD audiobook, The Spleen of Melbourne: Prose Poetry & Fiction, it occurred to me that it would be worth exploring my emotional, intellectual, and artistic relationship with the poet whose influence upon that work is as significant as any of the other broad strands of influence I’ve traced in my notes while developing the presentation for the formal product launch.Īnd today on The Melbourne Flâneur, I post for your delectation, dear readers, a video I recently shot on location in Geelong, strolling beneath the ‘living pillars’ of the City Hall as I recite my translation of Charles Baudelaire’s poem, “ Correspondances”.
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