Translation: Charles Baudelaire's Beauty

Maxfield Parrish, Contentment, 1927

This is Bora Mici's original French to English translation of the poem Beauty, La beauté in French language by the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire. In this short poem, Baudelaire celebrates the eternal and divine nature of beauty and its relationship to the poet through visual imagery and comparisons. As often is the case in Baudelaire's literary work, an ambiguity reigns in the relationship of the poet or the artist to the ideal being celebrated. In this particular poem, beauty is portrayed as both cold and exacting, as well as a cause for wonder and fascination, a kind of luring trap.   

Beauty

I am fair, oh mortals! like a stoney dream,

And my breast, where each has been bruised shard by shard, 

Is made to inspire a love in the bard

Eternal and mute like matter serene.

I reign in the sky like a quizzical sphinx

Marrying a snow heart with the swan’s white;

I loath movement in the lines however slight,

Never in tears or laughter do I sink.

Poets, in the face of my grandiose airs,

which I seem to borrow from the proudest marvels

Will consume their days in austere study snares;

For I have, to fascinate these sheepish lovers, 

Pure mirrors, which render all more fair and tender:

My eyes, my large eyes of eternal splendor.