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| Gustav Klimt, Fir Forest 1, 1901 |
This is Bora Mici's original translation of the 1857 poem Correspondances or Communications in English by the French 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire. The poem expresses a synesthetic Symbolist vision of the connection between the poet and nature, and nature's ability to communicate with the poet and transport him to a realm where his senses are awakened and begin to dialogue with and become immersed in a natural forest of symbols, which seems familiar but has things to reveal. This poem places the emphasis on connections between the senses and the intellect and that's why I have chosen to translate it as Communications, rather than keeping the original concept of Correspondances, which seems to leave room for the incomplete or unachieved transmission of a coded missive, a parallelism that persists and that constitutes the metaphysics of our experience. It is perhaps to evoke a more contemporary reading of this timeless poem.
Communications by Charles Baudelaire
Nature is a temple where many a living column
Sometimes muffled words whistles;Man enters there through forests of symbols
That look upon him familiarly solemn.
Like long echoes that overlap far away
In a homogenous, deep darkness,
Expansive like the night and the brightness,
Aromas, colors, sounds dialogue in the leigh.
The perfumes smell fresh like children’s flesh,
Sweet like oboes, green like meadows,
— Yet others triumphant, rich, enmeshed
Expansive like infinite shadows,
Like amber, resin, incense and musk,
Singing the transports of mind and the senses at dusk.
