Translation: Louise Ackermann To an Artist

Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo, 1508-1512

This is Bora Mici's original French to English translation of the poem To an Artist, A une artiste in French, by French poet Louise Ackermann. The poem is about the role of the artist as a guiding light for earthly creatures and his or her relationship to mankind and its lowly existence and how artistic inspiration can lift us above our human condition marked by suffering. The original text refers to a female artist, evoking her support for the members of her own sex who strove to make their name known in 19th-century France through their creative work.

To an Artist

Since even those who are happiest face infinite pain,

Since the ground is cold and the sky looms dark,

Since mankind here below wanders sullen in vain,

Among futile regrets and fleeting amorous darts, 

What to make of life? Oh our immortal souls,

Where to direct your desires and your secret urges?

You would possess, but here all quivers and prowls;

You want to love forever, but near death emerges.     

It’s better yet in some austere study to immerse 

Ourselves, and in an enchanted world too,

And in our beloved art to contemplate on earth,

Through one of its facets, beauty pure and true.    

Artist of unclouded brow, you have grasped it from above, 

You, whom, of all the arts, the sweetest hath drawn near,

Who envelops it in faith, a cult, tender love,

At a time when faith, cult and love, all disappear.

Ah! And as for us, for whom weakness is mistress, 

And who lack a flame to light the shadows we tread,

We step over brambles and cry out in distress,   

Walk in your bright path that you have always lead.    

Walk! so that the sky may love and smile upon thee,

So you can yearn for it yourself with a holy fire,

And outwit, your heart full of your idolatry,

The eternal pain and immense desire. 

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.