Translation: Charles Baudelaire Communications

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.

Translation: Charles Baudelaire's The Flowing Hair

Odalisque, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1870

This is Bora Mici's original translation of La chevelure or the Flowing Hair in English by the French 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire. Similar to the poem Correspondances or Communications as I have rendered it, this poem describes a synesthetic journey through the poet's many exotic past destinations and his immersion in a head of flowing hair that revives the sensations and imagery he once experienced. The flowing hair is described as an ocean and the poem seems to blend a more Romantic aesthetic of infinity with a more modern Proustian remembrance of things past.  

The Flowing Hair by Charles Baudelaire

Oh mane, foaming like waves to the clavicle
Oh curls! Oh perfume vapors of insouciance!
Ecstasy! Tonight to fill the dark alcove magical
With memories sleeping in these locks that are navigable
I’d wave them, a handkerchief, in the great expanse!

Asia the languid and Africa that burns,
A faraway world, absent almost gone,
Dwells in your depths, aromatic ferns!
Like other souls surf on melodious turns,
Mine oh my love! swims in your perfume alone.

I’ll go where trees and men, full of verve
Swoon at length in the burning hazes;
Mighty locks, become the tides that swerve
Sea of onyx, shimmering dreams you conserve
Of sails, rowers, masts and blazes.

A busy port where my soul might drink
In big gulps perfumes sounds and colors
Where the vessels glide toward the golden brink
Open wide their arms to welcome the glint
Of a pure sky where the trembling heat gathers.

I’ll sink my head with love astray
In this dark ocean that encloses another;
And my subtle spirit caressed by the sway
Will find you, oh fertile, lazy day,
Endlessly cradling, a leisurely balmy cover.

Blue hair, a tent of darkness splayed
An immense dome you make the blue sky seem,
On the fuzzy edges of your strands displayed
I passionately become drunk on the scents arrayed
Of coconut oil, musk and tar supreme.

At length! always! in your heavy mane my hand
Will plant rubies, pearls and sapphires,
So that you never buck to my demand!
Are you not the oasis where I dream, and the land
Where I avidly inhale the wine my past perspires.