Translation: Pomme Witches

Album cover by Ambivalently Yours

This is an original French to English translation of the beautiful song, titled Sorcières or Witches in English, by the French singer-songwriter Pomme, which first appeared in 2020. The song describes what it's like to be an independent-minded woman who is likened to a witch. It acts as a reappropriation of an image laden with multiple connotations in the collective imaginary. In this song Pomme adds her personal tones to this maligned magical being that is also an enchanting relatable woman. You can hear it here:

Witches by Pomme

If you wear dark clothes in sight,
If you wander like a lark in the night,
If you drink hot water with scattered dried flowers,
If you think beyond people’s jaded ego towers,

You must be a witch, you must be a witch
You must be a witch, you must be a witch.

If you like cats standing on your head,
If you cry out in the hollow of your bed,
If you do not like being told to smile,
If you find the moon beautiful when it beguiles,

You must be a witch, you must be a witch.
You must be a witch, you must be a witch.

If you know how to be alone in your plight,
If you follow your instinct in the night,
If you need no one to come save you,
If you think nothing replaces freedom too,

You must be a witch, you must be a witch.
You must be a witch, you must be a witch.

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.