Myth of Arrival

Let us look at an actual Baudelaire sonnet and see what makes it different from other sonnets? First, there is the rhyme pattern. ABAB ABAB CCD EED But form in itself is not enough to make this poem Modern. Let us look at the original French. What do you see beyond the 14-lines?

La Géante
Charles Baudelaire

Du temps que la Nature en sa verve puissante
Concevait chaque jour des enfants monstrueux,
J'eusse aimé vivre auprès d'une jeune géante,
Comme aux pieds d'une reine un chat voluptueux.

J'eusse aimé voir son corps fleurir avec son âme
Et grandir librement dans ses terribles jeux;
Deviner si son coeur couve une sombre flamme
Aux humides brouillards qui nagent dans ses yeux;

Parcourir à loisir ses magnifiques formes;
Ramper sur le versant de ses genoux énormes,
Et parfois en été, quand les soleils malsains,

Lasse, la font s'étendre à travers la campagne,
Dormir nonchalamment à l'ombre de ses seins,
Comme un hameau paisible au pied d'une montagne.

When I say this is a Modern poem what interests me about Baudelaire's point of view is the very real crisis he wrote this poem in. Bermann recounts the following:

By the nineteenth century, the poet's social position — and the very purpose of his poetry — had of course changed enormously from what they had been in the Renaissance, and Baudelaire's particular plight as a nearly destitute art critic and journalist for most of his adult life is a case in point. No longer attached to or supported by a court eager to promote the revival or ornamentation of a national language and literature, the poet of the 1850s was, if anything, a person without a clear social function. Needed by neither an aristocracy nor, as in the Renaissance, by a newly wealthy merchant class seeking to add artistic luster to commercial success, the poet had to appeal now to a growing middle-class public, a reading public broader by far than ever before existed.¹

Here, then, is a poet attempting to write a poem that will be looked at with commercial success. Indeed, La Géante is the sort of poem where, even if you have never read Baudelaire's work, you might think, "hey, that sounds sort of familiar … I didn't know he wrote that." It is the sort of poem the tired old Decadent poets loved sixty years ago. The objectifying of women's body becomes literal here, with the narrator of the poem describing fascination with a female body of mythical size and enough time to caress her marvelous flesh at my ease. In a 1961 translation of Flowers of Evil Francis Duke claims the notion of giantess here evoked is strictly of classical: one of the race of Gaia, earth-goddess and mother of all things: poetry, the physical sciences, etc.² I do not know if I agree completely with that statement, but regardless, La Géante is distinctive in that it struck a note with the licentious reading public, a note that carries on today. In fact, if you ask most people what sort of poetry they read in their spare time, many will cite poetry that has a care-free naughtiness to it, a joyous decadence. This is what makes this poem Modern and if you are the kind of person who likes decadence then we must thank Baudelaire for paving the way. If it was not for Charles Baudelaire we would never have had Charles Bukowski a hundred years later and all his glorifying of wine, women and song.

Giantess
translated by ZJC

In old times, when Nature's lust could transgress
and breed monster children, I wish I had been
in love with a girl giant, some teenage giantess,
like a voluptuous cat beside his queen.

Let me watch her body bloom with desire
that blooms with each new exquisite surprise.
Try to guess if her heart conceals dark fire,
fire whose misty smoke swims before her eyes.

Let me caress her marvelous flesh at my ease,
crawl on the cliffs of her enormous knees,
and when depraved suns in summer season

force her to lie down across a plain to rest
let me sleep in the shadows of her breast
like a town in the shade of its mountain.

1. Bermann, Sandra L. The sonnet over time: a study in the sonnets of Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press (1988) pages 96 - 97. [back]
2. Duke, Francis. Flowers of Evil and other poems. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press (1961) page 287 [back]

This entry was posted on Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 10:10 am and is filed under Forms, French Translations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.