Myth of Arrival

I have been working on Charles Baudelaire's "Don Juan aux enfers," Don Juan in Hell." I do not know if you are familiar with the story of the famous libertine? (speaking of libertines, have you seen the new Johnny Depp movie, The Libertine? It hasn't come out in the theaters yet here) … anyway, the plot, such as it is, centers around about a free-thinking Spanish noble, who seduces a woman, kills her father Don Luis and then insults the dead man's stone statue before finally being condemned to hellfire. Mozart's Don Giovanni is based on the myth. The original poem goes as follows:

Quand Don Juan descendit vers l'onde souterraine
Et lorsqu'il eut donné son obole à Charon,
Un sombre mendiant, l'oeil fier comme Antisthène,
D'un bras vengeur et fort saisit chaque aviron.

Montrant leurs seins pendants et leurs robes ouvertes,
Des femmes se tordaient sous le noir firmament,
Et, comme un grand troupeau de victimes offertes,
Derrière lui traînaient un long mugissement.

Sganarelle en riant lui réclamait ses gages,
Tandis que Don Luis avec un doigt tremblant
Montrait à tous les morts errant sur les rivages
Le fils audacieux qui railla son front blanc.

Frissonnant sous son deuil, la chaste et maigre Elvire,
Près de l'époux perfide et qui fut son amant,
Semblait lui réclamer un suprême sourire
Où brillât la douceur de son premier serment.

Tout droit dans son armure, un grand homme de pierre
Se tenait à la barre et coupait le flot noir;
Mais le calme héros, courbé sur sa rapière,
Regardait le sillage et ne daignait rien voir.

The poem isn't a real sonnet and there were a few term Baudelaire used I had to look up. Antisthenes was a Greek philosopher who invented cynicism. Also, Charon, in Greek mythology, is the ferryman of the dead. He rows his boat across the river Styx in the underworld. The dead would pay their passage in his boat with a coin called an oboli, but that was too hard to rhyme so I called it a death coin instead. And Sganarelle is Don Juan's manservant or valet.

When Don Juan reached that underground river,
he paid his death coin passage from those shores.
Charon, gruff in Antisthenes' manner,
then pulled with vengeful arms on his long oars.

Their breasts sagging in unlaced gowns, a crowd
of grim women, herded under black sky,
made, as they cried, bestial noises, loud,
urgent, like doomed sacrifice led to die.

Sganarelle, laughing, called for his wage
while in among the vast dead assembled there
old Don Luis pointed with shaking rage
the son who dared once to mock his white hair.

Elvira, chaste and thin, shuddering while
standing near her false husband, her wed grief,
tried to ask for one final, parting smile
of his first love for her, both bright and brief.

And the statue of the man carved from stone
stood at the helm, steering. The Don, staring
absently at the waves, calm and alone,
leaned on his sword, ignoring everything.

Today I began work on a sonnet by Uruguay's Juana de Ibarbourou. She was born in 1895 and was an early feminist, among other things. My Spanish is even worse than my French, so I am asking for help with some friends on several of the key terms I am getting stuck on. Still, I will share with you all the fruits of my labor as the week goes by. Here is the original:

Magdalena: yo a veces envidio lo que fuiste
Me aburre esta existencia tan monótona y triste.
Hoy daría mi alma por los mil esplendores
Y el vértigo de abismo de tu cien mil amores.

Y después, el sayal gris de los penitentes
¡Que importa! Hoy es mi alma un nido de serpientes!
Me vengo del Hastío ensoñando el pecado.
Y siento entre mis labios la miel de lo vedado.

¡El inmenso bostezo de mi paz cambiaría
Por el barro dorado de tus noches de orgía!

Para ofrendarlo eb yb gran vaso lleno
de ungruentos de nardos, el rubio Nazareno.
Hoy daría mi alma porlos mil esplendores.
¡Y el vértigo de abismo de tus cien mil amores!

I took a wonderful Shakespeare course my last semester of graduate school and one of the text we examined was The Tempest. One direction of scholarship that proved extremely interesting was the re-examination of colonial literature not from the point of view of the colonizer but the colonized. In other words, what does literature written at a time when various empires were expanding over the planet show us about the mind-set, the attitudes and apprehensions of the invading powers trying to re-shape various indigenous peoples into their own images? As Caliban says, You taught me language, and my profit on 't / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!¹

I have been forced to approach much of Baudelaire's poetry in this fashion. He is, of course, like all of us, a product of his culture. That is, Paris, France, in the 1840s and 1850s. Charles was middle-class, taken to living off the allowance his mother gave him and fond of prostitutes and absinthe. That is the popular mythology that surrounds him. What this means is he developed various venereal diseases that stayed with him his entire adult life and which he apparently passed onto all his lovers.

But in many of his poems there is a figure of a certain woman, who Louis Simpson refers to as "quadroon," or octoroon, a person having one-quarter African ancestry, named Jeanne Duval.² It has been the tendency of several of the critical essays I have read so far (see: Ward, 2001; de Jonge, 1976; Piaget Shanks, 1974) to eroticse Duval as much as Baudelaire does. That is, they take the poem on face value without bothering to question what the poet was attempting to do.

For example, in Parfum Exotique, what is curious to me is not so much that from a scent of exotic fragrance brings forth all these images to the speaker of the poem, Proust does the same thing but for 600 pages, but what those images are. The speaker talks of a sun-drenched, lazy island where outlandish trees grow and the population is both submissive and sexually libidinous.

That this idea of Primitivism is still in art speaks volumes. That is that "primitive peoples" (read: non-Western, white and middle class) contain some sort of destructive force that is continually lurking on the outside of our (read: male) understanding, particularly ecstasy, spiritual punishment and/or unsuppressed urges of violence or sexuality. This idea had been sweeping through Paris at the time of Baudelaire, with Paul Gauguin's paintings of the Tahiti and the South Pacific, featuring nude, highly sexual women in various "native" poses. However, like many other things, Primitivism is a racist construct, developed by outside observers searching for solutions to various problems of their own society. The original poem reads as follows:

Quand, les deux yeux fermés, en un soir chaud d'automne,
Je respire l'odeur de ton sein chaleureux,
Je vois se dérouler des rivages heureux
Qu'éblouissent les feux d'un soleil monotone;

Une île paresseuse où la nature donne
Des arbres singuliers et des fruits savoureux;
Des hommes dont le corps est mince et vigoureux,
Et des femmes dont l'oeil par sa franchise étonne.

Guidé par ton odeur vers de charmants climats,
Je vois un port rempli de voiles et de mâts
Encor tout fatigués par la vague marine,

Pendant que le parfum des verts tamariniers,
Qui circule dans l'air et m'enfle la narine,
Se mêle dans mon âme au chant des mariniers.

That Baudelaire would find the Pacific, or the Caribbean or Africa exotic is less shocking than if he somehow would have had the creativity and humanity not to. Perhaps what this shows to us is how quickly what titillates changes. What was once seen as forbidden or taboo is now common. Common is not a bad thing, it means we are no longer scandalized by the "Other." The sonnet I would love to read would be Jeanne Duval's reply to Baudelaire, After giving me the clap, I lay next/ to your pasty flesh and smell Paris'/ sewer system in one fetid breath … but sadly, we do not have that.

Bewitching, on an autumn night with eyes
closed I breathe in the musk of your breasts, see
far off shores, atolls, all bright and happy
under a dazzling, endless sunrise.

Lazy island, where Nature breeds countless
wondrous trees and fruits of weird delight,
and whose men, with their lithe bodies, invite
women, whose eyes flash with lewd directness.

Lured by your scent to an isle so charming,
I see a port full of sail, mast, rigging
all still weary from the ocean's furies

while the tamarind trees breathe their flavor
to please my senses with greedy pleasure,
mingled with sailor's sea-songs and chanteys.

Notes in Translation:

For those who are not familiar with the terms, Tamarind trees are a tropical Asian evergreen tree, having pale yellow flowers and long seed pods. Chantey is a song sung by sailors to the rhythm of their movements while working.

1. This line alone from The Tempest has been interpreted, among many things, as Shakespeare speaking on behalf of the enslaved peoples Britain had conquered at a time when they had no voice at all. [back]
2. Simpson, Louis. Modern Poets of France: a bilingual anthology. Story Line Press (1997) page 381 [back]

Shelby and I just came back from a wonderful student production of Jacques Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann. Offenbach, known as "the thinnest man in Paris," in his day, composed lovely Romantic music, some of which I had actually heard prior to showing up at the 3 pm show.

The set pieces were great, with lots of physical humor that went well with the large cast. Of the students, Melody Siu-Wan Sze, the mezzo-soprano who played the role of Nicklausse, was fabulous. Shelby quite liked Matthew Tuell, who was in the title role of Hoffmann.