The following translations of two of Charles Baudelaire’s prose poems were produced by Burl Horniachek and Ian McMillan, and are part of the pair’s recently completed effort to create new English translations of all of Baudelaire’s prose poetry.

Here, by way of introduction, is a brief blurb by Horniachek, outlining his reasons for revisiting Baudelaire and why he feels a fresh English translation of the author’s work is necessary:

I was motivated to translate Baudelaire’s prose poems because I was dissatisfied with the versions already available. The available translations tend to make Baudelaire sound like a bunch of stale newspaper articles. Baudelaire’s clean, precise descriptions and carefully deployed words heighten the effect of his frequently horrifying subject matter. There is quite a bit of aggression in Baudelaire and he wants you to feel the full force of the world’s hideousness. His sentences are full of daggers, but too often in English his prose comes across like a heap of butterknives.

Why Baudelaire? Baudelaire has a sort of negative spirituality which still has great appeal in a secularized age. God may no longer seem possible in such a banal, brutalized, materialist world, but suffering and evil are still everywhere apparent, and such terrifying realities bring with them a kind of acknowledged significance, if not salvation. Though he indulged in drugs and sexual promiscuity, Baudelaire was no hippie optimist. He despised sentimental do-gooders like Victor Hugo quite as much as the respectable burghers of post-Revolutionary France. Neither, according to him, were willing to face the true horror of existence. Baudelaire did believe in the reality of beauty and the ideal, but such things were so seldom seen in ordinary experience, especially in the modern world, that, to experience them at all, one must painfully refashion them yourself, often from out of the most unpromising material.

XV. Cake

I was travelling. The landscape in whose midst I was placed was one of irresistible grandeur and nobility. Undoubtedly in that moment something moved in my soul. My thoughts fluttered about with a lightness equal to that of the atmosphere. Vulgar passions, such as hatred and profane love, now appeared to me as distant as the clouds which passed in the depths of the abyss beneath my feet. My soul seemed to me as vast and pure as the dome of the sky in which I was enveloped. The memory of earthly things came to mind only weakened and diminished, like the sound of bells from animals one cannot see, pasturing far, far away, on the other side of the mountain. On the small motionless lake, black from its immense depth, passed the shadow of a cloud, like the reflection from the cloak of an airborne giant flying across the sky. And I remembered that this solemn and rare sensation, caused by an enormous yet perfectly silent movement, filled me with a joy mixed with fear. In short, I felt, graced by the exhilarating beauty by which I was surrounded, at perfect peace with myself and with the universe. I even believed, in my perfect beatitude and in my complete forgetfulness of all earthly evil, that I could no longer find so ridiculous the newspapers who claimed that man was born good. – when incorrigible matter renewed its demands. I thought to remedy the fatigue and ease the hunger caused by so long an ascent. I took from my pocket a large piece of bread, a leather cup and a flask of an elixir which pharmacists were then selling to tourists to mix as opportunity presented with melted snow.

I was quietly cutting my bread, when a very slight sound made me lift my eyes. Before me stood a ragged little creature, black, dishevelled, whose sunken eyes, wild and as if pleading, were devouring the piece of bread. And I heard him sigh, in a voice low and hoarse, the word: cake! I could not keep myself from laughing upon hearing the title with which he had chosen to honour my almost white bread, and I cut him off a good slice, which I then offered to him. Slowly he approached, his eyes never leaving the object of his desire. Then, snatching the piece with his hand, he retreated quickly, as if he was afraid that my offer was insincere, or that I had already repented of it.

But, at that exact instant, he was knocked over by another little savage, who came out of nowhere, and who so perfectly resembled the first that one would have taken him for his twin brother. Together they rolled around on the ground, fighting over the precious prey, neither undoubtedly willing to sacrifice a half for his brother. The first, enraged, grabbed the second by the hair. That other got hold of an ear with his teeth and spat out a bloody little piece along with a magnificent curse in dialect. The legitimate owner of the cake tried to sink his little claws into the eyes of the usurper. He in turn applied all his strength towards strangling his adversary with one hand, while with the other he tried to slide into his pocket the prize of battle. But, reinvigourated by desperation, the loser stood straight up and sent the victor sprawling in the dust with a blow of the head to the stomach. But why describe a hideous fight which lasted in truth much longer than their infantile strength might lead one to expect? The cake travelled from hand to hand, and changed pocket at each instant. But, alas, it also changed in volume. And when finally, exhausted, gasping for breath, bloody, they stopped from the sheer impossibility of continuing, there was, to tell the truth, no longer any cause of battle. The piece of bread had disappeared, and was scattered in crumbs like the grains of sand with which it was now mixed. This performance obscured for me the landscape, and the serene joy which had pleased my soul before seeing these little men had totally disappeared. I remained sad for quite a long time, and I unceasingly repeated, “So there is a magnificent country where bread is called cake, a delicacy so rare it is sufficient to engender a perfectly fratricidal war!”

XXX. The Rope

For Eduard Manet

“Illusions, my friend told me, are as innumerable as the relations between men, or between men and things. And when the illusion disappears, that is to say when we see the thing or fact as it exists outside us, we experience a strange feeling, complicated half with regret for the vanished ghost, half with pleasant surprise at the novelty, at the real fact. If there is any well-known phenomenon, banal, always the same, and of a nature about which it is impossible to be mistaken, it is maternal love. It is as difficult to suppose a mother without maternal love as a light without heat; is it not therefore perfectly legitimate to attribute to maternal love all the actions and words of a mother relative to her child? And yet listen to this little story, where I was oddly mystified by that most natural illusion.

“My profession of painter pushes me to gaze attentively at faces, physiognomies, which present themselves in my path, and you know what enjoyment we draw from this faculty which renders life to our eyes more vigourous and more meaningful than for other men. In the remote quarter where I live, and where vast lawned spaces still separate the buildings, I often observed a child whose ardent and mischievous physiognomy, more than all the others, at first seduced me. He posed more than once for me, and I sometimes transformed him into a little gypsy, sometimes into an angel, sometimes into a mythological Cupid. I made him carry the vagrant’s violin, the Crown of Thorns and Nails of the Passion, and the Torch of Eros. Finally, I took such keen pleasure in the humour of this child that one day I asked his parents, poor people, if they were willing to give him to me, promising to dress him well, to give him some money, and not to impose on him any more trouble than cleaning my brushes and running my errands. This child, once cleaned up, became charming, and the life he led at my home seemed to me a paradise compared to that which he would have experienced in the paternal hovel. Only I have to say that this little fellow sometimes astonished me with odd fits of precocious sadness, and that he soon manifested an immoderate taste for sugar and cordials; so that one day, when I noticed that, despite my many warnings, he had still committed a new larceny of this kind, I threatened to send him back to his parents. Then I went out, and my business kept me away from home for a long time.

“Imagine my horror and astonishment when, returning to my house, the first object to strike my eye was my little fellow, the mischievous companion of my life, hanging on the panel of this wardrobe! His feet were almost touching the floor; a chair, which he had undoubtedly pushed back with his foot, was overturned beside him; his head was tilted convulsively to one shoulder; his face, swollen, and his eyes, all wide open with a frightening fixity, produced at first the illusion of life. Taking him down was not as easy a task as you might believe. He was already quite stiff, and I had an inexplicable repugnance for letting him fall suddenly to the ground. I had to support the whole of him with one arm, and, with the hand of the other arm, cut the rope. But that being done, all was not finished; the little monster had made use of a very thin string which had penetrated deeply into the flesh, and it was now necessary, with thin scissors, to locate the cord between the two folds of the swelling, in order to free it from the neck.

“I neglected to tell you that I had called out vigorously for help; but all my neighbors had refused to come to my aid, faithful in this to the habits of civilized man, who will never, I know not why, meddle in the affairs of a hanged man. Finally, a physician came, who declared that the child had been dead for several hours. Later, when we had to undress him for the burial, the corpsely rigidity was such that, with no hope of bending the limbs, we had to slash and cut the clothes in order to remove them.

“The commissioner, to whom, naturally, I had to report the accident, looked askance at me, and said: “This looks fishy!” no doubt moved by the inveterate desire and professional habit of instilling fear, totally at random, in the innocent as well as the guilty.

“There remained one final task to accomplish, the mere thought of which caused me terrible anxiety: the parents must be told. My feet refused to take me there. Finally, I got up the courage. But, to my astonishment, the mother was unmoved, not one tear leaked from the corner of her eye. I attributed this strangeness to the very horror she must have felt, and I remembered the well-known saying: “The most terrible suffering is that which is silent.” As for the father, he contented himself with saying, in a manner half idiotic/stunned/brutish, half delirious: “After all, it may be for the best; he would have come to a bad end anyway!

“Meanwhile the body was stretched out on my couch, and, assisted by a servant, I was busying myself with the final preparations, when the mother entered my studio. She wanted, she said, to see the corpse of her son. I could not, indeed, prevent her from intoxicating herself with her grief and deny her that final and dark consolation. Then she asked me to show her the spot where her little one had hanged himself. “Oh no! madame,” I answered, “that would do you no good.” And as, involuntarily, my eyes turned towards the funereal wardrobe, I perceived, with a disgust mingled with horror and anger, that the nail was still stuck in the wall, with a long end of rope still trailing from it. I dashed quickly forward to tear out the last remnants of the mishap, and, as I was about to toss them out through the open window, the poor woman seized my arm and said in an irresistible voice, “Oh! sir! Let me have it! I ask! I beg you!” Her desperation had, undoubtedly, seemed to me so crazed, that she now longed tenderly for what had served as instrument for the death of her son, and wanted to keep it as a dear and horrible relic. – And she grabbed the nail and the string.

“Finally! finally! it was all finished. It only remained for me to go back to work, even more vigorously than before, to drive out little by little this little corpse which haunted the folds of my brain, and whose ghost exhausted me with its large fixed eyes. But the next day I received a packet of letters: some, from tenants in my own house, some others from neighboring houses; one, from the first floor; another, from the second; another, from the third, and so on, some in a semi-pleasing style, as if trying to disguise under an apparent bit of banter the sincerity of the demand; others, extremely crude and without spelling, but all tending to the same end, that is to say, to obtain from me a piece of the fatal and beatific rope. Among the signatories there were, I have to say, more women than men; but, believe you me, they did not all belong to the low and vulgar class. I kept these letters. “And then, suddenly, there was a flash in my brain, and I realized why the mother was so anxious to tear off the string and by what trade she meant to console herself.”