7.27 Baudelaire — Le Spleen de Paris — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read six prose poems by Charles Baudelaire from Le Spleen de Paris , about 1,900 words in all: a stranger who loves clouds, a dream room and a real one, a dog, a poor family at a cafe window, an order to get drunk, and a lit window at night. Recognise the prose poem: a short text in prose with the density, images and music of a poem, but no verse and no rhyme. Follow Baudelaire's sudden changes of tone, from dream to disgust, from tenderness to cruelty. Read a text aloud for its rhythm: repetitions, lists and the long sentence that builds to a point. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English — Eh ! qu’aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire étranger ? — Well then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger? Les meubles ont l’air de rêver The furniture seems to be dreaming L’âme y prend un bain de paresse, aromatisé par le regret et le désir. The soul takes a bath of idleness there, scented with regret and desire. venez respirer un excellent parfum acheté chez le meilleur parfumeur de la ville. come and breathe an excellent perfume bought from the best perfumer in town. s’approche et pose curieusement son nez humide sur le flacon débouché comes up and curiously puts its wet nose on the open bottle Il faut être toujours ivre. One must always be drunk. Prerequisites : 7.26 — this reading follows 7.26 Reading . You need the vocabulary of literature from 5.18 Vocabulary : le poème , le vers , la rime , la métaphore ; and of the mind from 5.20 Vocabulary : l'âme , le désir . About this text Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) is the poet of modern Paris. His collection of verse, Les Fleurs du mal , brought him a trial for offending public morals in 1857, and six of its poems were banned. In the following years he wrote some fifty short pieces in prose, published in newspapers and reviews, which he meant to collect under the title Le Spleen de Paris ; spleen , an English word, was his name for the deep, idle melancholy of the city dweller. They appeared together after his death, in 1869, as Petits Poëmes en prose . In a letter that serves as their preface, Baudelaire describes the dream of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough to follow the movements of the soul and the jolts of consciousness. He names Aloysius Bertrand as his model, but these pieces made the prose poem a major form; later poets, from Rimbaud to the surrealists, followed him. The text here gives six of the fifty, in the order of the collection, about 1,900 words, from volume IV of Baudelaire's complete works published in Paris by Michel Lévy frères in 1869, as transcribed in French Wikisource. Each poem keeps its title. Reading Baudelaire No verse, but music. Read Enivrez-vous aloud. Its sentences repeat and grow: demandez au vent, à la vague, à l'étoile, à l'oiseau, à l'horloge . The list is the rhythm; the repetition of enivrez-vous is the refrain. Two worlds. Several poems turn on a sudden switch between the ideal and the real. In La Chambre double , the narrator lies in a room of dream and perfume, until a knock at the door brings back the dirty room, the debts and Time. Watch for the moment of the switch in each poem. Cruelty. Baudelaire is not kind to his reader. The dog that prefers filth to perfume is compared to le public ; the narrator of Les Yeux des pauvres ends by hating the woman he loves. The shock is deliberate. Capital letters. Abstract nouns with capitals, le Temps , are almost persons, powers that rule over the narrator. Reading it a second time, poem by poem L'Étranger . A dialogue: asked whom he loves, father, friends, country, beauty or gold, the stranger answers that he loves only the clouds. La Chambre double . A room like a dream, soft colours, a perfume, the beloved idol on the bed, time abolished. A knock: a bailiff, a mistress, or an errand boy from a newspaper; the room becomes a hovel, and Time returns with its tyranny. Le Chien et le Flacon . The narrator offers his dog an excellent perfume; the dog recoils, and would have preferred filth. Like the public, the narrator says. Les Yeux des pauvres . In a brand-new, brilliantly lit cafe, a poor man and his two children stand outside and stare in with wonder. The narrator is moved and ashamed of his glass; his companion asks to have them sent away. He tells her why he now hates her. Enivrez-vous . One must always be drunk, with wine, poetry or virtue, to escape the weight of Time. Les Fenêtres . Seen from outside, a closed window lit by a candle shows more than an open one. The narrator invents the story of a poor, already wrinkled woman he sees behind a window, and asks what it matters whether his legend is true, if it has helped him to live. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. Paris Spleen The Stranger "Whom do you love best, enigmatic man, tell me? Your father, your mother, your sister or your brother?" "I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother." "Your friends?" "You are using there a word whose meaning has remained unknown to me to this day." "Your country?" "I do not know in what latitude it lies." "Beauty?" "I would gladly love her, goddess and immortal." "Gold?" "I hate it as you hate God." "Well! What do you love, then, extraordinary stranger?" "I love the clouds... the clouds that pass... over there... the marvellous clouds!" The Double Room A room that resembles a reverie, a truly spiritual room, where the stagnant air is lightly tinted with pink and blue. The soul takes a bath of idleness there, scented with regret and desire. It is something of the twilight, bluish and pinkish; a dream of sensual pleasure during an eclipse. The furniture has elongated, prostrate, languid shapes. The furniture seems to be dreaming; one would say it was endowed w