Une Charogne (The Carcass)

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……Charles Baudelaire wrote Une Charogne to his lover, Jeanne Duval, an actress and dancer, who met him when she left Haiti for France in 1842. Whether she died sooner or lived longer than the poet is in dispute, though both would succumb to syphilis. For twenty years she was the poet’s muse, and a good one. The poems Baudelaire wrote to her remain among the great love poems, sensual, down right erotic at times, and sometimes, as with Une Charogne, where the words themselves often sound like decay conjuring up—though some say this is impossible—a poem that is both beautiful and morbid. If for Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval was a metaphor for decay, I would argue that that doesn’t make him misogynistic. Baudelaire called Duval, who was Creole, his Vénus Noire; she symbolized for him the whole life process: blossoming and decay, birth and death. It is poetically interesting to note that Jeanne Duval lived at 6 rue de la Femme-sans-tête, Street of the Headless Woman. Perhaps to really like Baudelaire one has to be a little morbid. So be it. To accompany the poem and my translation, I’ve added paintings by Edvard Munch, an artist who was four years old when the poet died, who certainly came to share some of the poet’s sublime morbidity.

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Une Charogne

Rappelez-vous l’objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
…..Ce beau matin d’été si doux:
Au détour d’un sentier une charogne infâme
…..Sur un lit semé de cailloux,

Les jambes en l’air, comme une femme lubrique,
…..Brûlante et suant les poisons,
Ouvrait d’une façon nonchalante et cynique
…..Son ventre plein d’exhalaisons.

Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,
…..Comme afin de la cuire à point,
Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature
…..Tout ce qu’ensemble elle avait joint;

Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe
…..Comme une fleur s’épanouir.
La puanteur était si forte, que sur l’herbe
…..Vous crûtes vous évanouir.

Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride,
…..D’où sortaient de noirs bataillons
De larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide
…..Le long de ces vivants haillons.

Tout cela descendait, montait comme une vague
…..Ou s’élançait en pétillant;
On eût dit que le corps, enflé d’un souffle vague,
…..Vivait en se multipliant.

Et ce monde rendait une étrange musique,
…..Comme l’eau courante et le vent,
Ou le grain qu’un vanneur d’un mouvement rythmique
…..Agite et tourne dans son van.

Les formes s’effaçaient et n’étaient plus qu’un rêve,
…..Une ébauche lente à venir
Sur la toile oubliée, et que l’artiste achève
…..Seulement par le souvenir.

Derrière les rochers une chienne inquiète
…..Nous regardait d’un oeil fâché,
Epiant le moment de reprendre au squelette
…..Le morceau qu’elle avait lâché.

— Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure,
…..À cette horrible infection,
Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,
…..Vous, mon ange et ma passion!

Oui! telle vous serez, ô la reine des grâces,
…..Apres les derniers sacrements,
Quand vous irez, sous l’herbe et les floraisons grasses,
…..Moisir parmi les ossements.

Alors, ô ma beauté! dites à la vermine
…..Qui vous mangera de baisers,
Que j’ai gardé la forme et l’essence divine
…..De mes amours décomposés!

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A Carcass

Darling, remember what we saw
…that beautiful summer morning
a rotting thing at the turn of the path
…on a bed that was sown with pebbles

with its legs in the air like a woman ready
…burning and sweating it opened
in a cynical offhand way
…a womb exhaling poison.

The sun shone on this rottenness
…cooking it to the point
Great Nature got back a hundred ways
…what it had joined as one.

Heaven looked down on this wonderful carcass
…as it would on a flower blooming
there in the grass where the stench was so strong
…you thought it would send you swooning.

The flies crawled over its belly bloated
…by hordes of black maggots flowing
thick as a boiling liquid
…over all of it moving

it flew up and flew down like a cloud
…or rushed forth sparkling at you—
you might have said it swelled with a breath
…that lived by multiplying itself

giving off a strange soft music
…like running water or the wind
or the sound a winnower makes
…shaking grain back and forth in his pan

its form was erased, came again changed
…like a dream or a sketch long forgotten
left on a canvas the artist remembers
…when he wants to draw it.

Behind the rocks a jittery bitch
…was looking angrily at us
spying the moment to pull from the bones
…the piece she had let go of.

Darling, one day you’ll be this filth
…this horrible infection
star of my night’s, my nature’s sun
…my angel and my passion

yes, you’ll be, Queen of the Graces
…after the last sacraments
under the ground and the flowering grasses
…rotting among the skeletons.

Then, my Beauty, tell the worms
…who’ll eat you with their kisses
that I still keep the form of my love
…decomposed and its divine essence.

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