Trees, translation, and Baudelaire

I recently listened to the poet John Cooper Clarke on Desert Island Discs. He mentioned that Charles Baudelaire was his favourite poet, who I've never read. Today I happened to notice a book of French poetry sitting amongst our tsundoku (Japanese word for unread books on your shelves).

I picked it up and flipped to the Baudelaire section and - wow. I was blown away by the first poem I came to, Correspondances. Reading it in (halting, bad) French was a luxurious experience, rolling those lush sounds round on the tongue.

Then I read the translation below. Talk about desiccating a piece of art! It was essentially a word-for-word rendering of the French into English, like Google Translate might spit out. None of the cadences, the mystery, the feel of the original.

This of course piqued my interest in the art of translation. Such a fine balance between faithfulness to the content on the one hand and to the feel on the other. I spent a happy twenty minutes comparing several different translations of the poem on the excellent fleurs de mal website.

Personally I felt none of these translations quite captured my experience of the poem. I think it’s about the strange, mysterious language of the forest. A language of scents, sounds, and shades. A language which we’ve lost the ability to speak, but which can still speak to us.

Richard Powers’ wonderful Pulitzer prize-winning book Overstory shows trees as complex, interconnected, sentient beings. There is certainly evidence emerging that trees communicate with each other (see this and this). I think this is what Baudelaire is anticipating in his poem.

So, naturally, instead of topping up the car’s windscreen washer fluid or putting up the bedroom shelves, I decided to have a crack at translating it myself.

And, as Baudelaire might have said, voilà:

Connections

Nature is a temple where living pillars
Speak in half-formed whispers
We pass through forests of symbols
Which watch with knowing eyes.

Distant echoes intertwine
In deep and shadowy union
Vast as night and as daylight
Scents, colours, and sounds.

There are scents as fresh as a child's flesh,
As sweet as oboes, as green as meadows,
- there are others, corrupt, rich, triumphant,
Endlessly expansive
Amber, musk, and resinous incenses
Sing rapture to spirit and to the senses.

And here’s the original poem:

Correspondances

La nature est un temple où des vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir des confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers les forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme des longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
- Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.

Adam Barnett3 Comments