Sandra Simonds

My Baudelaire Translations


My Baudelaire is a kind of drag queen, a hysteric, a vampire, a suicidal teenage girl, a depressive, a maniac, a monster, the gothic script itself, a thief, the sun in the south in August, hot, wet and terrible. My Baudelaire is surrounded by a lot of white melting candles in a dark room with dusty purple velvet candles and the poet sits and thinks and listens. My Baudelaire is a drunk. My Baudelaire is a drug addict. My Baudelaire is a prostitute. My Baudelaire is a single mother with student loan debt who lives in the Deep South. My Baudelaire is a woman and a man and neither a woman nor a man but this doesn’t stop her or him from performing man and woman. My Baudelaire has no gender or sex, lives in animalistic delight and animalistic agony. Time, for my Baudelaire, only makes sense in terms of bodily pleasure. My Baudelaire is a sinner and chameleon. My Baudelaire is an English Professor but has been fired from all her jobs. My Baudelaire goes to Walmart at night to buy a boxes of diapers. Sometimes my Baudelaire cries in her parked car in the Walmart parking lot alone and no one sees her. My Baudelaire endlessly grades composition papers. She has read a million personal narratives from students. My Baudelaire is all the stories of her students’ lives. My Baudelaire is a performance trying to find some delight, some beautiful thing balancing on our collapsing plane of ecology, inside nights of burglary and rape and theft and violence. My Baudelaire is the body of some collection of aristocratic beliefs that have been overtaken by the proletariat—their million voices have entered his body, have hijacked his voice, his throat, his eyes, his face, his skin, his being and have unleashed some deep anarchy like cracking a code.


 

Charles Baudelaire

Les Metamorphoses du Vampire


La femme cependant de sa bouche de fraise,
En se tordant ainsi qu’un serpent sur la braise,
Et pétrissant ses seins sur le fer de son busc,
Laissait couler ces mots tout imprégnés de musc:
—« Moi, j’ai la lèvre humide, et je sais la science
De perdre au fond d’un lit l’antique conscience.
Je sèche tous les pleurs sur mes seins triomphants
Et fais rire les vieux du rire des enfants.
Je remplace, pour qui me voit nue et sans voiles,
La lune, le soleil, le ciel et les étoiles!
Je suis, mon cher savant, si docte aux voluptés,
Lorsque j’étouffe un homme en mes bras veloutés,
Ou lorsque j’abandonne aux morsures mon buste,
Timide et libertine, et fragile et robuste,
Que sur ces matelas qui se pâme d’émoi
Les Anges impuissants se damneraient pour moi! »

Quand elle eut de mes os sucé toute la moelle,
Et que languissamment je me tournai vers elle
Pour lui rendre un baiser d’amour, je ne vis plus
Qu’une outre aux flancs gluants, toute pleine de pus!
Je fermai les deux yeux dans ma froide épouvante,
Et, quand je les rouvris à la clarté vivante,
A mes côtés, au lieu du mannequin puissant
Qui semblait avoir fait provision de sang,
Tremblaient confusément des débris de squelette,
Qui d’eux-mêmes rendaient le cri d’une girouette
Ou d’une enseigne, au bout d’une tringle de fer,
Que balance le vent pendant les nuits d’hiver.

trans. Sandra Simonds

Metamorphosis of the Vampire


You know the kind I’m talking about: a sort of snake lady,
all bruises and torqued flesh dancing
in a Montana river with trout, beer cans and flies.
Pregnant with science, music, mud and fronds,
her conscience has the tarnished, antique quality
of a century of sin.
                             It makes me laugh to think that she’s
                             a woman who cannot die and, for eternity, must
                             speak, eat and sleep like a babbling infant.

 
 

Exotic Perfume


When my two eyes close on a warm autumn night, I sweat
           the smell of your hot skin, and I feel the blazing rivulets
of happiness that fuel the inferno of the monotonous sun.

We have come to this lazy island together, Felix,
  where nature offers shivering trees with shivering red fruit,
    cold as an ancient orgy. This place where men
are thin and vigorous and women are fresh and sassy like sin.

My god, this climate, it charms me but also
           makes me so very tired, all that vague marine
just piles and piles of sea on sea like corpses,
                blue on obscene blue endlessly.  

What the fuck do I know about what is perfumed?
 Felix, I know nothing about what is green.
                    Something lush circles the air above us.
         It’s a soul, I’m sure of it. Some sort of screen.

Parfum exotique


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.

 

The Sick Muse


My poor, poor, sick muse, hello. What are you doing today?
           Your creamy eyes, all purple with nocturnal visions,
I see you reflected in every tint of the world—all of it—
           The madness, the horror, the cold taciturn hell of it.

I can’t succumb to you so quickly, but all my verse
          pours so easily into the rose love of your urns.
I could try to hide it, but the depth is despotic,
and all I really care to do is float on your rhythmic waves.

I don’t know how to be healthy, Felix,
        don’t know that particular exhalation, and I think of you
so deeply, so furiously, all the time.
                     It’s a sickness but I want it.

Come with me, let’s count out these antique syllables
           while we can for we are the mothers of our own songs.
       Phoebus and the fantastic Pan, they have built
           their houses out of us with their mythological blood.

La Muse malade


Ma pauvre muse, hélas! qu’as-tu donc ce matin?
Tes yeux creux sont peuplés de visions nocturnes,
Et je vois tour à tour réfléchis sur ton teint
La folie et l’horreur, froides et taciturnes.
Le succube verdâtre et le rose lutin
T’ont-ils versé la peur et l’amour de leurs urnes?
Le cauchemar, d’un poing despotique et mutin
T’a-t-il noyée au fond d’un fabuleux Minturnes?
Je voudrais qu’exhalant l’odeur de la santé
Ton sein de pensers forts fût toujours fréquenté,
Et que ton sang chrétien coulât à flots rythmiques,
Comme les sons nombreux des syllabes antiques,
Où règnent tour à tour le père des chansons,
Phoebus, et le grand Pan, le seigneur des moissons.

 
 

Eternity


The demon in the hot, hot chamber
          came to see me in my hot, hot chamber
and I lost everything, everything
         because he claimed he was my savior.

Everything is beautiful! Everything!
                    And I am beauty’s lost enchantment,
composed of all the flesh’s charms.

What is the softest thing in the world, Felix?
               It is my penis; It is my soul and it is
         abhorrent and nothing will stop it.

I don’t want you to ravish me; I don’t
           want you to ignore me either or
      seduce me. I just want you to
              consume me, Felix, in the way that
the old masters did since harmony

       is too exquisite and governs everything,
like the O in every metamorphosis
            where some mystical One
     hails music, hails perfume like a cunt.

Tout entière


Le Démon, dans ma chambre haute
Ce matin est venu me voir,
Et, tâchant à me prendre en faute
Me dit : « Je voudrais bien savoir
Parmi toutes les belles choses
Dont est fait son enchantement,
Parmi les objets noirs ou roses
Qui composent son corps charmant,
Quel est le plus doux. »— Ô mon âme !
Tu répondis à l’Abhorré :
« Puisqu’en Elle tout est dictame
Rien ne peut être préféré.
Lorsque tout me ravit, j’ignore
Si quelque chose me séduit.
Elle éblouit comme l’Aurore
Et console comme la Nuit ;
Et l’harmonie est trop exquise,
Qui gouverne tout son beau corps,
Pour que l’impuissante analyse
En note les nombreux accords.
Ô métamorphose mystique
De tous mes sens fondus en un !
Son haleine fait la musique,
Comme sa voix fait le parfum !


 

Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821 and died in 1867. He is best known for his book of poems Les Fleurs du mal and is credited with inventing the term modernity. 

Sandra Simonds is the author of Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). Her poems have been included in Best American Poetry 2015 and 2014 and have appeared in many literary journals, including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Fence, Granta, Lana Turner, and Poetry. In 2013, she won a Readers’ Choice Award for her sonnet “Red Wand,” which was published on Poets.org, the Academy of American Poets website. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida, and is an assistant professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia.

 

 

More from Vol. 33, Issue 3

The Killing Jar // Staying

Kevin McLellan

Certainty // Here // Full Sun

Octavio Paz, trans. Jeff Alessandrelli

from Memory Cards: Dogen Series

Susan M. Schultz

My Sexuality Is “Victim of Capitalism"

Sandra Simonds, trans. Rodrigo Toscano

Every Good Kneeler Knows Her Ground // You Are Mistaken

Nance Van Winckel

Metamorphosis of the Vampire // Exotic Perfume // The Sick Muse // Eternity

Charles Baudelaire, trans. Sandra Simonds

The Quick Brown Fox

Judith Baumel

Interview with Claudia Keelan, Editor of Interim

Michael Berger

[1. It’s there—in the fire. // 2. A ghost // …]

Martín Cerisola, trans. Keith Ekiss

Itamar's Netsanetian Sojourn

Nathaniel Mackey