{"id":1757,"date":"2016-11-24T14:56:10","date_gmt":"2016-11-24T14:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1757"},"modified":"2016-11-24T14:57:16","modified_gmt":"2016-11-24T14:57:16","slug":"1757","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1757","title":{"rendered":"Charles Baudelaire, \u201cLa Cloche f\u00eal\u00e9e\u201d, translated by Jan Owen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewing Jan Owen\u2019s translations of poems from Les Fleurs du Mal<\/em> for The North[1]<\/a>, I was startled by the ending of her version of \u201cLa Cloche f\u00eal\u00e9e\u201d. In the end there wasn\u2019t space to include my thoughts on it in the review, but I want to say something here because \u201cLa Cloche f\u00eal\u00e9e\u201d has always meant a good deal to me. Here\u2019s Baudelaire\u2019s poem:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Il est amer et doux, pendant les nuits d’hiver,
\nD’\u00e9couter, pr\u00e8s du feu qui palpite et qui fume,
\nLes souvenirs lointains lentement s’\u00e9lever
\nAu bruit des carillons qui chantent dans la brume.<\/p>\n

Bienheureuse la cloche au gosier vigoureux
\nQui, malgr\u00e9 sa vieillesse, alerte et bien portante,
\nJette fid\u00e8lement son cri religieux,
\nAinsi qu’un vieux soldat qui veille sous la tente!<\/p>\n

Moi, mon \u00e2me est f\u00eal\u00e9e, et lorsqu’en ses ennuis
\nElle veut de ses chants peupler l’air froid des nuits,
\nIl arrive souvent que sa voix affaiblie<\/p>\n

Semble le r\u00e2le \u00e9pais d’un bless\u00e9 qu’on oublie
\nAu bord d’un lac de sang, sous un grand tas de morts
\nEt qui meurt, sans bouger, dans d’immenses efforts.<\/p>\n

To my ear that shows a remarkable combination of localized conversational intimacy with a kind of stately, balanced expansiveness in the overall development of the thought, unfolding in \u00a0harmony with the metrical divisions, line by line and stanza by stanza. The coincidence of sentence with stanza in the first two quatrains gives added moment to the enjambed division between the two tercets, but again the effect is gravely balanced, because the sentence is divided equally between the two. \u00a0To my ear Owen\u2019s opening moves too briskly to match that, but it\u2019s highly atmospheric and involving in its own way:<\/p>\n

How bitter-sweet it is on winter nights
\nlistening by the fire\u2019s flicker and hiss
\nto distant memories slowly taking flight
\nwith the carillons resounding through the mist.<\/p>\n

Her ending shocked me though:<\/p>\n

and often now my voice turns weak and thin<\/p>\n

as the last rattling breaths of a wounded man
\nunder a mound of corpses piled up high
\nnext to a lake of blood. Struggling to die.<\/p>\n

This seemed to me an incomprehensible blunder, not as a matter of language (Owen\u2019s French is undoubtedly far superior to mine) but as a matter of poetic understanding. Having the soldier struggling to die<\/em> instead of struggling in vain to live<\/em> changes the whole sense of the poem from what I\u2019d always taken it to be. I went to a website that presents a mass of different translations of Baudelaire poems. You can find it by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I saw that Roy Campbell interprets the line in essentially the same way as Owen, though he puts it into much more pompous words (\u201cTrying with fearful efforts to expire\u201d). However, this interpretation seems to me plumb wrong, for the following reasons:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. It\u2019s difficult to imagine why a wounded man crushed and stifled under a pile of corpses and who wanted to die would need to struggle<\/em> to do so, or what form his struggling would take.<\/li>\n
  2. It\u2019s appallingly easy to imagine a wounded man crushed and stifled under a pile of corpses making immense efforts to live<\/em>, straining every weakened muscle without being able to move under the weight pressing down on him.<\/li>\n
  3. Such an image makes sense of the wider context. Baudelaire has presented himself trying and failing to live as a poet<\/em>, to fill the cold night air with his songs. The cracked soul that makes him fail makes him unlike the full-throated bell or hale old soldier; makes him in fact like the dying man who tries to call out from under a heap of corpses but is only capable of a death-rattle.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I\u2019ll post my review of the book here when it\u2019s been published in the magazine. For now I\u2019ll just say that over all I think Jan Owen\u2019s translations make a very good introduction to Baudelaire and that her versions of a number of the poems are outstanding.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    [1]<\/a> Charles Baudelaire, Selected Poems from \u201cLes Fleurs du Mal\u201d<\/em>, translated by Jan Owen, Arc Publications, 192 pp.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Reviewing Jan Owen\u2019s translations of poems from Les Fleurs du Mal for The North[1], I was startled by the ending of her version of \u201cLa Cloche f\u00eal\u00e9e\u201d. In the end there wasn\u2019t space to include my thoughts on it in the review, but I want to say something here because \u201cLa Cloche f\u00eal\u00e9e\u201d has always […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charles-baudelaire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1757"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1757"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1762,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1757\/revisions\/1762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}