Cyclamen / Poems After Baudelaire
Alix Chauvet

Tenement Press #21
978-1-917304-09-2
110pp [Approx.]

£17.50

 PREORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE 


Publishing 19th July 2024



Chauvet’s debut, a suite of unfaithful translations /
transversions of works drawn from Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du Mal / Flowers of Evil :  a bunch of
flowers in decay, pressed and frayed, ‘a flock of
pockmarked words.’

I have had a gullible and complicit admiration for Baudelaire since the day I was introduced to him, namely the day I learned the word ‘albatross.’ I had been asked to memorise a poem of the same name and illustrate it in a school notebook. I drew the bird with a strong line in the centre of a blank page turned blue, its giant wings spread out, as I had also just been told that they prevented it from walking. Making the ‘prince of clouds’ mine through my strokes enmeshed me to the poet from the age of seven.

This conviction of understanding Baudelaire and being seen by him followed me in my adolescence when I read the entire Fleurs du Mal for the first time. I felt attracted to the violence of the collection that resonated with the intensity of those years of inner turmoil. Despite the recurrent obscenities against women, I sided with the ‘reader,’ ‘brother,’ the ‘fellow man’ to whom the work is addressed. I was manifestly suffering from a literary Stockholm Syndrome, forgiving the author for every one of his crudenesses, recognising the element of beauty in them, padding them out with talismanic thinking to escape the wound. 

            

_{Left—Chauvet, 'Stems from a shadow,' © 2024. 
Right—Chauvet,  photographed by Daria Lou Nakov, © 2024.}



Translating Baudelaire’s oeuvre responds to a need to explore this connivance. I want to reach the hanging point at which I simultaneously encounter familiarity and alienation by immersing myself in his poems. I share Lisa Robertson’s intuition that the substance of Les Fleurs du Mal is feminine, in that by reading its thorny passages and filling them with my voice, I experience a disarming appropriation. I envision my rewritings as a practice of feminine freedom, in which I hold the transgressive foil of language instead of enduring its blade in silence.

To begin by the translation of the Spleen series amongst all others is fortuitous. Their echo to the misty views of Amsterdam last October certainly prompted such a step. In hindsight, the elusive nature of the Anglicism spleen gives further credence to this occurence. The term bears new meanings in its Baudelairian usage, so that translating it back into English involves a shift in signification. Like a rhizome, the definition of the blood-filtering organ is reoriented towards apathy, deep melancholy, disgust with life. 

Such a displacement reveals both the kinship between languages and the transformations at play in the translation process, which has been part of my method. The latter is metonymic, introspective and intuitive, for it draws from its source more than it has, through contingent associations mixing intra- and intersemiotic features. Following Baudelaire’s lines one by one, I cast homologous sentences onto the page as with a pendulum. This throwness produces resonances and dissonances that fog up the original text as much as they reveal it.

These cryptic correspondences to which I alone hold the key put the filiation between the source material and its translation to the test. I summon belief from the reader by playing with the nebulous open-endedness of language. Multiplying hermetic symbols, I jeopardise access to meaning, deliberately resisting narration in favour of collision and event as I write. My intention is not to be understood nor to comprehend, but to transpose the emotions and physical sensations aroused while reading Baudelaire’s verses.

In this regard, my method is embodied. Corseted in twelve-syllable lines, my sentences mimic the Alexandrian form of the original poems, using metrics as a container, like a womb. Filled with aggression, sadness and derision, they contrast the inherent theme of death with that of birth, offering a feminist counterweight to their source. Translation thus allows me to turn my submissive collusion into an assertive sisterhood.

^{Baudelaire’s annotations to the frontispiece of
the 1857 Poulet-Malassis et de Broise edition
of Les Fleurs du Mal / The Flowers of Evil,
℅ the Gallica Digital Library  (ID:  btv1b86108314/f23).}



LUSTER / After LXXVI. Spleen


<sub>J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans.
My mind hangs like a chandelier.

Un gros meuble à tiroirs encombrés de bilans,
A toad-like squat armchair knocked up with verdant debts,  
De vers, de billets doux, de procès, de romances,
verses and april rains, earthworms, ravens and slugs,
Avec de lourds cheveux roulés dans des quittances,
with some horsehair curling in the midst of a lull,
Cache moins de secrets que mon triste cerveau.
lies less convincingly than my reclining skull.
C'est une pyramide, un immense caveau,
It’s a fancy hotel, a deep cemetery,
Qui contient plus de morts que la fosse commune.
that receives socialites on its sterile compost.
—Je suis un cimetière abhorré de la lune,
—I am an apricot that the tide has thrown up,
Où comme des remords se traînent de longs vers
in its flesh, hushed taboos imitate the maggots,
Qui s'acharnent toujours sur mes morts les plus chers.
assaulting ruthlessly the so-called cold-hearted.
Je suis un vieux boudoir plein de roses fanées,
I am grumpy-dopey trapped in a potpourri,
Où gît tout un fouillis de modes surannées,
In which marbles collide amongst phoney bustles,
Où les pastels plaintifs et les pâles Boucher
where falsified Degas and dolls made of rind,
Seuls, respirent l'odeur d'un flacon débouché.
get drunk on petulant jasmine emanations.

Rien n'égale en longueur les boiteuses journées,
Nothing equals in pain the never-ending lacks,
Quand sous les lourds flocons des neigeuses années
when under the deaf snows of countless alibis,
L'ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosité
absence, the trace of the night train rendered invisible,
Prend les proportions de l'immortalité.
echoes all the lost time, its wingspan you deny.
—Désormais tu n'es plus, ô matière vivante !
—Your injury’s no more, fleeting tendinitis !
Qu'un granit entouré d'une vague épouvante,
Than a crippled pretext serving as reposoir,
Assoupi dans le fond d'un Sahara brumeux ;
for your memory blown by a pale sirocco.
Un vieux sphinx ignoré du monde insoucieux,
A caterpillar hangs from the Corsican tree,
Oublié sur la carte, et dont l'humeur farouche
its skeletal motif recalls the depths of things,
Ne chante qu'aux rayons du soleil qui se couche.
the very point at which the moon sets with a blush.</sub>