When we stand here and now and look back at Baudelaire, look back at The Flower of Evil, it is like a journey up the river, and we return to the scene of the beginning of modernist art: a novel, lush and thorny poetic forest, a lonely, fanatical and melancholy soul.
The "flower of evil" full of paradoxes grows in Paris, and only in Paris. The prosperity and desolation of the metropolis, the aroma and the putrefaction, the light and the night, the hope and the anxiety, together dwell on the streets of Paris. Baudelaire wandered obsessively, alone and wrapped in the crowd. In this package the poet's eyes widened alertly, looking for something. "What is he looking for?" Baudelaire asked himself when commenting on modern artists. "This loner with an active imagination, a loner who constantly crosses the vast desert of human nature... He looked for what we might call modernity. ”
Baudelaire was more eager than any artist to capture what he called "something of modernity." He rebelled against classical writing, trying to find poetry and beauty in modern life. Immersed in the atmosphere of modern society, Baudelaire found that modernity is precisely those things that are "transitional, ephemeral, and accidental". In a brief, unexpected encounter with these things, he felt the "thrilling experience" (Benjamin) brought about by the beauty of the moment.
In The Landscape of Paris in The Flower of Evil, Baudelaire meets gamblers, blind men, liars, prostitutes, and thieves, and he sees them, gives him a quick glance, but is frozen like a photograph. These people are ugly in appearance and depraved in their deeds, but he praises them. He unearthed poetic beauty from them, just as he found beauty in decaying corpses—"The sky gazed, and this corpse was truly wonderful, / Open like a flower." "As a kind of evil, the juxtaposition of corpses with flowers brings intense sensory and imaginative stimulation. Gamblers, swindlers, prostitutes, and even corpses were all sublimated into beauty by Baudelaire, but he knew they were evil. These evils were created by the capitalist metropolis of Paris, by the mediocre, closed, rigid society of the time. Such a society also led to the poet's bitter spirit, the melancholy heart. He wrote them, he sang in praise of Satan, he found in Him the courage to resist, and he poured out his passion for social criticism in the situation of the fallen. But in the end, he failed. After "Resistance," it was Death. Death is Baudelaire's last consolation, another starting point for the search for an "ideal", but this starting point is so illusory.
Today is the 200th anniversary of Baudelaire's birth. In a sense, the commemoration of Baudelaire is to commemorate the birth of modernist poetry, from which you may also be able to glimpse some of the enlightenment of the future development of modern poetry. The poet Shucai said in the memorial article:
"I think modern poetry has come to an extremely personal paradox. This is a worldwide dilemma. How to solve it? Either we inherit Baudelaire's modern poetic tradition 'horizontally', exchanging sound, rhythm, symbolism—with physical devotion and life's adventure—for the material for writing poetry; or poetry leaves the original aesthetic scale and creates a new aesthetic scale. The exploration of the vanguard requires precisely the translation grafting of the 'horizontal' and the critical consciousness of the 'vertical' blood inheritance. (Introduction: Zhang Jin)
This article is from the April 9 feature of the Beijing News Book Review Weekly, "Baudelaire's Melancholy Rebels."
Written by 丨 shucai
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="70" > incredible act of rebellion</h1>
Charles Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris on 9 April 1821. When he was born, his father was 63 years old, and Baudelaire was only 6 years old the year his father died. The 6 years with his father were Baudelaire's happy childhood. There is a very beautiful garden in the center of Paris, the Jardin du Luxembourg, where his father often takes him to play; as a painter, his father often takes him to various art galleries. There were many beautiful statues in the Jardin du Luxembourg, and his father would tell him the story of those statues. After Baudelaire's death, because of the fame brought by "The Flower of Evil", he also transformed into a statue and stood on a green lawn in the park, as if he had returned to the place where he used to play in his childhood. Every time I went to Paris, I had to visit the Jardin du Luxembourg, and subconsciously I wanted to visit the statue of Baudelaire, only to see him with a beautiful face, looking into the distance, with one hand obliquely in front of the chest of his jacket, and the passing wind often lingered, as if I wanted to hear a few lines of poetry from between his silent lips.
Baudelaire's mother, Carolyn Duface, was only 26 years old when she married. She has a melancholy personality and delicate feelings. Baudelaire lost his father at the age of 6 and was dependent on his young mother. Just as the young Baudelaire was enjoying this "good life full of maternal tenderness", her mother remarried. His stepfather, Obik, was a soldier with the rank of major, and later rose all the way up to major general and ambassador. The loss of his father at an early age and the remarriage of his mother were two events that had a decisive turning effect on Baudelaire's life.
His mother's remarriage was not something that 7-year-old Baudelaire could stop, but he certainly wasn't happy. He later said a sentence, meaning, there is a son as sensitive as me, the mother should not remarry! This is obviously too harsh. But a 7-year-old boy has his naïve psychological structure, his personal perspective of understanding, and he will feel that his mother's love for him has been stolen by an interloper. On his mother's wedding night, he threw the keys to his new house out the window.
After Baudelaire lived with his stepfather, his happy childhood was gone. Hidden depression begins from that moment. What Freud called the "Oedipus complex" was evident in Baudelaire. All the incredible acts of rebellion in Baudelaire's later life, such as falling out with his beloved mother and confronting his stepfather in various ways, can be found here.
Baudelaire excelled academically. Latin, rhetoric, composition are excellent. But he revealed in his diary that he was very lonely. Loneliness became something that Baudelaire had tasted prematurely in his heart. In the blink of an eye, Baudelaire graduated from high school. Faced with college and a future, Baudelaire's stepfather wants him to take a career, but Baudelaire refuses. He announced: I want to be a writer! This amounts to a scandal for an official's family. So, the parents quietly arranged a long trip for Baudelaire to take a cruise to India. The stepfather had some friends in the diplomatic world, and he hoped that his son would be trained in India and should be able to find a diplomatic position when he returned. But after Delaire boarded the cruise ship, he only arrived at Reunion Island and did not leave. He returned to Paris nine months later. He declared conceitedly: "I have returned with wisdom in my pocket." ”
Upon returning to Paris, Baudelaire reached the legal age to receive his inheritance. Despite his parents' objections, he took all the 100,000 gold francs left to him by his biological father. This is a huge fortune. Baudelaire also saw the use of heritage as a form of rebellion. He lived a life of eating, drinking, and having fun. Two years on, the legacy has been spent in half! The stepfather consulted with his mother that the prodigal son could not be allowed to continue so extravagantly, and without Baudelaire's consent, they found a notary. The stepfather asked a notary to administer the remaining property, stipulating that he should be given only 200 francs a month. Baudelaire could only accept. Worse, the debt was not paid, and he became a man in debt.
How do you resist? Bitterness, drinking... Or, just kill yourself. Baudelaire did commit suicide once, but in a somewhat ridiculous way. On June 30, 1845, he picked up a small fruit knife and stabbed himself hard. Although blood is splattered, death is impossible. He wanted to use this to rebel against his parents' hellish decision, but he still didn't have the strength to overturn it. After attempting suicide, he had to go home and live with his parents for a while. However, Baudelaire soon decided to leave the bourgeois family again. This time it was completely gone! He moved into the Latin Quarter and lived with Jeanne Duval, a mixed-race girl. Duval is an actor in a small theater, and he runs the dragon suit, but he is full of charm. On the one hand, she has all the places where beauty is "evil", lazy, lying, vulgar, on the other hand, she is very beautiful, full of eroticism, and can bring people the bliss of the senses. Baudelaire never married, and it was this "Black Venus" who accompanied him for a long time.
Despite winning some vanity in the literary world, Baudelaire was in debt. Belgium became his imaginary refuge. He arrived in Brussels in June 1864. He wanted to make money by speaking and publishing his works, but his abacus failed. For the last two years, his life was miserable. One day in March 1866, he fell while visiting the church of Saint-Rou in Namur with two friends, resulting in a coma, aphasia and hemiplegia.
His mother took him back to Paris, where he was hospitalized in Dr. Duval's clinic. Many friends came to visit, Saint-Beuve, Bonville, Le Comte de Lear, etc. Mrs. Paul Morris also specially played Wagner's music for him. In order to reduce the cost of hospitalization, the poet's friends also drafted a petition for him, in which Hugo and Balzac participated, and even Merimide, who hated him, signed it. Baudelaire died in a mute state of losing his language, and it was painful. On August 31, 1867, Baudelaire closed his eyes forever. He was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery after his death and had to be close to Obik, the stepfather he hated all his life.
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="83" > the bloom of the "Flower of Evil"</h1>
The French word for "Flower of Evil" is LesFleurs du Mal. People who know French know that "flower" here is plural, not singular. "Evil" is an abstract term. The translation of "flower of evil" makes "flower" a singular abstract flower, losing the intuitive image and fragrant fragrance of "flower"; in fact, this "flower" is "the flower of evil", a flower that can be touched and heard. Baudelaire painstakingly planted and watered the flowers of these languages, and their fragrance is strange, exotic, a strong fragrance, an extreme fragrance like musk.
"The Flower of Evil" allows Baudelaire to rediscover "beauty." He broke with the traditional view of good and evil, believing that "evil" has a certain duality, having both an evil side and an unusual beauty. The more than a hundred poems in the collection "teach" us to taste the "beauty" of evil with new eyes. And this "beauty" is related to "now" or "now". In his essay "The Salon of 1846," Baudelaire writes that few people today are willing to give the word "now" a real, affirmative positive meaning. He emphasizes the value of the "now" but praises the personal feeling as a "source of beauty." This shows that Baudelaire's understanding of beauty is based on a "personal feeling" of "now."
The Flower of Evil, by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Guo Hong'an, edition: The Commercial Press, June 2018.
On July 11, 1857, "The Flower of Evil" was published, which established Baudelaire's place in the history of French and world poetry. This is Baudelaire's work. He said: "In this book, I put all my heart, all my tenderness, all my religion, all my hatred..." This collection of poems made him famous in one fell swoop, and also brought countless criticisms, accusations and sieges, and eventually caused a lawsuit. His poems, such as "To a Woman Who Is Too Happy" and "The Woman Who Went to Hell", were simply unacceptable to someone who read them. In the face of such a revolution, the folly of the bourgeoisie is immediately revealed. A journalist published an article in Le Figaro attacking Baudelaire's poem as "blasphemous and unpopular." Of course, there were people who defended him. In the proceedings conducted on 20 August 1857, the defender used the example of famous writers such as Musé, Molière, Rousseau, Balzac, Georges San, etc., and pointed out that "affirming the existence of evil is not the same as approving evil", but this did not convince the acting prosecutor general who served as the prosecutor. The verdict of the trial was that the crime of "desecration of religion" could not be established, and the crime of "bad manners" was convicted. Baudelaire and his publisher were punished. Six poems in the collection (Jewelry, Forgetting the River, To a Girl Who Is Too Happy, Resbos, The Woman Who Should Go to Hell, and Vampire) were sentenced to be removed. The outcome of the trial was entirely unexpected by Baudelaire. He thought he would be acquitted! What made him even more humiliated was that the court had treated a poet with the words it used to treat criminals. When was this decision reversed by the French Supreme Court? Nearly 100 years: May 31, 1949.
In 1861, the second edition of The Flower of Evil was published, and Baudelaire deleted 6 poems and added 35 more. The second edition was a great success. The newly raised generation of poets admired him and regarded him as a leading figure in poetry. Maramé and Verlaine, who later became great poets, also wrote articles to praise. But for Baudelaire, the praise seemed too late. Because of the pain and suffering, he could no longer feel any joy. He responded to the young poets' tribute to him this way: "These young people... It scared me like a dog. I just want to be alone. ”
Faced with the incomprehension, Baudelaire said: "Only the absolutely ill-intentioned person can not understand the intentional impersonality of my poems." "Non-impersonality" here is the key word. Baudelaire's poems have a protagonist "I" for each reading, but what Baudelaire really means is that a poem, because it is a masterpiece of language, must have "impersonality", and this "impersonality" is precisely human nature. People have individuality, but when the poet expresses his personality, it is precisely through this way of concealing individuality that it is a "non-personal" way.
I think that there are two kinds of great poets, one is the poet who has successfully completed, who has obtained everything in his lifetime, who has been explored, who has been explored, whose talents have been fully utilized, and whose works have been recognized, such as Valéry; and the other is the poet whose genius has died early (the poet who has completed it is generally not a genius poet), such as Rimbaud in France and Haizi in China. Geniuses usually have an unfortunate characteristic, which is early death. But they all died at the end of the eye. This juncture is a verification of their genius. Of course, not all poets who died early were geniuses. Poets like Baudelaire, with the courage to be free, the will to resist, the energy to create, the ability to act to taste danger and experience the ultimate experience, are the hallmarks of genius.
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="93" > experiment with poetic forms</h1>
There is a poem in The Flower of Evil, considered the most exquisite of Baudelaire's works, entitled "The Harmony of Dusk". In contrast, most of our modern poetry lacks a sensitivity to form, and in fact, in a real poem, there must be a special form hidden in it. Baudelaire had a genius sensitivity to "form".
There are many translations of Baudelaire's poem. What impressed me the most was Chen Jingrong's translation. Chen Jingrong translated it into "The Waka of Dusk":
The hour has come. Trembling in the branches,
Each flower spits out a fragrance like an incense burner,
Sounds and aromas echo in the dusk sky,
The melancholy and feeble round dance is dizzying.
The violin is like a wounded heart;
The melancholy and powerless round dance is dizzying,
The sky is miserable and beautiful like a great altar!
The violin is like a wounded heart,
A gentle heart that hates the great, black emptiness!
The sky is miserable and beautiful like a great altar,
The sun sank in its own thick blood.
A gentle heart that hates the great, black emptiness,
Collect the traces of everything from the glorious past!
Your memory shines on me, as brilliant as the throne of God!
Listen, there is not a single word, not a single syllable, not a single turn that makes people feel confused, unhappy, or unhappy. This reflects the "vitality" of modern Chinese written by an excellent poet, such as "each flower spits out fragrance like an incense burner / The violin is like a wounded heart", "The sky is sad and beautiful like a great altar / The sun sinks in its own thick blood", these four poems are well translated. The original text is more subtle, especially the rhythm, breath and rhythm. This poem is written about the poet's feelings and impressions of sunset and dusk. Baudelaire has some works with strong formal experimentation, but in terms of formality (the musical sense of sound), this one reaches the extreme. It is characterized by the rhythmic repetition of verses, and the two or four sentences of each verse are exactly the same as the first and third sentences of the next section, so that the whole poem obtains a wonderful effect of interlacing and advancing layer by layer.
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="116" > the dilemma of modern poetry</h1>
Modern Chinese poetry, on the whole, is still confined to the framework of Romantic poetics and symbolist poetics, and is unwilling to get out. The linguistic sensitivity and ontological consciousness of modern poetry have been restored in the "obscure poetry" people, but it was not until the younger generation of Chinese poets born in the 1960s and 1970s that they really attached importance to the use of language, and dragged the creation of poetry back to the essence of language with a pioneering exploration posture, wanting to use speech to life and creating texts.
Which language is truly alive? It must be the words used daily by the poet. Entering the poem with living body language, longing to reach the true beauty, is the awakening of the younger generation of poets. And baudelaire's "personal feeling" comes first and foremost from the bodily senses. Language is where the "synaesthesia" of the body is presented. Poetry is written after all. No matter how rich a person's feelings and experiences are, if he cannot form the language form of a poem, he still has no connection with the "poet". Metaphorically speaking, a poem is the body of a language. In this linguistic body, there is visible flesh and blood (syntax, sound, image), and even more invisible spirit (structure, breath, rhythm).
As a representative of Symbolist poetry, Baudelaire focused on "beauty" and highlighted "truth". In fact, "truth" contains more life uneasiness and soul pain: uneasiness is the basic condition of the modern human mind; trauma is the various symptoms of the body on the psychological level. Baudelaire's great contribution to modern poetry is that he beautifully presents the astonishing "true beauty" in front of our eyes and ears, making our souls tremble. Romantic poetics is taken to a new place by The Flower of Evil: the erotic bliss of language and the melancholy uneasiness of the heart. Therefore, "The Flower of Evil" is only a "language" existence, but also a "psychological" existence, but also a "symbolic" existence. The space for "modern poetry" is instantly broadened by Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil!
The Melancholy of Paris, by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Guo Hong'an, Edition: The Commercial Press, June 2018.
The question I would like to ask is: After more than one hundred and sixty years of evolution, is there still drama in "modern poetry"?
According to my observation, as the first modern poet, Baudelaire can be said to have turned out to be a "peak" as soon as he appeared, and "The Flower of Evil", as the first modern poetry collection, is both the starting point and the highest point. We must understand that modern poetry echoes the divisive changes of modern society as a whole, the secularization of religion triggers lyrical narrative tendencies, and the superstition of technology leads to a fanaticism for the avant-garde... Rimbaud said it best: "Go, towards the new unknown!" ”
As technological development accelerated, so did language afflict modern poets after Baudelaire. Today, French poetry has descended from its former peak; today, the acceleration of life is the most obvious fact, and each of us can feel this acceleration in ourselves. The renovation of technology and the gradual weakening of the soul have led the poetic muse to the daily streets and details of life. Modern poetry, on the one hand, derives fission power from "proseness"; on the other hand, it falls into some kind of irredeemable mediocrity and dullness in the present temptation of prose.
Baudelaire believed that a modern poet must at the same time be a critic. The translation process is also the process of generating critical awareness. Today's poets must force themselves to be critics, just as today's critics must be poets.
Creation brings new enlightenment to criticism, but criticism should have its own ability to "think". In terms of the current situation of criticism of contemporary Chinese poetry, the "soft" and "weak" of critical words, the "thoughtlessness" and "snobbery" of critics, make the creative meaning of criticism disappear, and it has never surpassed the two practical functions of "depreciation" or "praise". Criticism must have the ability to ask questions. The lack of real questions is the sad reality facing criticism today. In Baudelaire's ideals, criticism and creation should be integrated.
I think modern poetry has come to an extremely personal paradox. This is a worldwide dilemma. How to solve it? Either we inherit Baudelaire's modern poetic tradition "horizontally", exchanging sound, rhythm, symbolism—with physical devotion and life's adventure—for the material for writing poetry; or poetry leaves the original aesthetic scale and creates a new aesthetic scale. The exploration of the vanguard precisely requires the translation grafting of "horizontal" and the critical awareness of "vertical" blood inheritance. Pioneer experiments cannot stop at the superficial level of language: language games and poetic methods. French poetry is like this, more and more developed in technology, but less and less spiritual shock and soul inspiration.
For poetry, technology is always "narrow". Technology has only good, no harm, to poets who are good at using it. Technology is the tangible things of language symbols, but poetic meaning is the invisible soul breath. The emotions and personalities of the poet are invisible; the hopes, beliefs, dreams, and intuitions that attract the human heart are invisible, but they are decisive. Perhaps humanity as a whole has entered the modern dilemma of being "dominated by technology", and modern poetry has also entered the modern dilemma of "language and soul disconnection".
Poetry has its own special knowledge of archaeology. I believe it is a kind of "knowledge" that is not knowledge, or knowledge that transcends knowledge. If poetry is just knowledge, the world is completely boring. Now, the flood of knowledge is precisely asking every poet: Do you have the ability to inspire yourself to generate new ideas? Do you dare to discover and express in new languages? These questions may be the philosophical conditions under which modern poetry can survive.
This article is from the April 9 feature of the Beijing News Book Review Weekly, "Baudelaire's Melancholy Rebels." This article is exclusive original content. Author: ShuCai; Editor: Zhang Jinxiao Shuyan; Proofreader: Xue Jingning. Without the written authorization of the Beijing News, it shall not be reproduced, and welcome to forward to the circle of friends.