Robert Lowell's translation of the poem "Spleen" from Baudelaire's Fleurs De Mal stands out to me as an exceptional translation -- alive with all the antic joy and formal crispness of the original:
Spleen
I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich
but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,
one who escapes his tutor's monologues,
and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;
nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry,
his people dying by the balcony;
the bawdry of the pet hermaphrodite
no longer gets him through a single night;
his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;
even the ladies of the court, for whom
all kings are beautiful, cannot put on
shameful enough dresses for this skeleton;
the scholar who makes his gold cannot invent
washes to cleanse the poisoned element;
even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy,
our tyrants' solace in senility,
he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food
is syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.
— Robert Lowell, from Marthiel & Jackson Matthews, eds., The Flowers of Evil (NY: New Directions, 1963)
I love Lowell. So much.
I agree--a great translation, and one that is remarkably close to the original (and it rhymes!). So do you read this as a poem by Lowell, or a translation of a poem by Baudelaire?
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