Baudelaire's Correspondances (Correspondence)( 波德來爾之『對應』 )

Yesterday, I talked a little about Baudelaire's ideas about the function of poetry in the exploration of beauty. That forms part of the Baudelaire's thoughts about the function of art. But that does not exhaust his thoughts on the matter. In another poem, Correspondances, Baudelaire attempted to elaborate a little more about his theory of art. Let's find out what he has got to say on the subject by looking at the following poem, the translations of which follow below.

Correspondances                                               Correspondence                                        對應

La Nature est un temple où de vivant piliers         Nature is a temple where live pillars     大自然是一座廟宇

Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;            Sometimes let out confusing speeches;   在哪活生之柱有時發出紊亂之話語

L'homme y passe à travers des forets de symboles and man walks across forests of symbols人類走過以親切眼光            

Qui l' observent avec des regards familiers.           watching him with intimate looks.  觀察着他們的眾多象徾之林

 

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent   As long echoes which bsfffle from afar      猶遠方不絕之迥響

Dans une ténèbreuse et profonde unité,          within a dim and deep unity,             在昏暗與深邃之統一中難以釐清，

Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,            vast as the night and the light                 猶浩浩之黑夜與光芒，

Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent. the perfumes, the colors and the sounds reply.香氣，色彩與聲音正作出回應。

 

Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs dénfants,   They are perfumes fresh as baby's flesh      香氣清新如嬰兒肌膚，

Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,  sweet as flutes, green as meadows  若長笛般甜蜜，若草原般翠綠，

--Et d'autres, corrumpus, riches et trimophants,        --and others, corrupted, rich and triumphant,--其他的，腐敗，豐沃和洋洋得意，

 

Ayant l'expansion des choses                   Having expanded from things infinite  猶若攬着一些在不斷擴張中的永恆東西，

Comme l'ambre, le musc, le bonjoin et encens,     as amber, musc, benjamin and incense,  如琥珀，麝香，香木與乳香，

Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens  which sing of the uplifting of the spirit and of the senses 歌頌着精神與官能的狂喜。

In this poem, he images Nature as a gigantic temple. In that temple there are all kind of voices. Sometimes such voices will try to speak to us and tell us what they wish to do. They will talk in jumbles, confusedly. Yet hidden deep within Nature, there is a certain unity in such apparently baffling and confusing voices. They would speak to us through symbols which populate Nature like so many forests of different kinds of trees. The trees he refers to are probably the trees of languages, the live pillars of Nature that he was talking about in the first line of the first stanza. And the symbols of such trees are constantly watching over and observing mankind. But the pillars of Nature can also be interpreted differently as something related to the male body. Baudelaire is a dandy whose stepfather is a senator and he spent his days in Paris visiting brothels and indulging in the other pleasures of the body and of the senses. By using ambiguous sysmbols which can mean different things because of their very ambiguity, he is able to engage the imagination of his readers.

To Baudelaire, the different sounds of words would echo throughout Nature as if from very far away but in that dark and hazy world, there is not only darkness. One may also find there light too. And they may speak to us through the language of smells, odors, perfumes as he says, through ambers, musk, benjamin ( a kind of tree in America or in Indonesia from whose bark we can extract a white substance which has a wonderful aroma which is sometimes used in cooking or medicine) and incense. In the third stanza, Baudelaire uses mixed images. He says that the perfumes has the peculiar smell of the skin of a baby and is as sweet as the sound of the flute and as green as the color of the grass meadows. Here we find that correspondence which he is talking about: the sensation of smell is successively described in terms of sound and in terms of sight!  This is the kind of mixing of the different sensations occuring deep within the human psyche where the structural similarity of information coming to us through our different senses are given a certain unity by the mental processes of our brain. This is a form of what some psychologists or philosophers have called synesthesia: the mixing of the sensations coming from our eyes, our ears,  our noses, our tongues and simply our skin. At a very primitive state of our development, our only contact with the external world is our skin! It is only later that different areas of our skin become specialized sensory cells for a more subtle and discriminating sensing of the external environment. The brain delights in such mixing of sensations. He says that such smells are singing praises to the common joy of both our spirit and our senses. If one were able to read French, one could feel the fusion of sound with sense by hearing not only the end rhymes of the original French lines but also the internal rhyming of the words within each line and from line to line. This kind of writing is first introduced by Baudelaire and was later developed by such poets as Arthur Rimbaud, and and also Anna Maria Rilke and  found its highest development in the poetry of Mallarmé.  This kind of writing later also influenced the poetry of such English poets and writers as Algernon Swinsburne, W. B Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and in America the poetry of William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg and Allen Ginsburg.