View source for "Des Sept Viellards"

=='''''Des Sept Viellards'''''==

Go back to [["The Burial of the Dead" Annotations]]

'''“John Goudge (1921-  ) offered this translation of “The Seven Old Men” in his Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (Walton-on Thames: Outposts, 1979):'''


City swarming with people!  City crowded with dreams!

Through the narrow back streets of this mighty colossus, 

Like the sap in a tree, a dark mystery streams,

And ghosts clutch a man’s sleeve, in broad day, as he passes.



One morning when the houses that lined the sad street

Hovered larger than life, so it seemed, in the mist,

And resembled the banks of a river in spate,

A stage set for the shade of a pantomimist,



In the foul, yellow fog that pervaded the whole

Atmosphere, I strode on, like a hero in battle,

Each nerve taut, and communed with my world-weary soul,

While the carts made the neighbourhood shake with their rattle.



All at once in the gloom, an old man came in sight,

Wearing tatters as yellow as thundery skies,

And a torrent of alms had showered down at his plight,

Were it not for the malice that gleamed in his eyes,



You’d have said that his beard was as long as a lance,

Jutting out, and equal of Judas’ quite,

That his eyeballs were bloating in bile, that his glance

Was so cold as to sharpen the sting of frostbite.



He was not so much crooked as broken, his spine

With his legs represented a perfect right-angle, 

And his stick put the finishing touch to his mien,

For it gave him the gait of and made him resemble



A lame four-booted beast or a jew with three legs.

‘Twas as though in the mud and the snow as he went,

He was trampling the dead underground with his clogs—

Rather hateful and spiteful than indifferent.



His twin followed him close, beard, back, stick, rages and eye,

By no mark could you tell one foul fiend from his brother.

These grotesque apparitions, pace for pace, went their way, 

Each was bound for the same unknown end as the other.



Was it wicked mischance that had made me a fool?

By some infamous plot was I being seduced?

I know not, but I counted this sinister ghoul

Some seven times in seven minutes, by himself reproduced.



And the man who makes fun of my disquietude

And who feels not the chill of a brotherly shiver

Should mark well that despite such decrepitude

These grim brutes had the look of surviving for ever.



Had an eighth then appeared, I believe I’d have died—

One more pitiless twin sent to menace and mock

An incestuous phoenix, by himself multiplied—

But I took to my heels and presented my back



To this ghastly parade.  As if drunk, vision doubled,

Panic-struck, I ran home, shut the door, turned the key;

I was ill, overcome, hot and cold, deeply troubled, 

At once baffled and hurt by the absurdity.



And in vain did my reason attempt to take charge, 

For its efforts were foiled by the tempest in me,

And my soul began dancing a jig, like a barge

Without masts on a monstrous and infinite sea.”