2016年3月6日 星期日

"The Sunset of Romanticism" by Charles Baudelaire

漂流詩篇 1866

"The Sunset of Romanticism" by Charles Baudelaire
How beautiful the Sun is when newly risen
He hurls his morning greetings like an explosion!
— Fortunate the one who can lovingly salute 
His setting, more glorious than a dream!
I remember!... I have seen all, flower, stream, furrow,
Swoon under his gaze like a palpitating heart...
— Let us run to the horizon, it's late,
Let us run fast, to catch at least a slanting ray!
But I pursue in vain the sinking god;
Irresistible Night, black, damp, deadly,
Full of shudders, establishes his reign;
The odor of the tomb swims in the shadows
And at the marsh's edge my timid foot
Treads upon slimy snails and unexpected toads.
*
Modern poetry begins with Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), who employed his unequalled technical mastery to create the shadowy, desperately dramatic urban landscape -- populated by the addicted and the damned -- which so compellingly mirrors our modern condition. Deeply though darkly spiritual, titanic in the changes he wrought, Baudelaire looms over all the work, great and small, created in his wake.

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