You are not worthy of my art (feat. Charles Baudelaire)

Dogs, you're all dogs

Hey, Charles: maybe next time don’t have your picture taken after a night binging on absynthe, smoking hash and writing weird poems?

One of my favorite poems from poetry über-God Charles Baudelaire is Le chien et le flacon (“The dog and the perfume bottle”). A scathing critique of his time, Baudelaire’s Le spleen de Paris is full of poignant and powerful texts that kept me going when I was a young émigré with nothing but dreams and a pile of books under my arms.

The dog and the perfume bottle is the 8th poem in his book Le spleen de Paris. By the time I got to this poem, Baudelaire was already one of my personal heroes, thanks to Les fleurs du mal. However, Le spleen de Paris abandons his rhyming style and sees him exploring free verse, which gives it more power. I know my literary path is quite the cliché, but thanks to Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and then to stylistic visionaries like James Joyce or Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, I felt free. There were no rules anymore: once I read Faulkner’s As I lay dying, together with the Beatniks and Hubert Selby Jr., it was off to the races. Do whatever you want, write whatever you want, make up your own style and approach.

Nowadays, posing as an anti-system punk is a marketing ploy used by most commercial artists. Rappers and rockers alike take pictures flipping you the bird. This has absolutely no value anymore. However, writing a free-form poem in 1864 calling your readers uncultivated dogs was highly risky.

Historically, Le spleen de Paris was published after Baudelaire’s death and largely ignored. His prose work was banned when Les fleurs du mal were published, and everyone, from Walter Benjamin to Jim Morrison, praised it as groundbreaking. No such fate was reserved for Le spleen de Paris, unfortunately.

So, that being said, I give you the eight poem of Le spleen de Paris, translated by this person. Thanks for saving me the trouble ;-)

Have a nice week, you dogs!

VIII.  The Dog & The Perfume Bottle
(a free translation)

“My beautiful dog, my good little doggy, my pooch, come here and breath in the wonderful cologne I’ve just bought at the best perfume shop in town.”

And the dog, while wagging his tale—a gesture, I believe, that corresponds to laughter and smiles among these poor creatures—ran up and stuck his moist nose with curiosity into the uncorked bottle.  Recoiling suddenly with fear, however, he barked at me as if in reproach.

“Ah! miserable dog, if I’d offered you a package of excrement, you’d have sniffed it with pleasure.  You might have devoured it.  So, dog—my sad life’s undeserving companion—you resemble the public that one must never exasperate with delicate perfumes.   Better, instead, to offer them carefully chosen manure.”

From Le Spleen de Paris, 1869.