La Mort des Artistes
Combien faut-il de fois secouer mes grelots
Et baiser ton front bas, morne caricature?
Pour piquer dans le but, de mystique nature,
Combien, ô mon carquois, perdre de javelots?Nous serons notre âme en de subtils complots,
Et nous démolirons mainte lourde armature,
Avant de contempler la grande Créature
Dont l'infernal désir nous remplit de sanglots!Il en est qui jamais n'ont connu leur Idole,
Et ces sculpteurs damnés et marqués d'un affront,
Qui vont se martelant la poitrine et le front,N'ont qu'un espoir, étrange et sombre Capitole!
C'est que la Mort, planant comme un soleil nouveau,
Fera s'épanouir les fleurs de leur cerveau!Charles Baudelaire
Comments
My limited French being incapable of following B through the curves, I used:
http://ets.freetranslation.com
... first as a literal tool, and then -- after experiencing the interactive frisson of its soul-killing nature -- as a figurative tool to mut(il)ate the text into something other.
Using the web tool I translated the translated poem text first from English to German and back, then from English to Japanese and back, and so on with all the supported languages. When done I began again, choosing languages at random.
Overwhelmed by the generated nonsense, I decided to zero in on just the last stanza, continuing to translate/decay its text to stranger and stranger forms, and in addition -- to help things along -- hand-modifying the various intermediate stages of English into forms which struck me as more poetic or at least more English. This had the inevitable result of causing the translation software to mutate the text even further.
Becoming bored, I pronounced it done after a last round of manual adjustmant (and a refactoring of the line breaks):
That which has only the outskirts of a hope: is strange
and is supplied by delivery to refuel it.
It is the flower of the product of the brain that passes
as if a new person sunbathes to the flower
that died and began again
so to speak.
Posted by: Richard Gleaves | décembre 9, 2006 03:45 PM