Original Title: "Tu mettrais l'univers"
Text: Charles Baudelaire (1857)
Year: 1967
You'd shove the whole universe in your alleyway
Impure woman! Boredom makes your soul cruel.
To exercise your teeth at this singular game,
Everyday, you need a heart added to your rack.
Your eyes, lit up like shops
Or blazing yew trees in public feasts,
Blatantly use of a feigned power,
Without ever knowing the law of their beauty.
Blind and deaf machine, fertile in cruelties!
Salutary instrument, drinker of the blood of the world,
How aren't you ashamed and how haven't you,
In front of all the mirrors, seen your charms fade?
The greatness of that ill where you believe yourself skillful
Never then has made you back away in terror,
When nature, tall in its hidden designs,
Makes use of you, oh woman, oh queen of sins,
- Of you, vile animal, - to knead a genius?
Sang by J. Bertin
Text: Charles Baudelaire (1857)
Year: 1957 (Ferré's version), 1985 (Bertin's version)
Keith Waldrop's translation (not mine)
Child, Sister, think how sweet to go out there and live together! To love at
leisure, love and die in that land that resembles you! For me, damp suns in
disturbed skies share mysterious charms with your treacherous eyes as they shine
through tears.
There, there’s only order, beauty: abundant, calm, voluptuous.
Gleaming furniture, polished by years passing, would ornate our
bedroom; rarest flowers, their odors vaguely mixed with amber;rich ceilings;
deep mirrors; an Oriental splendor—everything there would address our souls,
privately, in their sweet native tongue.
There, there’s only order, beauty: abundant, calm, voluptuous.
See on these canals those sleeping boats whose mood is vagabond; it’s to
satisfy your every desires that they come from the world’s end. —Setting suns
reclothe fields, the canals, the whole town, in hyacinth and gold; the world
falling asleep in a warm light.
There, there’s only order, beauty: abundant, calm, voluptuous.
My translation:
My child, my sister, think about the sweetness of going out there and live together!
To love at leisure, to love and die in that land that resembles you!
The wet suns of those scrambled skies for my mind have the charms
So mysterious of your treacherous eyes shining through their tears.
There, everything is nothing else but order and beauty: luxury, calm and delight
Gleaming furniture, polished by the years, would ornate our bedroom;
the rarest flowers, mixing their odors with the vague scents of the amber
The rich ceilings; the deep mirrors; the Oriental splendor
everything there would speak to the soul, in secret, in their sweet native tongue.
There, everything is nothing else but order and beauty: luxury, calm and delight
See on these canals sleeping those boats whose mood is vagabond; it’s to satisfy your every desires that they come from the world’s end. —Setting suns embellish the fields, the canals, the whole town, in hyacinth and gold; the world is falling asleep in a warm light.
There, everything is nothing else but order and beauty: luxury, calm and delight
