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Enchanted by Baudelaire, and the Gamemaster

By Psyche | March 27, 2008 | Print This Post | E-mail This Post | 1 Comment

I’ve only recently started reading Baudelaire; I finished Twenty Prose Poems yesterday. Despite taking French from kindergarten through to OAC1, it’s hardly surprising that the few trips I’ve taken to Quebec to exercise the tongue have not been sufficient to maintain bilingualism: I found the French quite challenging.

It’s strange, after so many years absent from the language, to see how easy it was to pick up again in some respects, but also quite different and difficult. I’m no longer sure if this is due to the differences between québécois and Parisian French, or because they were written before Canada was even a country and the language is antiquated, or, far more likely, c’est parce que mon français est terrible.

Fortunately, the City Lights edition I have was translated into English by Michael Hamburger, and, after struggling through the French, immediately following I was better able to appreciate the grace of Hamburger’s translation, and better understand the text.

Multitude, solitude: terms that, to the active and fruitful poet, are synonymous and interchangeable. A Man who cannot people his solitude is no less incapable of being alone in a busy crowd.

from “Crowds” (“Les foules“)

“The Generous Gamemaster” (“Le joueur généreux“)in particular, struck me as brilliant. It’s too long to post in its entirety, but I’ll see if I can convey the gist of it, as I can’t seem to locate it online.

The subject of the poem meets the devil in the street and is encouraged to follow him down “into a subterranean but dazzling abode, which shone with a luxury of which none of the finest houses of Paris could offer the shadow of example”. The image he presents of the people he encounters is horrifyingly bleak, but it is taken in course by our narrator.

They dine together, and we get to the heart of it:

My host and myself, from the moment we took our seats, were perfect friends. We ate, we drank immoderately all sorts of extraordinary wines, and, a circumstance not less extraordinary, it seemed to me, after several hours, that I was not more drunk than he. However, gambling, that superhuman amusement, had interrupted our libations at frequent intervals, and I must say that in partnership I had staked and lost my soul with heroic indifference and frivolity. The soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes so embarrassing that at this loss I felt only a little more emotion than if, during a walk, I had lost my visiting card.

He finds the devil a wonderful and enchanting conversationalist: “he expressed himself with a suavity of diction and dryness of with which I have not found it any of the most famous conversationalists of humanity.”

Boldly, our hero inquires after the devil’s counterpart:

Encouraged by so many kindnesses, I asked him news of God, and whether he had seen Him recently. With a carefree air tinted with a certain sadness he replied: “We raise our hats to each other when we meet, but like two old noblemen, in whom an innate politeness cannot extinguish the memory of former grievances.”

The devil shortly offers him all that he desired and more, and buoyed by these and so many kindnesses, our hero parts company with him, and makes his way into the rising dawn. Yet, upon reentering the world, doubt nags him, and what does he do?

…before going to bed, compelled by the residue of an idiotic habit, I again said my prayers, I drowsily muttered again and again: “O God! O Lord God! Make the devil keep his promise!”

I’m now beginning Les fleurs du mal.

Footnotes:

  1. Ages 5-18. [back]

Psyche is the editor of ahrfoundation.org and the curator for the occult resource SpiralNature.com, Psyche also operates a tarot consultation business, Psyche Tarot. She has been published in The Cauldron, Konton, Tarot World Magazine, among other magazines, and her essay “Strategic Magick” appeared in Manifesting Prosperity (Megalithica, 2008).

Psyche's website is http://www.ahrfoundation.org.

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  1. [...] subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!Last week I posted about my introduction to Baudelaire and shared a few excerpts from Twenty Prose Poems1. I’ve been reading Les fleur du mal; my [...]

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