Chapter 15 carrion

Beloved, think what we've seen, On a beautiful morning in cool summer: At the bend in the path, an ugly carrion Stretched on a bed of stones, His legs are raised high, like a lewd woman, With hot poisonous gas, Show casual, shameless look, Open your stinky belly. The sun shines on this rotting corpse, As if to burn it to pieces, Nutrients to hold nature together Return a hundredfold to the great nature. The sky gazes at the magnificent corpse, Like an open bud, The stench is so strong that you are on the grass It seemed that he was about to pass out from the smoke. Flies buzz around the rotting belly,

A large group of maggots in the dark Drilled out from the stomach, along the stinky skin, Flows like viscous pus. These maggots rising and falling like a tide Crashing and scrambling, As if this body blown inflated by the breeze Still living a reproductive life. The world makes a strange music, Like the water flowing, like the wind blowing, And like the rhythmic motion of a winnower, as with his dustpan. The image has disappeared, leaving only the shadow of a dream, ② Like against a forgotten canvas, A painter with his memory alone, Slowly draw a sketch. ③ Hiding behind a rock, showing angry eyes

watching our anxious dogs, It is waiting for the opportunity to get out of the corpse Grab another piece of leftover meat. ——But in the future, you have to be like this scum, Like this horrible carrion, The star of my eyes, the sun of my heart, You, my passion, my angel! yes!Queen of Grace, you cannot escape, After receiving the last sacrament, When you go to sleep under the weeds and flowers, Decay among the bones. Then, my beauties, tell them, The maggots that kiss you and eat you, Although the old love has broken down, but I have preserved The shape of love and the essence of love!

Translated by Qian Chunqi According to Pralon, the poem was written before 1843.Published directly in the first edition.The lover in the poem refers to Jeanne Duval.This poem is a realistic depiction of the corpse on the roadside, and the poet often recites it in hotels and studios, thus making him famous as "the poet of corpse literature".The original title Une Charrogoe, which is mostly translated as "dead livestock" or "dead beast" in Chinese literature, should be a "female corpse" here. ① Refers to flies buzzing and maggots rustling. ②The above are all seen in the past, and now in retrospect, only dream shadows are left.

③ Baudelaire once criticized the landscape painters at that time for not paying attention to painting from memory, see "The Art of Memory" in "Painters of Modern Life".