In my multicultural and multilingual upbringing and education, I have kept a soft spot for languages that allow poetry to flourish. French is one of them, and over decades I have revisited the classics either in time of extreme anxiousness, uncertainty or to recalibrate my compass regarding where my serenity waits for me.
The past year has certainly made me revisit many books in different languages. Isolation seems to provide the ample space for reading and writing.
So, it was a commentary I heard a few days ago that made me think of Arthur Rimbaud, one of the”enfants terribles” of French symbolic poetry. I heard a commentator define 2020 as the year when “countries navigated through the pandemic like a drunken would through the streets of an unknown city.”
Fair enough. So, I went to search for the “Le Bateau Ivre” (Drunken Boat) by Rimbaud.
Rimbaud was a capricious writer. He wrote a few poems, the most remembered entitled “Le Bateau Ivre” was written in 1891. It is a symbolic poem where a boat (bateau) is describing, as a human would do, its travels. It is also about escape, new horizons and discoveries.
As such, a perfect construct for someone in isolation to understand and use for his own mental, emotional or spiritual travels.
And that brings us to another “poèt maudit”, namely Charles Baudelaire
who in 1857 wrote a poem entitled “Le
Voyage” in his most famous poetry book “Les
Fleurs du Mal.” In pure Baudelairian arrogance, he described the “real
travelers “/ (vrais voyageurs) as those who travel on the impulse for a journey
but without a journey. Just for the
sake of adventure. He wrote :
Mais les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-là seuls qui partent
Pour partir, cœurs légers, semblables aux ballons,
De leur fatalité jamais ils ne s'écartent,
Et, sans savoir pourquoi, disent toujours : Allons !
So, it is spontaneity that counts, even when we may not know why we take on the journey. For after all, it is a futile one. We never learn why we stay, why we go. We just realize that we have to go.
Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat” seems to follow a similar pattern of self discovery. Here are a few lines from his twenty five lines of alternate-rhymed alexandrines:
Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré. Les aubes sont
navrantes,
Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer.
L'acre amour m'a gonfle de torpeurs enivrantes.
Oh! que ma quille éclate ! Oh! que j’aille à la
mer!
It is the futility of the journey that Rimbaud realises, just as Baudelaire did toward the end of his poem. From my high school days, I still recall these lines, although now I understand them better as my own boat, sober or drunken, has taken most of its journey.
And for my bilingual readers, here is a masterful translation of Rimbaud’s poem by Samuel Beckett. In fact, Beckett titled it “The Drunken Boat” and his translation is more of an interpretation than a literal translation:
But no more tears.
Dawns have broken my
heart,
And every moon is
torment, every sun bitterness;
I am bloated with the stagnant fumes of acrid
loving –
May I split from stem
to stern and founder, ah founder!
… As I wrote these lines, I recalled a photo I had taken in a small New England town in the North East of the United States. It was of a small boat that was in the middle of a forest…
So, we can ask “How did that boat get there?” but the answer would be simple – because someone dumped it there. Maybe it was taking in water; maybe the engine could not keep up with the journey.
But the real question, the one that Baudelaire and Rimbaud have been faced with would be “Why did that boat get there?”
Maybe one day I will know the answer.
December 10, 2020
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2020
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