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My heart, like a bird, was fluttering all joyous
And soaring freely around the rigging;
The ship rolled under a cloudless sky,
Like an angel drunk with a radiant sun.
What is this sad and black island? — It is Cythera,
We are told, a country famous in songs,
The banal Eldorado of all old bachelors.
Look, after all, it is a wretched land.
— Island of sweet secrets and affairs of the heart!
Of ancient Venus the superb phantom
Hovers above your seas like an aroma,
And fills minds with love and languor.
Beautiful island with green myrtles, full of blooming flowers,
Venerated forever by every nation,
Where the sighs of adoring hearts
Roll like incense over a garden of roses
Or the eternal cooing of a dove!
— Cythera was no more than a most barren ground,
A rocky desert troubled by shrill cries.
Yet I glimpsed a singular object!
It was not a temple with shady groves,
Where the young priestess, in love with flowers,
Went, her body burning with secret heats,
Half-opening her robe to passing breezes;
But there, as we skimmed the coast quite close,
Enough to disturb the birds with our white sails,
We saw that it was a three-branched gallows,
Standing out black against the sky, like a cypress.
Fierce birds perched on their prey
Were savagely destroying a already ripe hanged man,
Each planting, like a tool, its impure beak
Into every bleeding corner of that putrefaction;
The eyes were two holes, and from the collapsed belly
The heavy intestines flowed down his thighs,
And his torturers, gorged with hideous delights,
Had with their beaks absolutely castrated him.
Under his feet, a herd of jealous quadrupeds,
With muzzles raised, circled and prowled;
A larger beast in the middle stirred
Like an executioner surrounded by his aides.
Inhabitant of Cythera, child of so beautiful a sky,
Silently you suffered these insults
In expiation of your infamous cults
And the sins that denied you a tomb.
Ridiculous hanged man, your pains are mine!
I felt, at the sight of your floating limbs,
Like a vomit, rising to my teeth
The long river of gall of old sorrows;
Before you, poor devil with so dear a memory,
I felt all the beaks and all the jaws
Of the piercing ravens and the black panthers
That once so loved to mangle my flesh.
— The sky was charming, the sea was smooth;
For me everything was black and bloody from then on,
Alas! and I had, as in a thick shroud,
My heart buried in this allegory.
In your island, O Venus! I found standing
Only a symbolic gallows where my image hung…
— Ah! Lord! give me the strength and the courage
To contemplate my heart and my body without disgust!
Charles Baudelaire
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-a-voyage-to-cythera-charles-baudelaire/