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To Victor Hugo
Swarming city, city full of dreams,
Where the specter in broad daylight accosts the passerby!
Mysteries flow everywhere like sap
In the narrow channels of the mighty colossus.
One morning, while in the sad street
The houses, whose height the mist was lengthening,
Simulated the two banks of a swollen river,
And while, a setting like the actor’s soul,
A filthy yellow fog flooded all space,
I was following, steeling my nerves like a hero
And arguing with my already weary soul,
The suburb shaken by heavy carts.
Suddenly, an old man whose yellow rags
Imitated the color of that rainy sky,
And whose appearance would have made alms rain down,
Without the wickedness that shone in his eyes,
Appeared to me. You would have said his eye was soaked
In gall; his gaze sharpened the frost,
And his long-haired beard, stiff as a sword,
Projected, like that of Judas.
He was not hunched, but broken, his spine
Making with his leg a perfect right angle,
So that his stick, completing his look,
Gave him the gait and the awkward step
Of a crippled quadruped or a three-legged Jew.
In snow and mud he went stumbling,
As if he were crushing the dead under his old shoes,
Hostile to the universe rather than indifferent.
His double followed him: beard, eye, back, stick, rags,
No feature distinguished, from the same hell come,
This centenarian twin, and these baroque specters
Walked with the same step toward an unknown goal.
To what infamous plot was I then exposed,
Or what wicked chance thus humiliated me?
For I counted seven times, from minute to minute,
This sinister old man who multiplied himself!
Let him who laughs at my unease,
And who is not seized with a fraternal shudder,
Consider well that despite so much decrepitude
These seven hideous monsters had an eternal look!
Would I have, without dying, contemplated the eighth,
Inexorable double, ironic and fatal,
Disgusting Phoenix, son and father of himself?
– But I turned my back on the infernal procession.
Exasperated like a drunkard who sees double,
I went home, I closed my door, terrified,
Sick and chilled, my mind feverish and troubled,
Wounded by mystery and by absurdity!
In vain my reason tried to take the helm;
The storm, playing, thwarted its efforts,
And my soul danced, danced, old barge
Without masts, on a monstrous sea without shores!
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-les-sept-vieillards-charles-baudelaire/