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O fleece, billowing down to the neckline!
O curls! O perfume charged with languor!
Ecstasy! To people this evening the dark alcove
With memories sleeping in this head of hair,
I want to shake it in the air like a handkerchief!
The languorous Asia and the burning Africa,
A whole distant world, absent, almost defunct,
Lives in your depths, aromatic forest!
As other spirits sail on music,
Mine, O my love! swims on your perfume.
I shall go there where tree and man, full of sap,
Swoon long beneath the ardor of the climates;
Strong tresses, be the swell that carries me off!
You contain, sea of ebony, a dazzling dream
Of sails, of rowers, of flames and of masts:
A resounding port where my soul can drink
In great waves the perfume, the sound and the color;
Where the vessels, gliding in gold and in moiré,
Open their vast arms to embrace the glory
Of a pure sky where the eternal heat trembles.
I shall plunge my head in love with drunkenness
Into this black ocean where the other is enclosed;
And my subtle spirit that the rolling caresses
Will know how to find you, O fertile idleness,
Infinite rockings of perfumed leisure!
Blue hair, pavilion of stretched shadows,
You give me back the azure of the immense and round sky;
On the downy edges of your twisted locks
I grow drunk ardently on the mingled scents
Of coconut oil, of musk and of tar.
Long! always! my hand in your heavy mane
Will sow the ruby, the pearl and the sapphire,
So that to my desire you may never be deaf!
Are you not the oasis where I dream, and the gourd
Where I inhale in long draughts the wine of memory?
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-the-head-of-hair-charles-baudelaire/