Big Bang Burger Bar

I'm posting poetry because everyone else is. This is 'A Matyr' from Charles Beaudelaire's 'Flowers of Evil'. I've recently found an album of the same name where his poems are read by Yvette Mimieux with music by Ali Akbar Khan of Indian Classical fame. I hope you enjoy this macabre tale;

A Martyr

Drawing by an unknown master

In the midst of perfume flasks, of sequined fabrics
And voluptuous furniture,
Of marble statues, pictures, and perfumed dresses
That trail in sumptuous folds,

In a warm room where, as in a hothouse,
The air is dangerous, fatal,
Where bouquets dying in their glass coffins
Exhale their final breath,

A headless cadaver pours out, like a river,
On the saturated pillow
Red, living blood, that the linen drinks up
As greedily as a meadow.

Like the pale visions engendered by shadows
And which hold our eyes riveted,
The head, its mane of hair piled up in a dark mass
And wearing precious jewels,

On the bedside table, like a ranunculus,
Reposes; and, empty of thoughts,
A stare, blank and pallid as the dawn,
Escapes from the upturned eyeballs.

On the bed, the nude torso shamelessly displays
With the most complete abandon
The secret splendor and fatal beauty
That nature had bestowed on her;

A rose stocking embroidered with gold clocks remains
On her leg like a souvenir;
The garter, like a hidden flashing eye,
Darts its glance of diamond brilliance.

The bizarre aspect of that solitude
And of a large, languid portrait
With eyes as provocative as the pose,
Reveals an unwholesome love,

Guilty joys and exotic revelries,
With infernal kisses
That delighted the swarm of bad angels
Hovering in the curtains' folds;

And yet one sees from the graceful slimness
Of the angular shoulders.
The haunches slightly sharp, and the waist sinuous
As a snake poised to strike,

That she's still quite young! — Had her exasperated soul
And her senses gnawed by ennui
Thrown open their gates to the thirsty pack
Of lost and wandering desires?

The vengeful man whom you could not with all your love
Satisfy when you were alive,
Did he use your inert, complacent flesh to fill
The immensity of his lust?

Reply, impure cadaver! and by your stiffened tresses
Raising you with a fevered arm,
Tell me, ghastly head, did he glue on your cold teeth
The kisses of the last farewell?

— Far from the sneering world, far from the impure crowd,
Far from curious magistrates,
Sleep in peace, sleep in peace, bizarre creature,
In your mysterious tomb;

Your mate roams o'er the world, and your immortal form
Watches over him when he sleeps;
Even as you, he will doubtless be faithful
And constant until death.

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

If your bored & want something to do, you can dig up one of my favourite a Gaelic poem from the first world war called I think "the Fat English Corporal" which quotes another of my favourite poems the Goddolin of Tallassin. Its worth not being clipped round the ear when next we meet if you do & post it here.




 >:DGinger

Quick little buddy, say something silly! You're intallectual side is showing in public. ;)

Nice stuff though, must get hold of that album.

Time to buy some earmuffs! I can't find hide nor hair of either poem EvilGinger. You'll have to write it yourself from memory and your own creative talent.

As for the album, the translation of 'A Martyr' is far worse than the version i posted here. The lines are less poetic, - more descriptive, but the general atmosphere of a softly spoken woman and some tabla + sitar make up for it. I suspect the translation is a lot more literal and less poetic licence is used. The rest of the album doesn't seem to suffer from that though.