nunia
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加入时间: 2005/11/04
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作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
In "The Painter of Modern Life," he exponds this at length:
It is this infallible nature that has created parricide and cannibalism and a thousand other
abominations that modesty and manners forbid us to mention. [ Except, he must silently have
added, in poems.] It is philosophy ( I speak of the good kind), and it is religion, that order
us to feed our poor and infirm parents. Nature (which is nothing but the voice of our own
interests) commands us to clobber them. Go through, analyse, everything natural - all actions
and desires of the pure natural man. All you find will be atrocious. Anything beautiful and
noble is the result of reason and calculation. Crime, a taste for which the human animal has
drawn from his mother's womb, is natural in origin. Virtue, on the contrary, is artificial,
supernatural, since it has been necessary, in all times and in all nations, for gods and
prophets to teach animalistic humanity what man, alone, would never have managed to discover.
Evil comes about without effort, naturally, by fatality; the good is always the product of an
art.
So one is not surprised that his sense of beauty is less occupied with physical bodies than
with the arts of makeup and adornment. His growing disdain for realism in the visual arts
results in a predilection for caricature. And his most famous work, outside the poems and prose
poems, is Artifical Paradises, a work he intended to bring out just after the second Flowers of
Evil, but which ( because of his fiddling with the poems caused a delay) in fact appeared
first. Artificial Paradises is a beautiful book in two parts, on hashish and on opium ( though,
the part on opium is of less interest, being mainly a summary of De Quincey's Confessions of an
English Opium Eater.)
Baudelaire had earlier attended sessions of le Club des hachichins, which met a few times in
1845 and '46; Gautier, Balzac, and Gerand de nerval were also its members. (The Hashish, by the
way, was not smoked, but put into some kind of cake or cookie, as later recommended by Alice B.
Toklas.) Baudelaire does not promote the use of hashish or opium, because, he insists, wine is
more effective. In spite of his interest in these substances, he is reported to have been
rather abstemious or at least moderate, even with wine. But his notion of paradise is related
to such 'artificial' means - or sometimes to dreams. He drew an amusing caricature of himself
under the influence of hashish.
By another train of thought ( or trail of feeling) he comes to identify nature with woman:
"Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable." This leads to extraordinary statements, such as
one that attracted Eliot's attention:
Once someone asked, when I was present, what constituted the greatest pleasure in love. Someone
replied, naturally: in receiving. Another: in giving. Someone said: the pleasure of pride!
someone else: the ecstasy of humility! All these muckers making like the Imitation of Christ.
Finally, an impudent utopian was found who insisted that the greatest pleasure of love was in
forming new citizens for the fatherland.
Me, I said: what is uniquely, supremely voluptuous about love lies in the certainty of doing
evil. And man and woman know from birth that in evil is to be found all voluptuousness.
...
http://allthingsgo.us/~nunia/txt/TranslatorsIntro.KeithWaldrop.txt
作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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