I adore you as much as the high vault of night,
O you urn of sorrows, o untalkative great.
I love you, all the more beautiful because you flee from me
And seem to me, as ornament of my evenings,
More ironically to gather highway stretches
That keep me from embracing azure vastness.
- stanza I of poem XXIV from Les Fleurs du Mal (my translation)
When it comes to poem XXIV from Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), which I recently led a translation workshop on as a language tutor, there is a frequent tendency amongst the roster of famous Baudelaire translators to clean up the messiness of the line “Qui séparent mes bras des immensités bleues.” A literal translation of the line would be “That separate my arms from blue immensities.” I translated “immensités bleues” as “blue vastness” in the version that appeared this Halloween season in the lit mag Don’t Submit! (see link): my thought here is that “the real Baudelaire” is often quite understated, offbeat, while also precise about his vision. It’s a lofty expression but sounds subtly strange. Baudelaire can be understood to a large degree with the insight that inherited an over-the-top register from Edgar Allan Poe. (One incidentally more broadly fails to grasp something important about French Romanticism if one thinks that it should sound normal and domestic in English).
In my heart of hearts, I would have liked to have been as super off beat as Baudelaire and said “blue vastnesses,” but this sits awkwardly with the rhyming couplet scheme and the meter of the alexandrine verse of twelve-syllable hexameter. Besides that, “blue vastness” maps onto the same reality as “blue vastnesses.” A vastness presumably can contain vastnesses.
For comparison, any variation that translates “immensités” with some version of the word infinity/infinite would seem to misunderstand that Baudelaire does not assume that he will gain access to heaven in the afterlife. It also subtly adumbrates that Baudelaire does not actually think that his drug use gains him access to the divine. (Note how Baudelaire’s main work on drug use, in particular of hashish, is called Les Paradis artificiels (Artificial Paradises.) “Immensités” in light of this impossibility also would seem to especially hint at something dangerous like jumping off a building or into the sea. This part about blue immensities does not actually beat readers over the head with a sense that he is really talking about suicide or hallucination or some spiritual oddity.
There is, all that said, a sense of the numinous throughout Baudelaire’s work, but I think he, amidst all this, may have been aware that talk of the infinite becomes cheapened through repetition.
I don’t mean to malign any other translators. I moreover believe my rhyming version of this poem draws much of its meaning from the fact that I am zigging rather than zagging. Coming up with a translation that is in any way new is an accomplishment when the name of the game is being inventive with Baudelaire, who is perhaps the most translated French poet. You simply would not see my translation of this poem were I to have somehow repeated what someone else had done with this poem.