“A Carcass” read by Judith Baumel
From the new edition of The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Aaron Poochigian.
Do you recall, my love, the thing we saw
that fine morning in luscious June?
Right where the pathway turned, a carcass lay
on a bed made of cobblestone.
Her legs akimbo like a harlot’s, she
a boiling, toxic, sweating mass,
exposed, in an aloof, ironic way,
a belly puffed with noxious gas.
The sun was shining on that heap of rot
as if to cook it thoroughly
and pay back Nature many times for what
she had arranged in pregnancy.
The sky kept gaping as the noble stiff
opened, flower-like, to the dawn.
The stench was so intense it seemed as if
you just might pass out on the lawn.
The blowflies in her bowels made a hum;
there also was a horde of seething
maggots flowing like a busy stream
across her ripped and living clothing.
The whole ensemble burgeoned with a rasp
or swelled and tumbled like the sea.
It seemed her flesh, filled with a sort of gasp,
thrived on its own fecundity.
The cosmos loosed a curious music-making,
like running water, or a gale,
or grain a farmhand with a rhythmic shaking
keeps moving in the winnowing pail.
Such evocations, like a dream, diffused–
a challenging, half-done design
some artist had forgot and later must
complete from memory alone.
A restless mongrel, crouched behind a rock,
studied us with a greedy stare,
biding her time until she could get back
the chunk she had abandoned there.
—And you, my being’s center, you, my love,
the star and angel of my eyes,
someday will match that offal. You will prove,
at last, unsightly putridness.
Yes, charming princess, you will look like that
When the last sacraments are over
And you go down among the dead and rot
beneath the grass and flowering clover.
Then tell the maggots, O my gorgeous one,
as they consume you kiss by kiss,
that I preserve the beauty and divine
essences of my mistresses.
From The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Aaron Poochigian. Translation copyright © 2022 by Aaron Poochigian. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Judith Baumel is a poet, critic and translator. She is Professor Emerita of English and Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. She has served as a Fulbright Scholar to Italy, the president of The Association of Writers and Writing Programs and the director of The Poetry Society of America. Her books of poetry are The Weight of Numbers, for which she won The Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, Now, The Kangaroo Girl and Passeggiate. Her work has been published in such journals as The New Yorker, Poetry, Agni Review, The Common, The New Republic, The Paris Review, among others. She is a graduate of The Bronx High School of Science; Radcliffe College, Harvard University and The Johns Hopkins University.