With Dante, Sartre, Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoyevsky it is one of the greatest in European literature.

       BEAUDELAIRE DAMN POET AND HE LIKED BLACK WOMEN...

 

Few currently read Baudelaire, one of the greatest poets of French literature. Today I found a text of his in an attic in my hiding place that moved me because it brought the breath of youth. He only lives once.

I was twenty years old, I worked as a worker in Paris, I fasted and spent my wages on paperback books that I devoured on the subway rides from my house in Cité Universitaire to the Banlieu factory where I was just another worker with a crowd. of Moroccan, Italian, Algerian, Yugoslavian, Greek workers.

I open it and on the respect page I find this heading: my name and a date Paris, September 6, 1964. IT IS THE PERFUME OF AN ERA INSERT BETWEEN ITS PAGES: DE GAULLE, THE SONGS OF BECAUDE PARIS SE EVEILLE et j'ai pas somneil, AZNAVOUR, MONTANT, LAS MINISKIRTS, THE BOULOGNE FOREST. THE RIVE GAUCHE. A TIME IN FREEDOM

A little more than 59 years have passed and I, who wanted to be a writer when I was young, am still in that same demand as an old man. I have been a good journalist and a novelist without luck (ecrivan raté?) because my themes and my languages and my arguments are not understood.

Baudelaire like Sartre is a millenarian. A prophet, who does not want to listen to.

Both, along with Jules Verne, lie covered in the dust of oblivion. They are accused of anti-Semitism. Quel domage! Account and reason: anyone who thinks on his account or does not accept the official truth is expelled from Parnassus and the grand inquisitor puts the crown on him.

We are ready. We're all heading to the burner.

“Las Flores del Mal” is one of those collections of poems that broke new ground.

  Its hendecasyllables announce with bronze tongues the birth of a new cycle. Certain critics call Carlos Baudelaire 1821-1867 a blasphemer and satanist. Maybe he was ahead of the times. He lashes out at the ignorance of the obscurantists:

The man and the sea are both

Dark and discreet

Null man you didn't probe

The depth of the abysses

Oh sea, no one knows your intimate riches!

You both seem jealous of keeping your secrets.

There is in his verses an unsatisfied thirst to inquire into the presence of evil in the world: hypocrisy, wars, the deceitful double game that inhabits the cloisters when he rebukes a lazy friar: “Il te faut pour gagner le pain de chaque day

Jouer de l'encensoir

Chanter des Tedeums auxquelles tu ne crois guere”

His expressive ease, his concise narration, his verses resonate in the ear with an irrefragable softness. Pure French trigonometry. Caressing language of sweet France. Paradoxically, the great Parisian vate is a mystic who sings the De profundis for a new time, another era.

  He sings about love, about the dancing snake, about the carrion in the cemetery, about autumn, about apres-midi, about his pipe, about the sundial, about the irremediable, etc. Throughout my many years of bookish speculation, The Flowers of Evil have been my go-to book. Live France

Saturday, November 25, 2023