Charles Baudelaire, Photo by
Etienne Cajat, 1863
Baudelaire….and Gainsbourg
Drawing by Carlos Schwabe, 1900
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Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) published the poem Le Serpent Qui Danse (“The Dancing Serpent”) in the 1857 first edition of his book Les Fleurs du Mal (“The Flowers of Evil”) that included 100 poems he had penned during prior years. Baudelaire explores duality--the coexistence of beauty and evil, though the French word for “evil” (mal) extends beyond the simple antithesis of “good” to all kinds of pain and suffering. It was his only published book of poetry, a fact that he misleadingly attributed to his “indolence and perfectionism.” Less than 2 months after publication, six poems were banned from its contents.
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Serge Gainsbourg
In 1962, Serge Gainsbourg incorporated the full text of Le serpent qui danse in a song included on his early and short album titled Serge Gainsbourg No 4. He called the piece Baudelaire and bathed it in voluptuous vocal timbre and music with a samba rhythm. It was the last album in his original style blend of chanson, jazz, Latino and rock and roll.
Several years earlier (1957), Léo Ferré had used Baudelaire’s own book title for his album, Les Fleurs du Mal, the first of 3 albums that Ferré fashioned in tribute to Baudelaire’s work. Baudelaire’s poems have been set to music by many artists, and his influence cascaded through poetic circles to Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and many others.
Le Serpent Qui Danse is an erotic poem and becomes more so the closer you read it. There is powerful imagery and a grammatical and verbal structure that challenges translation to English so severely that it has spawned countless efforts to do so. In this poem as with others, one wonders whether the imperative of rhyme in the choice of words sometimes comes at the cost of precision and clarity. The poem is meticulous in its structure and rhyme but Baudelaire’s works were scandalous in their time for their treatment of sex, death and many other things. He was successfully prosecuted and fined for offense against public morals.
In the poem, Baudelaire addresses his Creole mistress, Jeanne Duval, using intimate forms of language and composing a verbal painting of her alluring attributes. In succession, he describes her skin, hair, eyes, walk, head, body and mouth. He uses exotic images that evoke far-away climes: acrid perfumes, ships, serpent, elephant, Bohemian wine. He collected these images on a trip to India in 1841. His descriptors are sensually evocative: shimmering, dancing, leans and stretches, melting, plunges. Baudelaire achieves significant erotic progress in the space of only a few stanzas of the poem, advancing from detached observation of Jeanne’s skin and hair in the first lines, past the precise midpoint image of a dancing serpent at the end of a stick, to the climax of sampling water in her mouth like a liquid sky sprinkling stars in his heart at the end.
Duval, a Haitian-born actress and dancer, was Baudelaire’s mistress and muse for many years. Their relationship was a tumultuous love-hate affair as suggested by the diverse interpretations that Baudelaire made of her in his drawings (below). For Baudelaire, she was surely the serpent qui danse incarnate, with all its duality and ambivalent symbolism. His mother termed her a “black Venus” that “tortured him in every way.”
Duval, a Haitian-born actress and dancer, was Baudelaire’s mistress and muse for many years. Their relationship was a tumultuous love-hate affair as suggested by the diverse interpretations that Baudelaire made of her in his drawings (below). For Baudelaire, she was surely the serpent qui danse incarnate, with all its duality and ambivalent symbolism. His mother termed her a “black Venus” that “tortured him in every way.”
Drawings of Jeanne Duval, by
Charles Baudelaire
Serge Gainsbourg found Baudelaire deeply inspiring and Baudelaire’s poem sank firmly into his psyche, as did his lifetime of dissolute behavior and provocation. Gainsbourg’s early experiment with Baudelaire in 1962 was a mild harbinger for what was to come. His own quest for a serpent qui danse found expression in his liaisons with Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin, and others. It is hard not to recognize echoes of Baudelaire’s seductive verbal caress of Jeanne Duval in Gainsbourg’s rendition(s) of Je t’aime…mois non plus. With Gainsbourg, these came complete with musical accompaniment and the interactive audio (heavy breathing) participation of his muse(s). The first iteration with Bardot was in 1967 (released only in 1986) and the second with Birkin (1969).
Political reaction to Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime…. was not dissimilar to the response Baudelaire garnered one hundred years earlier: official prosecutions, fines, and suppressions. For its part, Je t’aime… was banned from radio in many countries and officially denounced by the Vatican newspaper. Despite the political condemnations, the song became a runaway commercial success.
In retrospect, Je t’aime…. was but a dress rehearsal for the 1979 chorus of condemnation that greeted Gainsbourg’s reggae adaptation of the French national anthem La Marseillaise that he named Aux armes et caetera. This was met with a scathing anti-Semitic and nationalist backlash including death threats and legionnaire invasion of his concerts. Gainsbourg’s appreciation for the provocateur’s playbook went well beyond the realm of sex and personal conduct to include national symbols of identity and honor.
In donning the mantle of Baudelaire, Gainsbourg went so far as to intentionally personify the duality that Baudelaire perceived in the coexistence of good and evil. In his own world, during the 1980s Gainsbourg fabricated this duality by creating his very own alter ego—the depraved fictional character “Gainsbarre” that he concocted to contrast with "nice" Gainsbourg like a personal “Dr. Jekyl” and “Mr. Hyde.” Somehow, one supposes, this was intended to absolve the “real” Gainsbourg of responsibility for the endless addiction-fueled inappropriate antics of Gainsbarre that captured the last decade of his life.
[NB: In an apotheosis of Serge’s devotion to wordplay and the commercialization of provocation, the café and piano bar at the recently opened Maison Gainsbourg museum at 5 bis rue Verneuil in Paris is called Le Gainsbarre].
But, with all that—back to Baudelaire….and Gainsbourg…..
[NB: In an apotheosis of Serge’s devotion to wordplay and the commercialization of provocation, the café and piano bar at the recently opened Maison Gainsbourg museum at 5 bis rue Verneuil in Paris is called Le Gainsbarre].
But, with all that—back to Baudelaire….and Gainsbourg…..
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Que j'aime voir, chère indolente, De ton corps si beau, Comme une étoffe vacillante, Miroiter la peau! Sur ta chevelure profonde Aux âcres parfums, Mer odorante et vagabonde Aux flots bleus et bruns, Comme un navire qui s'éveille Au vent du matin, Mon âme rêveuse appareille Pour un ciel lointain. Tes yeux où rien ne se révèle De doux ni d'amer, Sont deux bijoux froids où se mêlent L'or avec le fer. À te voir marcher en cadence, Belle d'abandon, On dirait un serpent qui danse Au bout d'un baton. Sous le fardeau de ta paresse Ta tête d'enfant Se balance avec la mollesse D'un jeune éléphant, Et ton corps se penche et s'allonge Comme un fin vaisseau Qui roule bord sur bord et plonge Ces vergues dans l'eau Comme un flot grossi par la fonte Des glaciers grondants, Quand l'eau de ta bouche remonte Au bord de tes dents, Je crois boire un vin de Bohème, Amer et vainqueur, Un ciel liquide qui parsème D'étoiles mon cœur! |
How I love to see, dear indolent one, The shimmering skin Of your body so beautiful, Like a swaying fabric! On your ample hair With acrid perfumes, Sea fragrant and wandering With blue and brown waves, Like a ship that awakens In the morning wind, My dreamy soul sets sail For a distant sky. Your eyes that reveal nothing Of sweetness or bitterness, Are two cold jewels where mingle Gold with iron. To see you walk in rhythm, Beautiful with abandon, One would say a dancing serpent At the end of a stick Under the burden of your languor Your child's head Balances with the limpness Of a young elephant, And your body leans and stretches Like a fine vessel That rolls side to side and plunges Its spars into the water Like a tide swollen by the melting Of rumbling glaciers, When the water of your mouth rises To the edge of your teeth, It seems I drink Bohemian wine Bitter and victorious, A liquid sky that sprinkles Stars in my heart! |
NB:
- Ces vergues dans l'eau: “vergues” are horizontal spars or “yards” on the mast of sailing ships on which sails are set.
- un vin de Bohème has multiple possible references. Bohemia is a geographic and ethnic region and also carries a historical and cultural connotation associated with a certain lifestyle. It is likely that “Bohemian wine” also had a particular gustatory resonance two hundred years ago.
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