La Beauté

Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre,

Et mon sein, où chacun s'est meurtri tour à tour,

Est fait pour inspirer au poète un amour

Eternel et muet ainsi que la matière.

Je trône dans l'azur comme un sphinx incompris;

J'unis un coeur de neige à la blancheur des cygnes;

Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes,

Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.

Les poètes, devant mes grandes attitudes,

Que j'ai l'air d'emprunter aux plus fiers monuments,

Consumeront leurs jours en d'austères études;

Car j'ai, pour fasciner ces dociles amants,

De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles:

Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clartés éternelles!

— Charles Baudelaire

Possible translations:

Beauty

I'm fair, O mortals, as a dream of stone;

My breasts whereon, in turn, your wrecks you shatter,

Were made to wake in poets' hearts alone

A love as indestructible as matter.

A sky-throned sphinx, unknown yet, I combine

The cygnet's whiteness with a heart of snow.

I loathe all movement that displaces line,

And neither tears nor laughter do I know.

Poets before my postures, which I seem

To learn from masterpieces, love to dream

And there in austere thought consume their days.

I have, these docile lovers to subject,

Mirrors that glorify all they reflect —

These eyes, great eyes, eternal in their blaze!

— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)

La Beauté

fair as a dream in stone I loom afar

— mortals! — with dazzling breast where, bruised in turn

all poets fall in silence, doomed to burn

with love eternal as the atoms are.

white as a swan I throne with heart of snow

in azure space, a sphynx that none divine,

no hateful motion mars my lovely line,

nor tears nor laughter shall I ever know.

and poets, lured by this magnificence

— this grandeur proud as Parian monuments —

toil all their days like martyrs in a spell;

lovers bewitched are they, for I possess

pure mirrors harbouring worlds of loveliness:

my wide, wide eyes where fires eternal dwell!

— Lewis Piaget Shanks, Flowers of Evil (New York: Ives Washburn, 1931)

Goya, Time or Viejas