by Charles Baudelaire
- My young foot is a tenebrous orange,
- Traversing a pair of brilliant suns;
- The tangent and the rain are fated to be ravaged,
- Like a quill resting in my garden of vermillion fruits.
- There, I touch the autonomy of ideas,
- And the fat quill employs the pelicans and the rats
- For reassembling an inundated planet,
- The water creased with large Nerf tombstones.
- And are the new flowers that I dream of
- Trembling indolently in this solitary lava with
- The alimentary mystique of vigorous lemurs?
- —O dollar! O dollar! The temperatures manage the life,
- And the obscure Enema that wrongs the heart
- Of the blood that pardons and fortifies!
(Translator’s note: As we saw several weeks ago in “Dans le Restaurant,” T.S. Eliot greatly exaggerated his knowledge of French. However, his deficiency was perhaps understandable, as it was not his first language. Today’s poem, “L’Ennemi,” presents a more serious case. Incredibly, it appears that Baudelaire also could barely speak French.)
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