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The Gardener of Evil
Portland poet C.S. Thompson tends to "The Flowers of Evil"
by Chris Busby
You may have seen him striding through the streets of Portland at night -- a tall, bearded figure draped in a sweeping black coat, his long, dark hair spilling out from under his black hat. Did you dare to peer beneath the brim of that hat as he passed? He may have been carrying books or swords or books about swords.
If you'd had the nerve to stop him, he might have told you his name, but that probably wouldn't have tipped you off that you were standing in the presence of one of the most prolific, accomplished authors in town.
His name is C.S. Thompson, president of the Cateran Society (an organization dedicated to the study and practice of Scottish Highland martial arts -- thus the swords) and the author of two books of poetry published by Writers Club Press this year: "City at the Edge of Night and Other Poems," a collection of original verse Thompson's penned over the last decade; and "The Flowers of Evil," his translation of the great French poet Charles Baudelaire's controversial collection of bile, depravity and vice. Two other books -- "Games Dead People Play," a collection of Thompson's short crime fiction, and "A Little Place of Forgetting," a dark fantasy novel -- are on track to come out later this year.
Thompson, 28, grew up in the Fryeburg area but has lived in Portland off and on for most of his adult life. He started writing poetry when he was 13 and soon embarked upon a macabre apprenticeship under haunted poets who'd been dead for generations. "I was reading a lot of the early Romantic poets, and I more or less sat down and tried to deliberately copy their style to teach myself to do it," Thompson recalled. "That way you're copying the masters' works until you can gain the skill to produce your own works .Š It was like a formal training, but I didn't have anyone helping me."
The influence of those masters, particularly William Blake, is in evidence throughout "City at the Edge of Night." Thompson's style is anachronistic, a melding of metrical patterns and rhyme schemes of the past with subject matter informed by modern scientific knowledge and a foreboding sense of the future. The effect is often striking, as in "When the Threshers Come."
And if we went tonight, we'd dance a thousand years --
The light would fill us up, and activate the gears.
The light would rain and make uranium.
We need to hide it till the Threshers come.
Human emotions are often obscured beneath fantastic subject matter, a weakness Thompson recognizes and sometimes overcomes. In some of his poems, "The imagery is very intense on the surface, but I'm not sure how much depth there is to them," he said. "A lot of those poems are somewhat cold emotionally, because I didn't necessarily think that I could talk about emotional things without coming across either flat or melodramatic."
In a poem such as "One Usual Twilight," however, Thompson's fine ear for meter and rhyme elevates his verse above flat sentimentality.
Well, never from now will your wanting leave echoes and ripples,
While I in the morning replace the receiver, and wonder,
And never will crying be charged this account in the future
Because of my precious and needful and gracious ungiving --
That only is wanted which wanders a pace from the wanter .
The grammatical contortions Thompson performs to fit the poetic forms he sets up for himself in "City at the Edge of Night" are impressive, but nothing compared to the feats he pulls off throughout his translation of "The Flowers of Evil."
Introduced to Baudelaire by a high school French teacher, Thompson began translating the morbid verse five years ago -- recreationally for the first four years, then obsessively over the course of the last year, when he dedicated himself to finishing all 160-plus poems.
How difficult and daunting was it to tackle a book T.S. Eliot once called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language?
"When I was translating, I thought it was probably easier to break bricks with a sledgehammer than it is to translate," Thompson said. Though there were days when everything clicked and he'd complete three or four poems at a stretch, "There'd be other days when it would take me an entire day to do one or even a couple days of constant work to do one, because there'd be some line I'd get stuck on," he said. "I'd not just have to turn it into something that makes sense and that more or less means what the original means, but also that fits the meter and rhyme and does so in a way that doesn't sound awkward. That can be really, really hard."
As tricky as the translation itself was, living with Baudelaire's beautiful, yet often bestial, verse in his head for so long posed its own problems. While translating, Thompson said he "felt almost uncomfortably close to where [Baudelaire] was coming from. I really came to the conclusion that he had a ferocious and somewhat unpleasant personality. He was an extremely angry and bitter man. In order to translate the poems and do justice to them, I felt I had to get into his mind-set in a way that was almost taking glee or taking delight out of an attitude of ferociousness, for want of a better word.
"That could be tough sometimes, psychologically. I would be translating all day, and then I'd be in quite a weird mood for several hours afterward."
Thompson's goal in translating "The Flowers of Evil" was to convey in English the blunt power beneath Baudelaire's elegant French. "You'd read Baudelaire [in French], and it'd have this tremendous vigor to it, a lot of punch to it -- a lot of the poems are like a punch to the gut -- and then in the translation, it would seem to lose a lot of that force," he said. "It would seem to become tamed a little, and I wanted to do a translation that would sock it to ya like that."
Thompson's "Flowers" is successful in this regard, conveying Baudelaire's sick, manic sentiments in more modern, straightforward language than most of his predecessors in translation employed. But his versions also lack some of the rich, imaginative vocabulary and lyrical verve past translators like Robert Lowell or Stanley Kunitz applied to Baudelaire's poems.
Thompson's version of the book's prefatory poem, "To the Reader," contains this stanza:
It is the Devil who shall lead us hence!
Repugnant objects meet us on the way.
More close to hell with every passing day
We walk unhorrified, despite the stench.
In Lowell's version, the same stanza reads:
Each day his flattery makes us eat a toad,
and each step forward is a step to hell,
unmoved, though previous corpses and their smell
asphyxiate our progress on this road.
Baudelaire's choice of subject matter stirred up the prudes of his day, and the book was banned for its exuberant depictions of society's underbelly and unrepentant attitude in championing Satan, lesbians and other risqué characters. "He uses very extreme imagery, and in many ways he deliberately, directly attacks things society tends to value," Thompson said. "He took a delight in angering them and in throwing their values back in their face."
Though he added, "That isn't in any way a goal of mine, [but] it wouldn't surprise me if there would still be people who'd be extremely offended if they read it . It's not that I would take pleasure in shocking them, but it would show that I'd done the translation well."
Hopefully, it won't take protests outside local poetry readings to call attention to Thompson's achievement, but stranger things have happened.
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