Nicholas Moore (1918 – 1986), the son of the philosopher G. E. Moore, was considered one of the major poets of his generation in the 1940s, rated as highly as Dylan Thomas. For various reasons he fell out of favour in the 1950s, and he turned instead to horticulture, writing a monograph on the Tall Bearded Iris in 1956. When in 1968 George Steiner initiated a competition in the Sunday Times for translations of Baudelaire, Moore sent in 31 separate translations of one of the Spleen poems, Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux, mostly under eccentric pseudonyms : some anagrams – Alonso Moriche, Ion Lomas-Roche – others simply knockabout – H R Fixon-Boumphrey, W H Laudanum. These give an indication of the general tone of these translations, which is far from conventional. Moore felt that translation was almost always an inadequate representation of the original : by making different versions, he wrote, he could ‘in effect illustrate my own thesis of the impossibility of translation. Why I did so many is simply that one thing led to another.’
Moore had never given up writing poetry, and the interest aroused by his Spleen poems, which were first published in 1973, both enhanced his almost forgotten reputation and encouraged him to continue writing, in spite of poor health. A substantial collection of Selected Poems was published in 2014.
In setting 10 of Moore’s versions I have embraced a similar stylistic diversity, sometimes serious, more often parodistic, occasionally introspective. Baudelaire’s original is a strange and exotic vision of decadence and ennui, and I can’t claim to have made an attempt to unravel its inner meaning or to have treated the poem as narrative – any more than would a setting of this poem that might have been made in the 1880s by, say, Henri Duparc, probably the first composer to set Baudelaire. I have tried to match the often uninhibited, satirical mood of many of the translations, a challenge that was daunting but always stimulating.
One of the few difficulties I faced was that Moore frequently translates ‘bouffon favori’ in the seventh line by the name of a specific singer – Jacques Brel, Bob Dylan, Elvis (in the translation I’ve set beside the original – one which, although perhaps closest of all to its source, I did not set – he uses ‘his pop-singer’). He also refers by name to politicians and prominent figures of the 1960s. To include such names seemed to me to pin the poems down too much to a particular time, so I have mainly avoided those versions, or in a few cases either omitted the lines in question or transposed lines from other poems (Moore himself set an example by frequently imitating or sharing lines between one poem and another).
Some of what look to be shorter versions (since Moore generally follows Baudelaire’s 18 lines of rhyming couplets) are in fact fragments of the originals, abbreviated to give more variety of shape and duration to their settings; while ‘Potpourri’ is in fact a compilation made from three different poems, which seemed to me to be justifiable both in view of the considerable freedom that Moore himself took throughout, and because – since I could hardly set all 31 – there were lines which I did not want to lose. However the very brief stanza ‘After the Deluge’ is his own concise summary of the original poem, and leads to the final setting of Baudelaire.
I am grateful to the Syndics of Cambridge University Library for permission to set these poems.
Spleen (I’ve got a right to sing the Blues)
I am like One who rules a Land of Rain;
Young: rich; but impotent and I complain
Like an old man …
… dreams make my flowered bed seem like a tomb.
Dreamscape
An alchemist makes gold in his crucible;
A white-bearded savant
With delicate fingers.
He stands close, as in a picture,
Before a Dali-like landscape
Of bones and blood.
A river twists in the distance;
The gold watch has no face,
And, instead of hands,
the twitching sting of a bee.
A harvest-field of stone
Gravestones each bear the legend “Rome…”
But none of this is exciting to my young eyes.
No vice of blood can warm the dead.
“Join me” I hear my own corpse cry,
And, winding through my veins,
Instead of blood,
The slow green waters of Lethe.
For the Tomb of a Press Baron
I’m the Alexander of a flooded empire,
Rich, but still powerless perhaps. I tire;
And grow distrustful of my editors,
Tired of my dogs, afraid to back a horse.
I don’t find fun in birds – of flesh or steel,
Black Power or genocide. My fools are real,
But all their potent, slanted, madcap tales
Can’t pull me out from my sick, private hells.
My hotel room becomes a catafalque.
The “actresses” – at moguls they won’t baulk –
Can’t with their topless dresses draw a smile
From this once young and powerful crocodile,
Whose skeleton smart bankers can’t enring
With gold enough to hide corruption’s sting.
Nazi putsches, hydrogen bombs, fanned strife
Of the bloodiest kind can’t bring this corpse to life,
Whose young-old bones contain, instead of blood,
The pale green waves of Lethe’s death-frothed flood.
So here lies Alexander. May his bones
Not quite outlast, perhaps, our worthier ones.
Sonnet 117
Battered by storm and swept by flood,
I’m king, but hapless, and no good
Find in old counsellors or young,
Nor in the beats I stroll among.
It isn’t my idea of sport
To see my ailing people brought
To nothing or hear comic songs
About our ever-present wrongs.
A bed as stony as a tomb
Is indispensable to gloom,
While whores in shocking disarray
Are not the thing for corpses’ play,
Nor any slick magician’s gold
A recipe for evil’s cold,
Nor bathing in a bath of blood
A resurrection for my mood.
Nothing can warm, or force to breathe, the
Green inheritor of Lethe.
Absinthe makes the Art green ponder
King Juda of Bikini (The Lethal River)
I’m like the king of a too clouded atoll,
Rich, but quite powerless; young, but in a squall;
Distrusting precepts, sick of Werner Braun;
All dogs and beasts dead; nothing left to own.
I can’t enjoy myself with great steel birds;
Nor does my tribe’s erosion leave me words.
As for the clownish military, singing
Glory of our return, my heart is wringing.
The royal bed I slept in’s just a tomb,
The women useless, when they have no home.
Their lovely prince can’t pluck their breasts or thighs
From this unsmiling isle of obsequies
Where gold’s been poured to leave skeletal planes,
Things sticking from the sand, blown limbs, bruised brains.
The Roman bloodbaths weren’t a patch on this;
If they made old men smile, this is death’s kiss.
Strontium can’t warm anything but weeds;
My blood grows green with gangrene in the reeds.
A Bad Dream Recurring
As the Ruler of a storm-flooded country, I
Am rich, but powerless, young, but terribly
Ancient, and all my ministers’ sycophancy
Doesn’t make up for my boredom with the beastly.
I can’t take joy in all-too-gameless sport;
From my balcony seeing my people dying. Caught
In this dilemma, our Pop Queen’s meaning ballad
Only reminds us of our present bad.
Our bed-covers are like the flower-girl’s tomb.
It’s said women make every Ruler room,
But none can wear a dress libidinous
Enough to warm a dead man’s boneyard rictus.
Nor can that sick man, managing our trade,
Make it look healthier with corrupter’s aid.
Nor would pogroms – however Stalinesque –
Raise any new life that’s not quite grotesque
Or warm the cockles of a skeletal
Heart – pumping water green as fear, and lethal.
Potpourri
I’m like the Father Christmas of a wet
And ungay Country; rich and youthful, yet
Powerless, outmoded; learning from the snows
Of my regalia nothing but more woes,
Not laughing at my dogs or reindeer, nor
My legend dying on the nursery floor.
I’m not enticed by the grotesque swing-song
From my cruel illness’s intrinsic wrong.
My eiderdown, embossed with antique flowers,
Reminds me of those sad Egyptian towers
Where mummied princes lie besides their drabs
Unsmilingly with dead dogs and scarabs.
Though glories of our blood and state contrive
With bloodbaths to keep alive
Old roués, nothing can warm a corpse from disillusion,
Whose blood’s as pale as a green-tea infusion.
Accidie
I’m like the Pluto of a rainy hell,
Rich but powerless, young, but too old as well;
Whose counsellors’ kow-towing he distrusts.
Bored with his dogs, and sick of other beasts.
Nothing can cheer him…
New tyrants spill new blood,
Yet it can’t warm this carcase back to breath
Whose blood’s only the green green lymph of Death.
Désuétude (fragments)
I’m young, but jaded,
Distrustful of advisers,
Whose joy has faded.
Nothing can make him happy,
He finds the dances feeble,
And no distraction.
His bed is like a tomb.
Nor can the milling women staunch his gloom.
The golden ornaments around his neck
Seem like a noose of inner doubt and wreck.
A corpse too old for any warmth to flood,
Whose veins are greened with Lethe, dry of blood.
Envoi : After the Deluge
Not riches, power, advisers, pets, sports, gold
Nor even naked women cheer the old
In heart. Bones will be bones. All that remains
Instead of blood, green water, clotted veins.
Spleen
Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux, / I am like the king of an ancient swampland,
Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux, / Wealthy, but impotent, young, but cold-in-hand,
Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes, / Who distrusts his advisers and their flattery,
S’ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d’autres bêtes. / But is bored with his dogs – and his horsery and cattery.
Rien ne peut l’égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon, / Nothing makes him laugh – neither blood sports nor pets
Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon. / Nor his tribe cut down like grass on the palace steps.
Du bouffon favori la grotesque ballade / His pop-singer he regards as a grotesque clown
Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade; / And as no distraction from the cruel sickness that gets him down
Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau, / His flowery, flag-bedizened bed is like a coffin
Et les dames d’atour, pour qui tout prince est beau, / And his fancy-women, who find it lovely to let any toff in,
Ne savent plus trouver d’impudique toilette / Can’t display a sufficiently indecent dress,
Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette. / To rub up a smile from this skeleton’s nakedness.
Le savant qui lui fait de l’or n’a jamais pu / The sorcerer who conjures up his gold
De son être extirper l’élément corrompu, / Can’t rid it of the corruption it’s forced to hold,
Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent, / And in the baths of blood the Romans brought us,
Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent, / In which new age-mad potentates have caught us,
Il n’a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété / He can’t warm up that jaded corpse, where seethe the
Où coule au lieu de sang l’eau verte du Léthé. / – instead of blood – green everglades of Lethe.
A Land of Rain was commissioned by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, and first performed by them with Claire Booth and Oliver Knussen in June 2017. It is dedicated to Stephen and Jackie Newbould.
View the score (published by Faber Music)