When the sky is as heavy and low as a lid,
Pressing on the heart of the long-weary ***,
When it surrounds the entire horizon ,
pouring down the darkness of daylight that is worse than night;
when the earth becomes a damp prison,
There, "hope" is like a bat,
flapping the prison wall with its cowardly wings,
and hitting the rotten ceiling;
When the rain drops are endless,
Like the iron bars of a big prison,
As a silent and annoying group of crickets
Come to the deep recesses of our minds to make webs.
At this time, those big bells suddenly jumped like thunder,
sent a terrifying roar into the sky,
like those homeless wandering ghosts,
So stubborn and stubborn, he began to wail loudly.
——A long train of hearses, unaccompanied by drums,
Slowly advancing in my soul; "Hope"
Crying in failure , cruel and violent "pain"
Put a black flag on my drooping head.
(Translated by Qian Chunqi)
Appreciation
This poem expresses "melancholy" as an emotion. Baudelaire and his contemporaries Most of the modern patients with the "disease of the century" have experienced this kind of pessimism and despair. Just like happiness and sadness, the word melancholy is often used to describe the human state of mind. But what is happiness, what is sadness, and what is melancholy? Few people throughout the ages have been able to explain clearly. In this poem, the poet allows readers to experience and grasp his state of mind through a series of complex, dense, concrete and textured images. In the first stanza of the poem, the poet compares the sky to a cover covering the earth, and thus imagines the world as a closed, oppressive, suffocating and dark place. The main thing this section wants to convey is a sense of depression. The second stanza of the poem compares the earth to "a damp cell" with a rotten ceiling and "hope" like a bat flying in it, with no possibility of escape. Reading this section, we can not only feel the despair in the poet's heart, but also seem to smell a musty smell. The concrete physical feeling and the abstract psychological feeling are integrated here. Stimulating the reader's physical and psychological feelings through specific images is the first characteristic of this poem. The third stanza is a continuation of the second stanza. In addition to the uncomfortable feeling of dampness, the poet adds a disgusting feeling through the netting of crickets. What the poet wants to convey in the first three stanzas is a feeling of depression, despair, boredom, nausea, and loneliness. The mood is extremely depressed. In the fourth stanza, there is a sudden emotional explosion. This explosiveness is achieved through the contrast of acoustic effects. The crickets in the third stanza are "silent", but in the fourth stanza there are explosive sounds: "thundering" bells, "horrible roars", and "loud" "wailing". Such thunderous bells, terrifying roars and loud wails are naturally the angry and rebellious cries of the poet's heart, the cries of a painful soul unwilling to live in a dungeon-like depressive world. However, any fierce resistance will ultimately be useless, and the resistance to melancholy will always be a cruel spiritual tragedy. The long hearse, the black flag of failure, and the lowered head all declare the poet's failure to resist melancholy. In addition to the shift in visual imagery, there is also a big change in the auditory aspect, from a loud voice of defiance back to a defeated, desperate silence. From the soft sounds in stanzas 1, 2, and 3 to the loud sounds in stanza 4 and then to the deathly silence in stanza 5, the auditory creation of this poem makes it very musical. This is also the second part of this poem. The most distinctive feature.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that Mr. Qian Chunqi’s translation also helps Chinese readers better understand this poem. Qian's translation of "Melancholy" adopts the "cross-rhyme" rhyme method, with one or three lines and two or four lines in each stanza rhyming. At the same time, the last stanza retains the cross-sentence of the original poem, thereby retaining the effect of the original poem being choked and unable to finish.
(Xiang Yu)