Why "Correspondences" Was Chosen
It is advisable to adapt to the present proceedings a conception which is so common that its author is not really known, and which is halting but nevertheless unrivalled. When a certain accuracy is assumed for various intuitive propositions concerning appearances, a description of their qualities is realized, but often many cases relating to the possible future are left out and this renders it unpractical when it is necessary to take action. Nevertheless supported by this description, the impressions seen initially are re-examined, defining them precisely enough to provide well-founded numerical counterparts so that such measurements allow a general supposition to be set forth relating to the most evident of the links seen at the start. To avoid the statements being too vague, tests are carried out, varying the quantities of many aspects among those studied, in order to discern as accurately as possible their characteristics. As the great works have survived their adaptations for schools, so they should stand up to our tests; and it is no use putting forward the argument that it would be better to write the texts and never borrow them, for it would quickly be suspected that they were composed only for the defence of the analysis presented.
Personally speaking, the tastes and advice of our parents and teachers directed us at an early age to Baudelaire, "The Flowers of Evil" and to "Correspondences", so that the poem has for many years been an easy subject for mental exercises, one which we often have in mind, to test our thoughts on interpretation. It has then become a sort of portable workshop of poetic linguistics, open at all times and even in situations in which it is not possible to note down any ideas.
Michel Magnen
Translated into English by Fay Guerry
Correspondences
Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let forth at times confused words;
There man passes through forests of symbols
Which observe him with familiar eyes.
Like long echoes which mingle in the distance,
In a dark and profound unity,
Vast as the night and the light,
Perfumes, colours and sounds answer each other.
There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,
Sweet as oboes, green as meadows,
-And others, corrupt, rich and triumphant,
Having the expansion of infinite things,
Like amber, musk, benzoin and incense,
Which sing of the transports of the mind and the senses.