We are delighted to announce that our Head Student, Alexander Hughes, has won a national poetry translation competition, the Stephen Spender Prize, for his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Harmonie du soir. This is an extraordinary achievement, especially as French poetry is not taught at our school!

The Stephen Spender Prize celebrates creativity in poetry translation among young people across the UK and Ireland. Entrants translate a poem from any language into English and provide a creative response, showcasing linguistic skill and literary insight.

Alexander’s success places him among the top young translators in the country. Congratulations, Alexander, on this remarkable accomplishment!

Below you can read Alexander's translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Harmonie du soir and his commentary on why he chose the poem.

Harmonie du soir

Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige
Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!

Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir.

Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige,
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir;
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige.

Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir,
Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige!
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige...
Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!

Charles Baudelaire

Harmony in the Evening

There comes a time when, quivering on their tender stems,

Every flower – a censer – sighs, and fumes itself away,

When sounds and perfumes dance out in the evening air

            Their melancholy waltz,                    

                        Their languid ecstasies.

Each flower – a censer – sighs, and fumes itself away.

The violin trembles – a heart distressed.

Above their melancholy waltz, above their languid ecstasies,

The sky sits – an altar – sad and beautiful.

The violin trembles – a heart distressed; a tender heart

Which fears the void, black and vast and swallowing

The sky. The sky sits – an altar – sad and beautiful:

The sun has drowned in a pool of blood.

Of the past,

The heart – a tender heart which hates the void –

Gathers ever shred.

The sun has drowned in a pool of blood:

Your memory shines in me – a monstrance, set in gold.

COMMENTARY:

I chose to translate Baudelaire’s Harmonie du soir because it struck me as an untranslatable poem. The features that strike the reader most – its use of alexandrines, the beautiful sounds and rhymes of the French language, and the musicality produced through their interaction– are almost impossible to replicate in English, especially if one tries to mirror them exactly. Attempts to mirror its rhyme-scheme result in clumsy phrasing; the substitution of iambic pentameter fails to capture the same effect as Baudelaire’s alexandrines; and the result is that its slow tempo is easily lost. I have tried to preserve this contemplative atmosphere above all else, preferring free-verse to the constraints of any metrical scheme. Naturally, this meant that some elements of the poem were threatened, particularly the association between encensoir, reposoir and ostensoir. This association, created by both the rhyme and a pun on soir, integrates the poem’s disparate images into a single development from censer to altar to monstrance. Rather than using rhyme, I preserved this association through syntax: each one of the poem’s central images is introduced as a parenthesis as if they are associations being made by an observer. Nevertheless, the result is a subtle shift in emphasis, since I have framed every important image as a conscious invocation by the persona. This I did to highlight the poem’s central theme: memory’s capability to preserve the impermanent. Whether seen to address the evening or one of Baudelaire’s paramours (usually Madame Sabatier), the poem’s closing apostrophe concerns the immortalisation of its subject through memory: where, hitherto, images of impermanence had dominated the poem, this line sees the triumph of the permanent in the form of the monstrance, one of the few solid objects in the poem. The ephemera of the first three stanzas are gathered and made permanent.