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“Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!“ It is always interesting when random touchstones from my life appear on Hacker News: books like the Aubrey-M
by libraryofbabel 1y ago
“Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!“
It is always interesting when random touchstones from my life appear on Hacker News: books like the Aubrey-Maturin (master and commander) series, Ursula Le Guin’s works, Dante, John Le Carre’s George Smiley novels, Tolstoy... and now Charles Baudelaire, at the top of the page no less.
Baudelaire was a dark misanthrope and the poetry is very bleak. His life was not happy and he died at 46. You probably need to have at least a little of the same darkness in your soul to get something out of it.
It’s worth remembering too, how strange and controversial this work was when it first came out, using traditional verse forms but with a relentlessly modern subject, poetry from the gutter of the 19th-century city. Modernism in literature has had 150 years to settle but this is the raw beginnings.
Some good ones: The Albatross, Invitation to the Voyage, Evening Harmony, and the Epilogue (“Le coeur content, je suis monté sur la montagne”). And many others.
- abouthn 1y ago[flagged]
- cgio 1y ago[flagged]
- jajko 1y agoArt is completely in the eye of the beholder, feel free to fully ignore parts you don't like. Don't need to denigrate somebody else's artistic output, world is pretty big place for all of us and our passions and desires. I for example respect much more a person who is trying to output artistically whatever inner processes drive them, rather than pushing it down and and sucking it up at some soul crushing corporate job, then coping with that emptiness via shallow fun and vices. I don't have to agree with that art nor appreciate it, but the effort is worthy and respectful.
- pegasus 1y agoAre you sure you're not subconsciously talking about something inside yourself here? Because I find your prose style equally - nay, more - annoyingly pompous than the ones you seemingly attack.
- photonthug 1y agoOh hey, I shared this in a comment a while back, dumping my tabs to show that hacker news reads more than code. Along with the lesser known cousin: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26063/hypocrite-auteur https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26063/...
- mahkeiro 1y agoAnother interesting fact about Baudelaire: he was the translator into French of many of Edgar Allan Poe's works. They also shared many common points; Baudelaire said that when he opened one of Poe's books, he was reading subjects and sentences he had already dreamed about.
- astrobe_ 1y agoBaudelaire also translated many short stories from E.A. Poe [1], and the famous The Raven which Poe uses as an example in one of its short essay (or science-fiction story?), The philosophy of composition. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire#Edgar_Allan_Poe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire#Edgar_Allan... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Composition
- bambax 1y ago> You probably need to have at least a little of the same darkness in your soul to get something out of it In France he's part of the normal curriculum so every student reads and studies some of his poems (sometimes the whole book) between the ages of 15-17. Maybe that explains some of our national character?
- af78 1y agoThe curriculum is larger than what can be taught in a couple of years. Literature professors get to pick the texts that will be studied in class. Therefore, chance plays a role in whether a given student will study Rimbaud or Baudelaire. In my case it was the former.
- thechao 1y agoI used to try to convince the faculty at a stodgy Texas University to let me name courses (this was Texas A&M's Dept of CS); your course? "Baguettes and Baudelaire". My suggestion for the programming language course "Cunning linguists for Typical hands" was outright rejected, BTW. I argued that it had a great movie reference.
- bambax 1y agoI studied both and so did my three kids (each in a different school). You can't really escape Molière, Hugo, Rimbaud and Baudelaire (and some others too).