Baudelaire's Les hiboux

A famous poem which Corinne's going to record, set to music by Déodat de Sévérac (not any more -- see below). Les hiboux was published in Les fleurs du mal in 1857. There's also a very beautiful setting by Louis Vierne (1870-1937), part of which can be heard from this page sung by Mireille Delunsch (NOT Christine Icart, who's a harpist) on Amazon US. Here we're interested in the poem and the owl. The french text and a translation follow.

Les hiboux

Sous les ifs noirs qui les abritent

Les hiboux se tiennent rangés

Ainsi que des dieux étrangers

Dardant leur oeil rouge. Ils méditent.

Sans remuer ils se tiendront

Jusqu'à l'heure mélancolique

Où, poussant le soleil oblique,

Les ténèbres s'établiront.

Leur attitude au sage enseigne

Qu'il faut en ce monde qu'il craigne

Le tumulte et le mouvement;

L'homme ivre d'une ombre qui passe

Porte toujours le châtiment

D'avoir voulu changer de place.

The Owls

In the shelter of the dark yews

The owls stand arrayed

Like gods from another land

Red eyes blazing. They dream.

Motionless they will remain

Until the melancholy hour

When, pushing down the slanting sun,

Darkness takes over.

From them the wise man learns

That in this world one should avoid

Tumult and movement.

Intoxicated by a passing shadow

Man is forever punished

For leaving his place.

After that tiresome french, some entertainment. Here are the first two verses sung by Corinne, accompanied at the piano by Jonathan Cohen: Vierne's hiboux (2 min 13 s mp3 at 128 kb/s, size 2 Mb). It's Louis Vierne's version. After hearing it Corinne felt it was so much more evocative than de Sévérac's that with some difficulty she extracted Vierne's songs from some french archive and decided to sing them all. Vierne is regarded as an organ player and composer; it seems to be little known that he wrote the song cycle of which Les hiboux is a part.

The complete track can be heard on Corinne's YouTube channel here. There's also a website for her already published CDs, which are of Debussy and Fauré song cycles. The Vierne material is still being recorded.

Here's an extract from another Vierne setting, for L'heure du berger, to show what beautiful stuff he could write. Vierne/berger (2.04 Mb).

For the sound recordists: Recorded in a London sitting room with a smoky pair of Neumann TLM-103s on to an HHB Portadisc. Bass rolloff used to subdue traffic noise and planes approaching Heathrow. Corinne edited the tracks and did the reverb. The recording studio is shown on this page.

So what's the owl? First, it's an hibou, not a chouette. Baudelaire obviously wants an impressive owl -- a serious owl -- as a subject. There are four hiboux, three of which have striking names: Grand duc, Moyen duc and Petit duc. Only one hibou, though, has anything like red eyes, and that's the grandest of them all, simply the biggest owl in the world, L'Hibou grand-duc. To us Anglos that's the European Eagle Owl, Bubo bubo. They're lovely creatures.

Hear what these birds sound like:

Hooting pair (400 kb mp3)

Courting squeak-hoots (1.1 Mb mp3)

Made by the bird at far left and his partner.

L'Hibou grand-duc. Was this magnificent creature with blazing . . er, orange eyes the inspiration for Baudelaire's poem Les hiboux? Or was it an opium-induced fantasy? Did he perhaps see the owl in the Paris zoo and transpose it in his mind's eye to those "ifs noirs"? I must say, if I saw some of these arrayed in a local yew I'd need a puff or two. These four pics by me, of a collection of European Eagle Owls in our local sanctuary.

Translating the poem is not so simple, and there are several interesting attempts on the internet ranging from the fairly literal to fancy running free. In very literal english translation the poem might read as follows.

Sous les ifs noirs qui les abritent

Les hiboux se tiennent rangés

Ainsi que des dieux étrangers

Dardant leur oeil rouge. Ils méditent.

Sans remuer ils se tiendront

Jusqu'à l'heure mélancolique

Où, poussant le soleil oblique,

Les ténèbres s'établiront.

Leur attitude au sage enseigne

Qu'il faut en ce monde qu'il craigne

Le tumulte et le mouvement;

L'homme ivre d'une ombre qui passe

Porte toujours le châtiment

D'avoir voulu changer de place.

Under the black yews which shelter them

The owls are arrayed

Like foreign gods

Darting their red eye. They meditate/muse.

Without moving they will keep themselves

Until the melancholy hour

When, pressing down the slanting sun,

Darkness will set in.

Their attitude teaches the wise man

That in this world one must fear

Tumult and movement.

Man intoxicated by a shadow that passes

Carries always the punishment

For having wanted to change place.

From an owl point of view, without question the most difficult part of the poem is the fourth line: Dardant leur oeil rouge. Ils méditent. "Darder" does indeed mean "to dart", but (1) owls' eyes never dart anywhere and (2) this sense is completely at odds with both the whole poem and with the immediately following Ils méditent, which indicates that they're in some inwardly turned state. (Baudelaire is absolutely right here as owls spend much of their time in a dream state!) Corinne, who's a native French speaker, makes the interesting and convincing suggestion that Baudelaire is thinking of darder's links with the sun in earlier usage, as in the sun's darts or rays. If that is so it's probably legitimate to loosely translate Dardant leur oeil rouge as red eyes "blazing", "luminous" or "gleaming", which is more in keeping with how the Grand ducs' eyes might have seemed as they dreamed in the yews.

Some other mildly curious points

Baudelaire writes Sous les ifs noirs qui les abritent, or "Under" the black yews... Since owls never sit on the ground I've gone for a non-commital translation, implicitly popping them back in the trees, where Les hiboux se tiennent rangés. Some translate se tiennent rangés along the lines of "perched in a row", but if you've seen several (adult) owls in a tree you'll know that individuals that they are they like to spread themselves out on different branches. Hence "The owls stand arrayed" in my version at the top. Corinne points out that if is an old Gallic word for yew, so Baudelaire is invoking ancient, atavistic resonances here. She says too that poussant le soleil oblique doesn't make much sense in French either! One presumes it's an immediate translation from a picture in his head -- the oncoming night "pushing" the sun down the sky.

(Page still being meditated on). Next page . . .

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