Poetry Is a Foreign Language

The Stranger by Charles Baudelaire

Originally posted on Substack, Dec 08, 2023

Because reading a poem is about risk and trust and trying to make sense of it all

When George Bernard Shaw quipped that England and America were “two countries separated by the same language” he wasn't just talking about countries. Even those of us who agree on the dictionary definition of a word usually have our own indefinable sense of what it means. It’s only natural. We each have our own histories with words, just like people. You could say we’re always translating (literally, ‘carrying across’)—from what someone said to what we think they mean, but also from feelings to thoughts, from feelings and thoughts to words, and from words back to thoughts and feelings. Since we are known to misinterpret even ourselves, it’s a wonder how often we seem to know what anyone is trying to get across. Maybe it’s less often than we think. 

Poetry is no exception. It may even be the rule. Although poetry looks like it’s made of everyday language, laid out in more or less orderly lines, implying sequence and, well, order, the language of a poem is fundamentally different from that of, say, a newspaper or an e-mail. Sharing information or opinions can be a part of what a poem is doing, but it’s not its primary role or essential purpose. That’s why we talk about a poem’s imagery and rhythms, why poems appeal to our senses and our memories, our worst impulses and our better natures. As the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí liked to say, “There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature.” Same goes for poems.

The words in a poem, how it looks on the page, how it sounds in and to our ear and reverberates along the tuning fork in our head that looks like a little person for a reason—all of this has more in common with colors delivered by brushstrokes and melodies riding harmonies like those other kinds of waves. We’re better off reading them the way we’d visit one of the houses Gaudí designed, walking through and around it, taking it in from as many different points of view as we can take up and inhabit, and not trying too hard to hold the whole thing together in our minds.

"The Stranger” seems a good place to launch this Substack: It’s a poem I love, and meeting a stranger is a natural starting point, wherever it leads. In French the title is also a kind of invitation, as is this Substack, as every poem should be. L’étranger means “the stranger,” but to go to l’étranger is to travel abroad. 

L’Etranger/The Stranger

by Charles Baudelaire

L’Etranger

— Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, dis ? ton père, ta mère, ta sœur ou ton frère ?
— Je n’ai ni père, ni mère, ni sœur, ni frère.
— Tes amis ?
— Vous vous servez là d’une parole dont le sens m’est resté jusqu’à ce jour inconnu.
— Ta patrie ?
— J’ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située.
— La beauté ?
— Je l’aimerais volontiers, déesse et immortelle.
— L’or ?
— Je le hais comme vous haïssez Dieu.
— Eh ! qu’aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire étranger ?
— J’aime les nuages… les nuages qui passent… là-bas… là-bas… les merveilleux nuages !

The Stranger
— Whom do you love best, enigmatic man, say! Your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?
— I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.
— Your friends?
— You make use there of a word the meaning of which has remained for me, up to this day, unknown.
— Your country?
— I am unaware under what latitude it lies.
— Beauty?
— I would love her willingly, goddess and immortal.
— Gold?
— I hate it as you hate God.
— What, then, do you love, extraordinary stranger?
— I love the clouds… the clouds that pass… over there… the marvelous clouds.

“The Stranger" is the first poem in Baudelaire's posthumously published collection Paris Spleen, also known as the Little Prose Poems. This makes it a logical candidate for poem-manifesto, the poem that announces the character and project of the whole, the way his poem "To the Reader" functions in The Flowers of Evil. “Enter here,” he seems to say, “you have arrived at a place you don’t call home.” Having been duly alerted to the fact that we are crossing a border and entering a foreign land, we will tread lightly, curious yet vigilant, as wary as welcome. 

Without any further explanation, as might happen at a customs desk under a sign naming the country that begins just behind it, the questions commence. 

The first one touches on the subject of love, a favorite of poetry, and comes with a provocative twist. Who do you love best? It’s one of those questions that, in families, often leads to tears, and in myth and history to war. It’s a strange question to ask out of the gate, strangely personal, strangely aggressive. The kind of question interviewers brandishing microphones ask celebrities on red carpets where, although the public is carefully cordoned off, the boundary between knowing and not knowing is so oddly blurred. It could be that this stranger’s reputation precedes him and he steps into the frame already possessed of a certain fame. It makes sense that Baudelaire, one of the fathers of modern poetry, would write the first poem about celebrity culture. Spleen also contains a poem about Franz Liszt, arguably the first celebrity in the modern sense. 

Context isn’t everything, of course, but it’s a lot, and in the domain of a poem we’re accustomed to expect someone who asks questions to be a version of the hero, a seeker after truths, or at least answers. This questioner seems more like a troublemaker, looking to stir things up, poking at some of the most primal jealousies that plague us. She may be worse than that. What would we call someone who believes that feelings can and should be classified, that an absolute, like love, can be measured and has degrees? Obtuse? A bully?

As for the “enigmatic man,” it does not only refer to the stranger. Aren’t we all enigmatic creatures, “one of those human beings… born of the sleep of reason… [and] everything at once”?[1] The stranger demurs, claiming to be sui generis (literally, ‘of his own kind’): “I have no father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.” It sounds impossibly grand, perhaps enviably freeing, but also rather lonely. 

Not discouraged by the stranger’s resistance to the game, the questioner perseveres. What about friends? Perhaps your friends are effectively your family, and it’s friendship you value most highly of all. 

The questioner employs the informal pronoun, “tu/toi,” which adults use with children, and friends with each other. The stranger responds to her first follow-up question with “vous,” formal and distancing, as much as to remind her that they are not friends, intimating that she takes objectionable liberties. His response is evasive, his tone, one of mocking hauteur. Does he value friendship? He’s never even had a friend, never understood what the word friend might even begin to signify. 

While we might be willing to admire his high-minded, not to say stratospheric, standards, we might also be starting to wonder if the stranger isn’t one of those people who thinks he’s too good for the rest of us.

Okay, so no family, no friends. By any chance, the questioner now wonders, might you be one of those people who proudly identifies with the principles and ideals represented by your country? 

But the stranger only sidesteps again. In a technical, pedantic retort, he asserts that he is ignorant of his country’s cartographical location. At least he doesn’t claim not to have one. And, again, we get it, countries, like families, like friendship, they’re complicated. Still, it’s possible to be idealistic and remain part of the world. Isn’t it?

Recognizing that she’s come to an impasse, the questioner changes tack and heads for an abstraction. 

What about beauty? 

If we have been laboring, or even just resting, under the assumption that the stranger is a stand-in for the misunderstood poet, and the questioner a representative of the audience who fails to understand him, we are at this juncture rewarded: Beauty is exactly what we expect it to be in the eyes of a poet: immortal, a goddess. It’s redundant, but in poetry we call that a pleonasm, two views of the same statue or the same undulating, tiled, skeletal, reptilian facade of Gaudí’s Casa Batlló, seen once at dawn and later by moonlight. A pleonasm is an indulgence in excess for the sake of emphasis and effect. We do it all the time. It’s the stranger’s conditional (petulant?) answer that pulls us up short: “I would love her….” Would love her if—What? If she loved him back? If she weren’t just an idea? If the ugly, secular, disappointing, transient world didn’t keep getting in their way?

Not mortals, not goddesses— Maybe the questioner’s been barking up the wrong tree. Her next suggestion that perhaps it’s gold that moves and motivates the stranger produces the most vehement, and direct, response so far. She gets both barrels: unconditional, unalloyed passion—I hate it—and an assumption that feels like an accusation: I hate it the way you hate God.

It’s an interesting moment. The moment in the poem when the tables could turn. Has the stranger hit a nerve? The questioner could certainly take offense at the  implication that she is impious, or else lacking the finer feelings of the truly spiritual. Does she quietly accept the charge as leveled? Or is she just too good at her job to let the stranger get the upper hand? All we know is that she doesn’t take the bait; she plays her final rhetorical card: “Ah! I give up. You tell me, what is it that you do love?”

At the end of an interview that has felt more like a duel, the questions landing and parried like blows, the stranger repelling every attempt to pin him down—socially, politically, aesthetically, economically—refusing to accept the received definitions of words as well as the concepts and categories by which the world is mapped and subdued, the preconceptions it harbors, the values it would impose, the questioner finally poses an open-ended question, free of qualification, unburdened of presumption. 

And suddenly, now that she’s no longer intent on leading the witness, she can finally stop beating her head against an enigmatic man and instead address an extraordinary stranger. It marks the beginning, at last, of a proper exchange, a real conversation, the stranger dropping all his defenses to offer the questioner a sincere, if enigmatic, answer: What he loves is clouds. She along with the rest of us will have to make of that what we will. 

It shouldn’t be too hard. We’ve known about clouds since before we could name them. They’ve always been there, a part of our natural environment. We read them to help us predict the weather and decide how we should prepare for the day ahead. We admire them as an ornament of the landscape and the sky. We paint them. We sing about them. We imagine that they take on familiar shapes—a camel, a weasel, a whale.[2] We reach for them when we need an example of what we cannot touch, hold, restrict, delimit or define. We use them as an image of what obscures and reveals, of what forms and dissipates, of what is always in a state of flux—ephemeral, elusive, visible but not attainable, existing in a place situated always “over there,” inherently foreign, habitually unknown. We know that poets regularly have their heads in them.

Look at the poem again. Who, in the end, is “The Stranger” of the title, the person about whom we know absolutely nothing? Which of the two of them lives in certainty?Uncertainty? Whom do we love better? Which of the two of them are we? And what, finally, are the clouds? Today I'll say they’re poetry, another world not too far from this one, just “over there” in fact, where everything is ever-changing in a way that is marvelous, and strange. 

Next time I read this poem, of course, they might look like something altogether else.

1 “Creatures of Love,” David Byrne.

2  Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2.