Helionaut

The Lament of Icarus
(From the French of Charles Baudelaire )

The lovers of ladies of the night
are hale and hearty, nicely liked.
While as for me… my embrace was smashed
by cloud-shapes which I tried to grasp.

Because of the matchless astral lights
which blaze where innermost heavens teem
there was nothing more for my blinded eyes
of its suns than a fast-receding dream.

In vain did I search in the whole of space
for a centre or an end,
and I know not under what fiery gaze
I felt my pinions rend –

and my crave for beauty blasted me!
The honour, sublime, shall not be mine
of giving my name to the endless deep:
My tombstone there was already assigned.


Les Plaintes d’un Icare

Les amants des prostituées
Sont heureux, dspos et repus;
Quant à moi, mes bras sont rompus
Pour avoir étrient des nuées.

C’est grâce aux astres nonpareils,
Qui tout au fond du ciel flamboient,
Que mes yeux consumés ne voient
Que des souvenirs de soleils.

En vain j’ai voulu de l’espace
Trouver la fin et le milieu;
Sous je ne sais quel oeil de feu
Je sens mon aile qui se casse;

Et brûlé par l’amour du beau,
Je n’aurai pas l’honneur sublime
De donner mon nom à l’abîme
Qui me servira de tombeau.


(From: ‘Of Gods and Men’)



Note:  Readers may also like to look at the longer Daedalus Alone, (not a translation), posted on The Igam-Ogam Mabinogion  Nov. 2019 – Jan. 2020.

The article’s title, Helionaut (‘Sun Voyager’) reaches us, of course, through the family line of the redoubtable crew of the Argo – aeronaut, astronaut, cosmonaut – the ‘helio-‘ taken in turn from  Greek helios, ‘sun’, and the name of the Greek sun-god. Welsh haul is cognate, both being derived from the same Proto-Indo-European root. There are cognates in other European languages, e.g., Latin sol (which might seem somewhat removed from helios, but not so from the original Proto-Indo-European) as in Sol Invictus (‘Unconquerable Sun’) the name of the official  Roman sun-god during the Later Empire. But none of these cognates are so agreeably close to the Greek as the Welsh.