“The Litanies of Satan” read by Andrea Caswell
From the new edition of The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Aaron Poochigian.
O you, most wise, most gorgeous of the seraphim,
O god betrayed by fate and stripped of all your fame,
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
O exiled potentate, you who have been mistreated
but always come back stronger when you are defeated,
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
You who know all, great king of subterranean things,
eminent healer of our human sufferings,
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
You who instruct the lepers and anathemas
you so adore to hunger after Paradise,
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
You who had sex with Death, an old and potent belle,
and on her fathered Hope, that fascinating fool,
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
You who provide the crook with calm looks of disdain
that damn the rabble massed around the guillotine,
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
You who have scanned the mean earth’s nooks and can disclose
the precious stones a jealous God has kept from us,
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
You whose keen eyes have spotted every arsenal
where multitudes of metals sleep beneath the soil,
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
You who with one extremely massive hand conceal
ledges from sleepwalkers out for a nightly stroll,
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
O you who, when some sluggish drunk gets trampled on
by horse hooves, wondrously relax the broken bone,
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
O you who first came up with mixing niter in
with sulfur to console the sufferings of man,
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
You who have set your mark on base and obdurate
Croesus’s brow, you exquisite associate,
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
You who have put, in young girl’s eyes and hearts desires
for men who dress in tatters and a cult of sores
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
Lamp for the inventor, exile’s walking stick,
confessor for the hanged man and the turncoat sneak,
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
Adoptive father of those two whom their Father God,
enraged, drove from the Paradise where they were made,
Satan, have mercy on my endless grief!
Prayer
Glory and praise to you, O Satan, both way up
in Heaven, where you once held sway, and way down deep
in Hell, where, crushed, you mutely dream the days away.
Grant that my soul may lie near you beneath the Tree
of Knowledge in the future, when its branches spread,
like a new Temple’s colonnade, above your head.
From The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Aaron Poochigian. Translation copyright © 2022 by Aaron Poochigian. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Andrea Caswell’s writing has been published widely in print and online. Her work has appeared in Tampa Review, River Teeth, The Normal School, Columbia Journal, Consequence, and others. She holds a master’s from Harvard University and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She’s a fiction editor for Cleaver Magazine, where she’s on the faculty of the Cleaver Workshops. In 2019 her fiction was accepted to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A native of Los Angeles, Andrea now lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts. She can be reached at www.andreacaswell.com.