Фатаморгана у Паризу: Шарл Бодлер и митопоетски простор римских песника
A Mirage in Paris: Charles Baudelaire and the Mythopoetic Space of Roman Poets

Summary/Abstract: When, in the drafts of the preface to The Flowers of Evil [Cveće zla], Baudelaire speaks of his “plagiarisms”, among the Roman poets he mentions Virgil and Statius, but not Ovid, whose name appears in the poems “Symphatetic Horror” [„Simpatija užasa“] and “The Swan” [„Labud“]. These drafts do not even mention Horace, although “Spline 2” [“Splin 2”] is often compared to “Ode 3.30” [„Oda 3.30“]. If the sensibility of the poetic voice in The Flowers of Evil can be considered primarily Ovidian, Horace represents the normative starting point of the collection that talks about the conquest and destruction of the “new Troy”.The fame of the poet in the future is conditioned by his unbreakable connection with his great predecessors. Baudelaire’s inversion of the metaphor of the imperishable glory of the poet and the harmonious relationship between the poet and the gods of the audience, shown in Horace’s “Ode 3.30”, is hinted at in Paris Pictures [„Pariske slike“] and in the poem Death of the Artist [„Smrt umetnika“]. The flowers of evil can also be viewed through the prism of thе development of Roman elegy. Horace’s Ode 3.30 was paraphrased by Propertius and later by Ovid. Poetry as a “monument” (monumentum) among Roman elegiac writers first refers to Horace’s ode, but poetry as a pledge of memory and a monument appears earlier, in Greek lyric poetry, where the poem, in constant oral performance or engraved in the form of an inscription on a tombstone, is identified with ephemeral memory (μνήμη). The prototype of Baudelaire’s immortality in Spline 2 may be Ovid’s inversion of Horace’s formula of the poet’s immortal glory in Tristia. The metaphor “lame days” (les bioteuses jounées) in Baudelaire does not mean only the slow passage of time, but also the slow arrival of the punishment for a new Ovidian error as an allusion to the inferential state of stagnation that the Roman poet describes in his Black Sea elegies. The frozen “Scythian” landscape in Pontus, the disease of “body and spirit” [„Tužne pesme“] and Epistulae ex Ponto [Pisma sa Ponta] compared to Ovid’s earlier, Roman elegies. The form of discourse in “Spline 2” originates from the speech of “object with a voice” in the oldest Greek epitaphs, where the poetic word takes on the verbal markers of material and transitory and conceals its eternity, which creates a characteristic effect of paradox in the text of the poem. Allusions to Ovid’s frozen Pontus, Catullus’ Troy, the “common grave” of the hero and the poet, the mythological contamination of the “ancient Sphinx” and Memnon, through the allusion to the teaching of sublime style in the treatise of Pseudo Longinus, contribute to the equalization of identity and the merging of the mythopoetic, historical and “personal” chronotope in “Spline 2” and in The Flowers of Evil.

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