Everyone agrees that modern poetry in France—and therefore in Europe—starts with Charles Baudelaire. But no agrees on why. His successors, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, are each in their own way more patently radical, and the same is true of his American contemporary Walt Whitman. How modern do you have to be to be a modern? Compared to their works, those of Baudelaire, despite their sulfurous aroma, are far more traditional; while he was an early adopter of the prose poem, his most influential poetry used received forms. “Baudelaire accomplished what classical prosody had always required, or rather what it had inaugurated. … His prosody has the same spiritual monotony as Racine’s,” Yves Bonnefoy once remarked. And beyond matters of form, some of Baudelaire’s content was familiar too. His exacerbated ambivalence toward his Haitian-born lover Jeanne Duval, the subject of so many of his poems, is as ancient as Catullus’s odi et amo; praise of drunkenness dates back to the Greeks; and his proud sense of damnation, of his “Heart great with rancor and bitter desires,” would have been second-hand news to Lord Byron. Was the “new shudder” that Victor Hugo perceived in Baudelaire’s writing new enough to make him, rather than the last of the Romantics (the one in whose work Romanticism, you might say, curdled), the first of the moderns?
Walter Benjamin found the essence of Baudelaire’s modern viewpoint in his subjects: the city, the flaneur, the commodity, the search for the new. For Bonnefoy, Baudelaire had pursued “a new and thankless task,” namely “the shattering of formal perfection and the collapse of Beauty which, in spite of himself and perhaps of ourselves, he envisaged for the poetry of the future, to suggest the way in which words dedicated to the universal are brushed by the wing of real life.” T.S. Eliot warned that his poems “have the external but not the internal form of classic art” and that he was “by his nature the first counter-romantic in poetry,” concluding—though without providing any comparisons to verify his superlative—that “Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language.”
It is not merely in the use of imagery of common life, not merely in the use of imagery of the sordid life of a great metropolis, but in the elevation of such imagery to the first intensity—presenting it as it is, and yet making it represent something much more than itself—that Baudelaire has created a mode of release and expression for other men.
Like Whitman and Rimbaud—and Byron before them—Baudelaire made of his life the myth his poetry centered. Deliberate squanderer of his inheritance, eulogist of drunkenness, connoisseur of hashish, laudanum and opium, found guilty of publishing poems offensive to public morals, an in extremis convert to Catholicism on his miserable deathbed at the age of 46, Baudelaire set the pattern for the poète maudit. A revolutionary in his youth, a reactionary in his all-too-brief maturity, a restless soul always in hopeless pursuit of the new (last words of his book), a born and bred Parisian, Baudelaire crowned himself “the king of a rainy country.” This damp gray domain corresponds to either the twelve old arrondissements or the intimate topography of a single idiosyncratic brain.
●
Nathan Brown, a professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal, is the latest of Baudelaire’s innumerable translators into English. His version of The Flowers of Evil was published jointly by three presses in 2021—MaMa in Skopje, Macedonia; Konrapunkt in Zagreb, Croatia; and Anteism Books in Montreal—and has now been reissued, with a substantial new introduction, by Verso. (There must be an interesting story to this curious publication history, but the present edition offers no clue to it.) According to Brown, Baudelaire “coined” the term “modernity.” That can’t be quite right, as the word has existed in English since the seventeenth century; how far behind can the French have been? But never mind. In his essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire gave new life to the idea of “modernity” by defining it as “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent,” though warning that it is merely “one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.” And from modernity would come, eventually, modernism, not merely a condition but a demand and an aspiration, Rimbaud’s “Il faut être absolument moderne.” For Brown, Baudelaire’s is a modernity or modernism that is “still on the very cusp of its incipience,” the “point of saturation where the old must pass over into the new”—but it becomes crucially significant in its transcendence of the merely subjective. For Brown, what gives Baudelaire’s poetry its weight is “the objective registration of modernity as a history of social dispossession and alienation.”
Yet a translation like Brown’s, which understandably forgoes the specific formal constraints under which Baudelaire worked, must almost inevitably give the reader a false perspective, making the poems seem more contemporary than they really are and discounting their traditionalism—the alexandrine, the sonnet and so on, the aspects that would have been seen as reflecting “the eternal and the immovable”—in their pursuit of the poem’s semantic content. Brown goes in the opposite direction of Fredric Jameson, who recognized “many Baudelaires, of most unequal value indeed,” of which “the hardest … to grasp” would be “the eternal freshness” of the poet, “whose language is bought by reification, by its strange transformation into alien speech.” The “sense” of the poetry may be oblique to “rhyme schemes and metrical patterns that,” Brown says, “can never adequately be rendered in English.” Well, it depends on how pedantic you want to be about adequacy; some of Roy Campbell’s mid-century rhymed translations remain better poetry in English than any other versions of Baudelaire I know. There’s something else to poetry beyond its sense on the one hand and the poet’s specific formal choices on the other—not just a rhyme scheme, for instance, but the decision to rhyme these particular words: let’s call it the poem’s unheard melody.
That said, Brown’s versions are not entirely without formal constraints, though he claims them to be dictated by sense. His decision to take “the poetic line as a unit of sense that should be translated as a unit, such that the reader may refer to a line in French and find that line translated into English on the facing page,” and even to reproduce as far as possible the original punctuation, suggests, if not a smothering literalism alien to any true sense of the poetry, a purely pedagogical aim—sounding like what used to be called, in fact, a trot, a kind of nearly word-for-word translation that handcuffs Baudelaire’s poetry. In an interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brown says the origin of his project was a critical study of the poet, for which he needed renditions of passages to be cited. He needed a version that would answer to his question, “Can I quote this passage and write about it in a way that makes sense?” That’s one way a translation can be used, but what of the common reader, who might see the whole poem, rather than the line, as the essential unit, and wants to savor rather than cite it?
Precisely because he is a poet of rhyme, however, Baudelaire makes the stanza more important than the line. He knits his lines together into a more significant unit. A molecule has qualities that could not be predicted from the atoms that make it up, and the same can be said of stanzas and lines. Yet Brown seems to call out, like “Beauty” in Baudelaire’s sonnet so titled, “I hate the movement that unsettles the lines”—but the poem is that movement. It turns out, though, that in this translator’s hands, the tone that results has little to do with Baudelaire’s strangely insinuating yet flamboyant growl. Inevitably, things are flattened; what Bonnefoy saw as a kind of monotony—hypnotic, surely—is drained of some of its spiritual nuance. And yet at times, Brown’s literalism has its advantages. I was immediately charmed, in the book’s opening poem, “To the Reader,” to find its sixth line, “Nous nous faisons payer grassement nos aveux,” rendered as “We pay ourselves fatly for our confessions.” Now, most of Baudelaire’s translators think that, in one way or another, we are paid (rather than that we pay). Thus Campbell has “For our weak vows we ask excessive prices,” and Wallace Fowlie has “We ask high prices for our vows.” Getting or spending, though, may make little difference. What makes Brown’s line snap is the physicality of “fatly,” which so bluntly renders Baudelaire’s “grassement.”
The same literalism can also be misleading. Consider the seventh line of “Correspondences”—“Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté.” Brown, according to his method, plays it straight: “Vast as night and as clarity.” Geoffrey Wagner, another mid-century translator, went almost the same way—“As vast as night and clarity”—while James McGowan has more recently tried to make more sense of the dichotomy between “nuit” and “clareté,” introducing, as Brown would prefer not to, an explanatory word corresponding to none in Baudelaire’s text: “Vast as the night, as sunlight’s clarity.” It’s clunky, I’ll admit, but McGowan has a point, because anglophone clarity is not exactly francophone clarté, which is, first of all, according to the Trésor de la langue française informatisé, not transparency but brightness—not intelligibility but brilliance. More water than wine.
Brown’s Baudelaire, you might say, has more clarity than clarté. And maybe that’s to be expected. There’s a tone to Baudelaire’s verse that’s never quite made its way into our language. T.J. Clark, in his blurb for the Brown translation, seems to want to plug his ears to anything like that tone, confessing an inability to read most others because “the verse always sounded too lofty in English.” But what if some poet could translate Baudelaire in such a way as to make that loftiness possible for us? But since that’s not the case yet, “Farewell then, songs of brass and sighs of the flute” (as “The Taste for Nothingness” would have it). Still, for myself, I have no such regrets that some of the earlier translations, and not only Campbell’s, manage not to flatten the tone quite as much as Brown does. Which “Invitation to the Voyage” do you find more inviting?—Brown’s:
My child my sister
Imagine the sweetness
Of going to live there together!
To love at leisure,
To love and to die
In a land resembling yourself!
The misty suns
Of those hazy skies
Have for me the charms
So mysterious
Of your dissembling eyes,
Shining through your tears.
—or that of Edna St, Vincent Millay, from 1936?
Think, would it not be
Sweet to live with me
All alone, my child, my love? —
Sleep together, share
All things, in that fair
Country you remind me of?
Charming in the dawn
There, the half-withdrawn
Drenched, mysterious sun appears
In the curdled skies,
Treacherous as your eyes
Shining from behind their tears.
To object, as I suppose Brown might, that Millay’s “Drenched, mysterious sun” and “curdled skies” impose on Baudelaire’s “soleils mouillés” and “ciels brouillés” some implications he never put there, would not be wrong, but it misses the point: the confounding voluptuousness that the poet means not only to evoke but to create, to kindle in the heart of the reader, is the essential content of the poem. That Millay conveyed this content where Brown does not seems to me evident, notwithstanding Kenneth Rexroth’s incredible verdict that hers was “probably the worst translation of Baudelaire—a personality utterly beyond her—in any language.” The lexical choices by which she accomplished this are merely the means. A translation can’t align them in precisely the way of the French text, but to choose to convey the means rather than the effect may not be, despite appearances, the most accurate way to proceed. Here, doing so puts the accent on rationality and empiricism in rendering a poet for whom those were not positive values. “These maledictions, these blasphemies, these laments, / These ecstasies, these cries, these tears, these Te Deum,” as Brown’s version of “Les Phares” (“The Beacons”) has it, “Are an echo recalled by a thousand labyrinths”—merely an echo, yet one amplified by being repeated a thousandfold, that is, by a thousand translators, a thousand thousand readers—French ones included, since they too are always transposing the poetry into terms they are prepared to receive.
Those echoes are far from unanimous. And translators can only render the objects of their labors in terms that make sense in the here and now—not so much in the target language as in the target culture. The effort to get closer to the source may in the end turn out only to have remade the source in one’s own image. I always think of Richard Taruskin’s argument that the “historically informed performance” movement in classical music, claiming to revive forgotten techniques of the Baroque period, had merely imposed twentieth-century modernist tastes on eighteenth-century scores. As well they might—since that is what helped those old works stay alive into the present. Works of art may be something like what Baudelaire (speaking not of poems but of Jeanne Duval’s hair) calls “the gourd / Where I drink in great draughts the wine of memory”: not the memories themselves but vessels from which we guzzle them. The spirit that intoxicates us always come from elsewhere.
No translation, Brown’s or anyone else’s, can give us at once a Baudelaire for our time and one fixed in his own. They must inevitably muddle the two, each time in different ratios, creating an artificial contemporaneity chockful of anachronisms. I’ll admit in Brown’s case I sometimes find the results intoxicating. That this Baudelaire is a contemporary poet who dares to express outrageous thoughts and coin images that might seem unthinkable by a man of our time—all the better. Can any of our contemporaries convincingly apostrophize his soul, or bluntly invoke a capital-I Ideal? Who today, even among religious believers, can take seriously all his talk of Satan, for instance? We can only dismiss it as a rhetorical device, the personification of some abstract notion like sin or disobedience. But no mere expedient can generate the hair-raising effects found in some of these poems, in which not only Satan, but Anguish and Hope, Hate and Vengeance, Beauty and so on appear as personal entities acting to torment the poet, perhaps diagnosable today as some sort of paranoiac, or to lash him with unspeakable pleasures. That it’s all so unreasonable only testifies to the intensity of the experience, a reminder, perhaps that (as we read in “The Irremediable”) “the Devil / Is good at whatever he does!”
I’d hazard the guess that no French poet has been translated so often as Baudelaire. With all the already-existing translations out there, is Brown’s the one to read? Wrong question. There can never be just one. The legendary “impossibility” of translation is synonymous with its innumerable possibilities of reading. Baudelaire is an idea that is only vivified by the differences between one reading—one translation—and the rest. Baudelaire is an invention of readers—translators included—who are inventions of his poetry. So yes, read Brown’s Baudelaire. It’s useful, and that’s something. But poetry is more than useful, so don’t stop there. No one translation can show you why Eliot spoke of Baudelaire raising his “imagery to the first intensity”—the italics are his—but reading several may accomplish what one of them alone could not do for you.
Is it disappointing to have to conclude that no one translation, no one method of translating can be relied on as the right one? Only if you think you’re going to be tested on it. Besides, how else might we comprehend the paradox that poetry, to borrow the words of the final poem of The Flowers of Evil, “The Voyage,” can only be an “infinitude cradled by finite seas”?
Everyone agrees that modern poetry in France—and therefore in Europe—starts with Charles Baudelaire. But no agrees on why. His successors, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, are each in their own way more patently radical, and the same is true of his American contemporary Walt Whitman. How modern do you have to be to be a modern? Compared to their works, those of Baudelaire, despite their sulfurous aroma, are far more traditional; while he was an early adopter of the prose poem, his most influential poetry used received forms. “Baudelaire accomplished what classical prosody had always required, or rather what it had inaugurated. … His prosody has the same spiritual monotony as Racine’s,” Yves Bonnefoy once remarked. And beyond matters of form, some of Baudelaire’s content was familiar too. His exacerbated ambivalence toward his Haitian-born lover Jeanne Duval, the subject of so many of his poems, is as ancient as Catullus’s odi et amo; praise of drunkenness dates back to the Greeks; and his proud sense of damnation, of his “Heart great with rancor and bitter desires,” would have been second-hand news to Lord Byron. Was the “new shudder” that Victor Hugo perceived in Baudelaire’s writing new enough to make him, rather than the last of the Romantics (the one in whose work Romanticism, you might say, curdled), the first of the moderns?
Walter Benjamin found the essence of Baudelaire’s modern viewpoint in his subjects: the city, the flaneur, the commodity, the search for the new. For Bonnefoy, Baudelaire had pursued “a new and thankless task,” namely “the shattering of formal perfection and the collapse of Beauty which, in spite of himself and perhaps of ourselves, he envisaged for the poetry of the future, to suggest the way in which words dedicated to the universal are brushed by the wing of real life.” T.S. Eliot warned that his poems “have the external but not the internal form of classic art” and that he was “by his nature the first counter-romantic in poetry,” concluding—though without providing any comparisons to verify his superlative—that “Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language.”
Like Whitman and Rimbaud—and Byron before them—Baudelaire made of his life the myth his poetry centered. Deliberate squanderer of his inheritance, eulogist of drunkenness, connoisseur of hashish, laudanum and opium, found guilty of publishing poems offensive to public morals, an in extremis convert to Catholicism on his miserable deathbed at the age of 46, Baudelaire set the pattern for the poète maudit. A revolutionary in his youth, a reactionary in his all-too-brief maturity, a restless soul always in hopeless pursuit of the new (last words of his book), a born and bred Parisian, Baudelaire crowned himself “the king of a rainy country.” This damp gray domain corresponds to either the twelve old arrondissements or the intimate topography of a single idiosyncratic brain.
●
Nathan Brown, a professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal, is the latest of Baudelaire’s innumerable translators into English. His version of The Flowers of Evil was published jointly by three presses in 2021—MaMa in Skopje, Macedonia; Konrapunkt in Zagreb, Croatia; and Anteism Books in Montreal—and has now been reissued, with a substantial new introduction, by Verso. (There must be an interesting story to this curious publication history, but the present edition offers no clue to it.) According to Brown, Baudelaire “coined” the term “modernity.” That can’t be quite right, as the word has existed in English since the seventeenth century; how far behind can the French have been? But never mind. In his essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire gave new life to the idea of “modernity” by defining it as “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent,” though warning that it is merely “one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.” And from modernity would come, eventually, modernism, not merely a condition but a demand and an aspiration, Rimbaud’s “Il faut être absolument moderne.” For Brown, Baudelaire’s is a modernity or modernism that is “still on the very cusp of its incipience,” the “point of saturation where the old must pass over into the new”—but it becomes crucially significant in its transcendence of the merely subjective. For Brown, what gives Baudelaire’s poetry its weight is “the objective registration of modernity as a history of social dispossession and alienation.”
Yet a translation like Brown’s, which understandably forgoes the specific formal constraints under which Baudelaire worked, must almost inevitably give the reader a false perspective, making the poems seem more contemporary than they really are and discounting their traditionalism—the alexandrine, the sonnet and so on, the aspects that would have been seen as reflecting “the eternal and the immovable”—in their pursuit of the poem’s semantic content. Brown goes in the opposite direction of Fredric Jameson, who recognized “many Baudelaires, of most unequal value indeed,” of which “the hardest … to grasp” would be “the eternal freshness” of the poet, “whose language is bought by reification, by its strange transformation into alien speech.” The “sense” of the poetry may be oblique to “rhyme schemes and metrical patterns that,” Brown says, “can never adequately be rendered in English.” Well, it depends on how pedantic you want to be about adequacy; some of Roy Campbell’s mid-century rhymed translations remain better poetry in English than any other versions of Baudelaire I know. There’s something else to poetry beyond its sense on the one hand and the poet’s specific formal choices on the other—not just a rhyme scheme, for instance, but the decision to rhyme these particular words: let’s call it the poem’s unheard melody.
That said, Brown’s versions are not entirely without formal constraints, though he claims them to be dictated by sense. His decision to take “the poetic line as a unit of sense that should be translated as a unit, such that the reader may refer to a line in French and find that line translated into English on the facing page,” and even to reproduce as far as possible the original punctuation, suggests, if not a smothering literalism alien to any true sense of the poetry, a purely pedagogical aim—sounding like what used to be called, in fact, a trot, a kind of nearly word-for-word translation that handcuffs Baudelaire’s poetry. In an interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brown says the origin of his project was a critical study of the poet, for which he needed renditions of passages to be cited. He needed a version that would answer to his question, “Can I quote this passage and write about it in a way that makes sense?” That’s one way a translation can be used, but what of the common reader, who might see the whole poem, rather than the line, as the essential unit, and wants to savor rather than cite it?
Precisely because he is a poet of rhyme, however, Baudelaire makes the stanza more important than the line. He knits his lines together into a more significant unit. A molecule has qualities that could not be predicted from the atoms that make it up, and the same can be said of stanzas and lines. Yet Brown seems to call out, like “Beauty” in Baudelaire’s sonnet so titled, “I hate the movement that unsettles the lines”—but the poem is that movement. It turns out, though, that in this translator’s hands, the tone that results has little to do with Baudelaire’s strangely insinuating yet flamboyant growl. Inevitably, things are flattened; what Bonnefoy saw as a kind of monotony—hypnotic, surely—is drained of some of its spiritual nuance. And yet at times, Brown’s literalism has its advantages. I was immediately charmed, in the book’s opening poem, “To the Reader,” to find its sixth line, “Nous nous faisons payer grassement nos aveux,” rendered as “We pay ourselves fatly for our confessions.” Now, most of Baudelaire’s translators think that, in one way or another, we are paid (rather than that we pay). Thus Campbell has “For our weak vows we ask excessive prices,” and Wallace Fowlie has “We ask high prices for our vows.” Getting or spending, though, may make little difference. What makes Brown’s line snap is the physicality of “fatly,” which so bluntly renders Baudelaire’s “grassement.”
The same literalism can also be misleading. Consider the seventh line of “Correspondences”—“Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté.” Brown, according to his method, plays it straight: “Vast as night and as clarity.” Geoffrey Wagner, another mid-century translator, went almost the same way—“As vast as night and clarity”—while James McGowan has more recently tried to make more sense of the dichotomy between “nuit” and “clareté,” introducing, as Brown would prefer not to, an explanatory word corresponding to none in Baudelaire’s text: “Vast as the night, as sunlight’s clarity.” It’s clunky, I’ll admit, but McGowan has a point, because anglophone clarity is not exactly francophone clarté, which is, first of all, according to the Trésor de la langue française informatisé, not transparency but brightness—not intelligibility but brilliance. More water than wine.
Brown’s Baudelaire, you might say, has more clarity than clarté. And maybe that’s to be expected. There’s a tone to Baudelaire’s verse that’s never quite made its way into our language. T.J. Clark, in his blurb for the Brown translation, seems to want to plug his ears to anything like that tone, confessing an inability to read most others because “the verse always sounded too lofty in English.” But what if some poet could translate Baudelaire in such a way as to make that loftiness possible for us? But since that’s not the case yet, “Farewell then, songs of brass and sighs of the flute” (as “The Taste for Nothingness” would have it). Still, for myself, I have no such regrets that some of the earlier translations, and not only Campbell’s, manage not to flatten the tone quite as much as Brown does. Which “Invitation to the Voyage” do you find more inviting?—Brown’s:
—or that of Edna St, Vincent Millay, from 1936?
To object, as I suppose Brown might, that Millay’s “Drenched, mysterious sun” and “curdled skies” impose on Baudelaire’s “soleils mouillés” and “ciels brouillés” some implications he never put there, would not be wrong, but it misses the point: the confounding voluptuousness that the poet means not only to evoke but to create, to kindle in the heart of the reader, is the essential content of the poem. That Millay conveyed this content where Brown does not seems to me evident, notwithstanding Kenneth Rexroth’s incredible verdict that hers was “probably the worst translation of Baudelaire—a personality utterly beyond her—in any language.” The lexical choices by which she accomplished this are merely the means. A translation can’t align them in precisely the way of the French text, but to choose to convey the means rather than the effect may not be, despite appearances, the most accurate way to proceed. Here, doing so puts the accent on rationality and empiricism in rendering a poet for whom those were not positive values. “These maledictions, these blasphemies, these laments, / These ecstasies, these cries, these tears, these Te Deum,” as Brown’s version of “Les Phares” (“The Beacons”) has it, “Are an echo recalled by a thousand labyrinths”—merely an echo, yet one amplified by being repeated a thousandfold, that is, by a thousand translators, a thousand thousand readers—French ones included, since they too are always transposing the poetry into terms they are prepared to receive.
Those echoes are far from unanimous. And translators can only render the objects of their labors in terms that make sense in the here and now—not so much in the target language as in the target culture. The effort to get closer to the source may in the end turn out only to have remade the source in one’s own image. I always think of Richard Taruskin’s argument that the “historically informed performance” movement in classical music, claiming to revive forgotten techniques of the Baroque period, had merely imposed twentieth-century modernist tastes on eighteenth-century scores. As well they might—since that is what helped those old works stay alive into the present. Works of art may be something like what Baudelaire (speaking not of poems but of Jeanne Duval’s hair) calls “the gourd / Where I drink in great draughts the wine of memory”: not the memories themselves but vessels from which we guzzle them. The spirit that intoxicates us always come from elsewhere.
No translation, Brown’s or anyone else’s, can give us at once a Baudelaire for our time and one fixed in his own. They must inevitably muddle the two, each time in different ratios, creating an artificial contemporaneity chockful of anachronisms. I’ll admit in Brown’s case I sometimes find the results intoxicating. That this Baudelaire is a contemporary poet who dares to express outrageous thoughts and coin images that might seem unthinkable by a man of our time—all the better. Can any of our contemporaries convincingly apostrophize his soul, or bluntly invoke a capital-I Ideal? Who today, even among religious believers, can take seriously all his talk of Satan, for instance? We can only dismiss it as a rhetorical device, the personification of some abstract notion like sin or disobedience. But no mere expedient can generate the hair-raising effects found in some of these poems, in which not only Satan, but Anguish and Hope, Hate and Vengeance, Beauty and so on appear as personal entities acting to torment the poet, perhaps diagnosable today as some sort of paranoiac, or to lash him with unspeakable pleasures. That it’s all so unreasonable only testifies to the intensity of the experience, a reminder, perhaps that (as we read in “The Irremediable”) “the Devil / Is good at whatever he does!”
I’d hazard the guess that no French poet has been translated so often as Baudelaire. With all the already-existing translations out there, is Brown’s the one to read? Wrong question. There can never be just one. The legendary “impossibility” of translation is synonymous with its innumerable possibilities of reading. Baudelaire is an idea that is only vivified by the differences between one reading—one translation—and the rest. Baudelaire is an invention of readers—translators included—who are inventions of his poetry. So yes, read Brown’s Baudelaire. It’s useful, and that’s something. But poetry is more than useful, so don’t stop there. No one translation can show you why Eliot spoke of Baudelaire raising his “imagery to the first intensity”—the italics are his—but reading several may accomplish what one of them alone could not do for you.
Is it disappointing to have to conclude that no one translation, no one method of translating can be relied on as the right one? Only if you think you’re going to be tested on it. Besides, how else might we comprehend the paradox that poetry, to borrow the words of the final poem of The Flowers of Evil, “The Voyage,” can only be an “infinitude cradled by finite seas”?
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.