The Flowers of Evil (Wesleyan Poetry)
by Charles Baudelaire
Decadence Translated
A review by Lucas Klein
If modern translation theory begins with Walter Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Translator," then one of the central writers in judging translation must be the man whose poems Benjamin introduced in his essay, Charles Baudelaire. If, as Benjamin writes in Harry Zohn's translation, "translatability is an essential quality of certain works," and also "a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages," then the translatability of Baudelaire has been repeatedly tested so that we may continue to come to terms with the foreignness of its language. The result is that Les Fleurs du Mal, the central oeuvre of the late-Romantic, proto-Decadent Baudelaire, has helped shape generations of poets around the world, modernist, post-modernist, and beyond.
Inasmuch as translation is a mediation between opposing forces, the content of Les Fleurs du Mal is particularly primed for translation, where Baudelaire slams sacred against profane, as lesbians "flee the infinite that [they] carry within" and Beauty -- "From Satan or from God, who cares?" -- can be asked:
Ah, Beauty, do you hail from the depth of the sky or have you sprung from the abyss? Your hellish heavenly gaze pours out, jumbled, blessing and crime -- comparable, in this, to wine.
These lines, from Keith Waldrop's new translation The Flowers of Evil, are noticeably not lines. The form of Waldrop's translation is versets, "a form that hovers between poetry and prose," as the book's front flap advertises. In his introduction, one of the most lively and thorough available on Baudelaire's life and works, Waldrop defends his aims: "it is not, as the shape on the page might suggest, a trot, but a literary translation," as the verset is "a measured prose, checked by a sense of line that restricts it. The restriction is rhythmic, not metrical." Nonetheless, on first look many will find the prose-looking passages of Waldrop's translation too prosaic; if Benjamin is right in his quotation that "The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue," then many will assume that Waldrop's versets do too much to preserve the state of English, and too little to be powerfully affected by the French.
To be sure, the verset is not the form of Baudelaire's poetry, and while Baudelaire was among the first to pen a modern prose-poem, none was included in Les Fleurs du Mal. And yet, looking at some of Waldrop's phrasing in The Flowers of Evil, we can quickly move past such a summary judgment. Consider a stanza (or paragraph) from "The Possessed":
I like you that way! Still, if today you prefer, like an eclipsed star coming out of the penumbra, to strut the places Madness stocks, all right! Charming dagger, sprung from its case!
Adverbs of time preceding predicates, similes in advance of their referents, relative pronouns trimmed to a minimum -- Waldrop seems to offset the prose aspect of his versets by relying on highly stylized diction, marking his translation as both particularly French and particularly 19th-century. These translations cannot be read as quickly as prose: they are both too poetic and too foreign for such facility.
And yet, for all their foreignness and antique luster, Waldrop's translations are also especially new, especially appropriate for readers of non-mainstream poetry today. If translation really is a mediation between opposing forces, then the question is what forces this translation mediates between. In other translations of Les Fleurs du Mal, the forces may be Baudelaire's French and a traditionalist, formalist, or quietist vision of Anglo poetics; here, though, the dynamic seems to be between Baudelaire's stylized bluntness and a trend in American poetry closer to the prosody of the New Sentence. In instances such as
Each flower evanesces like incense from a censer; the violin quivers like a heart aggrieved; melancholy waltz, vertiginous languor! The sky is sad and beautiful as an extreme shelter.
we read not only the post-avant ethic of juxtaposition and parataxis, but also an encapsulation of that ethic in the subtler rhythms of verse that's almost as free as it can get.
Yet Waldrop's English constantly points to the forms of Baudelaire's original. The passage just quoted comes from a pantoum, a French form based on lines of one stanza being repeated in the next. Though less marked in Waldrop's versets than in Baudelaire's French (to say nothing of how it could be rendered in a New Formalist translation), the form, made more organic, still permeates forth. The next stanza reads:
The violin quivers like a heart aggrieved, a tender heart which hates the vast black void! The sky is sad and beautiful as an extreme shelter; the sun is drowned in its own blood run cold.
Reading Les Fleurs du Mal it is obvious that Baudelaire was anxious about poetry, and about his own worth as a poet. In "The Albatross," he symbolizes the poet as a bird whose soaring beauty in the heavens is undermined by his sheer ridiculousness on ground:
The Poet is that prince of clouds, comrade of the storm, mocking the bowmen: exiled to the ground, jeered on all sides, his giant wings impede his walk (12).
The task of the translator, then, is to reconcile the strengths of the poet with his new surroundings, setting him in flight with wings that do not impede his walk. In part from landing on versets, but more particularly from his deftness in English and the depth of his understanding of Baudelaire, Keith Waldrop has created a Flowers of Evil that, in one gesture, can come to terms with the new needs of poetry readers in English and the foreignness of the language of Les Fleurs du Mal.
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