Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Charles Baudelaire, a life in writing
- 2 Baudelaire’s politics
- 3 Baudelaire’s poetic journey in Les Fleurs du Mal
- 4 Baudelaire’s versification: conservative or radical?
- 5 The prose poems
- 6 Baudelairean ethics
- 7 Baudelaire’s Paris
- 8 Baudelaire and intoxicants
- 9 Art and its representation
- 10 Music and theatre
- 11 Baudelaire’s literary criticism
- 12 Baudelaire’s place in literary and cultural history
- 13 A woman reading Baudelaire
- 14 Translating Baudelaire
- 15 The stroll and preparation for departure
- Afterword
- Appendix Titles of individual poems and prose poems referred to in the text
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- Index to Baudelaire’s works
- Series list
14 - Translating Baudelaire
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 August 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Charles Baudelaire, a life in writing
- 2 Baudelaire’s politics
- 3 Baudelaire’s poetic journey in Les Fleurs du Mal
- 4 Baudelaire’s versification: conservative or radical?
- 5 The prose poems
- 6 Baudelairean ethics
- 7 Baudelaire’s Paris
- 8 Baudelaire and intoxicants
- 9 Art and its representation
- 10 Music and theatre
- 11 Baudelaire’s literary criticism
- 12 Baudelaire’s place in literary and cultural history
- 13 A woman reading Baudelaire
- 14 Translating Baudelaire
- 15 The stroll and preparation for departure
- Afterword
- Appendix Titles of individual poems and prose poems referred to in the text
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- Index to Baudelaire’s works
- Series list
Summary
If we set out to write a history of English-language translations of Baudelaire, in the belief that all translations, in neat chronological sequence, face the same problems and solve them in different ways, as the presiding Zeitgeist dictates, then we would be sorely deluded. Deluded, principally because a history of 'formal' translations of Baudelaire is not a history of the translation of Baudelaire; the history of Baudelairean translation has unimaginably ramified, is unimaginably frayed, is irrecoverable. To investigate this condition and to reflect on the issues at stake for any translator of Les Fleurs du Mal, I would like to take my cue from Baudelaire's first English champion, Swinburne.
The question which is critical to translation and likely to undermine any attempt to develop a prescriptive poetics of translation is, quite simply, 'What does the translator seek to translate?' Our preoccupation should be not only to decide what translation is, but what is being acted out in translation. For Baudelaire himself, translation seems to have been a process of selfdiscovery, or self-recognition; in a letter to Théophile Thoré of June 20 (?) 1864 Baudelaire refers to his Poe translations in these terms:
Do you know why I so patiently translated Poe? Because he resembled me. The first time I opened a book of his, I saw, with horror and delight, not only subjects I had already dreamed, but actual phrases thought by me and written by him twenty years earlier.
[Savez-vous pourquoi j’ai si patiemment traduit Poe? Parce qu’il me ressemblait. La première fois que j’ai ouvert un livre de lui, j’ai vu, avec épouvante et ravissement, non seulement des sujets rêvés par moi, mais desphrases pensées par moi, et écrites par lui vingt ans auparavant.
(C ii 386)]- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire , pp. 193 - 205Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006