Alchemy and amalgam translation in the works of charles baudelaire

Bandy’s scholarship, culminating with the publication in 1990 of an excellent parallel-textedition.8Similarly, Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages is an ex- cellent edition by Bandy

Alchemy and Amalgam

Translation in the Works of

Charles Baudelaire

Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, M.J Freeman, Sjef Houppermans, Paul Pelckmans

et Co Vet

Emily Salines

Alchemy and Amalgam

Translation in the Works of

Charles Baudelaire

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2004

‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence’.

Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions

de "ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents

- Prescriptions pour la permanence"

ISBN: 90-420-1931-X

Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004

Printed in The Netherlands

Acknowledgements 7

Chapter 1: ‘L’amour du métier’?

Chapter 2: Translation in 19th-century France 61

Chapter 3: Translation and creation

Baudelaire and literary property

Chapter 5: Baudelaire’s aesthetics of amalgame 165

Appendix A: Chronology of Baudelaire’s translations 255

Appendix B: Annotated extract from Un Mangeur d’opium 261

Appendix C: Literary Property Law of 19 July 1793 269

Appendix D: ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’ / Morale du joujou 271

Index of source authors and translations 299

I would like to thank Dr Sonya Stephens, Profs Edward Hughes,Peter Broome and Michele Hannoosh for their invaluable adviceand help at various stages of the manuscript.

The Centre for Research in Translation at MiddlesexUniversity has been the ideal environment in which to develop myideas about Baudelaire and translation I thank my colleagues andstudents of the Centre, who through their comments and questionshave enriched my work

I thank the Women Graduates Association for awarding me

an emergency grant for the summer of 1995, and Royal Holloway,University of London for awarding me a travel grant in the sameyear, which allowed me to spend a month at the BibliothèqueNationale I am very grateful to Middlesex University for awarding

me a period of sabbatical leave in the Autumn of 1999, duringwhich the manuscript was completed

I would like to express my gratitude to Linzy Dickinson forher help and friendship throughout this project Last but not least,Steve Russell, my family and friends deserve special thanks for theirencouragement and support, as well as their patience!

The following abbreviations are used:

ŒCI and ŒCII: Baudelaire, Charles, Œuvres complètes, ed by

Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975-76)

CI and CII: Baudelaire, Charles, Correspondance, ed by Claude

Pichois with the collaboration of Jean Ziegler (Paris: Gallimard,1973)

S L W : Baudelaire, Charles, Un Mangeur d’opium avec le texte

parallèle des Confessions of an English Opium Eater et des Suspiria

de profundis de Th De Quincey, édition critique et commentée par

Michèle Stäuble-Lipman Wulf, Études Baudelairiennes VI-VII

(Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1976)

EAP: Poe, Edgar Allan, Œuvres en prose, Traduites par Charles

Baudelaire, Texte établi et annoté par Y.-G Le Dantec (Paris:Gallimard, 1951)

Ouvrages73: Baudelaire, Charles, Edgar Alan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages, Edition commentée par W T Bandy (Toronto: University

of Toronto Press, 1973)

Poe: Poe, Edgar Allan, The Complete Tales and Poems (New York:

Dorset Press, 1989)

Est-il normal que, pendant une quinzaine d’années, l’auteur des Fleurs du Mal

ait consacré la plus grande partie de son activité à traduire des œuvres souvent médiocres?

( )

Pour sa difficulté à créer, Poe lui fut un alibi: les traductions sont une cation, une caution bourgeoise, destinée à rassurer sa mère, Ancelle et lui- même 1

justifi-Claude Pichois’s question and his answer are emblematic of critics’general approach to Charles Baudelaire’s translations ‘Traduire’ –even in the corpus of a canonical writer – cannot but be a stopgap, thesign of a lack, an abnormal activity Such a view of translation is notrestricted to Baudelaire studies, of course Translation has traditionallybeen considered as a derivative activity (and one, therefore, that is lessworthy of interest) Susan Bassnett describes this tradition veryclearly:

Translation has been perceived as a secondary activity, as a ‘mechanical’ rather than a ‘creative’ process, within the competence of anyone with a basic grounding in a language other than their own; in short, as a low status occu- pation 2

Because of its dependence on a source text, translation is generallyseen as less valuable than so-called ‘original’ writing, and totally an-cillary, dependent on its source Despite the large volume of Baude-laire criticism, it is not surprising, therefore, to note that, of all hisworks, his translations have indeed been relatively little studied, andare generally considered as marginal in his corpus, a sign of his crea-

1 Claude Pichois, ‘Baudelaire ou la difficulté créatrice’ in Baudelaire, Études et

témoignages (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1967), pp 242-61 (p 246).

2Susan Bassnett-McGuire, Translation Studies (London and New York: Methuen,

1980), p 2.

tive incapacity, manifested in an over-reliance on derivative writing.Very rarely are they seen to be relevant to the poet’s creative process.The few studies which concentrate on Baudelaire’s translationsfocus mainly on Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, and mostly from thepoint of view of a possible affinity between the two authors They ex-plore mainly the question of Poe’s influence on Baudelaire and the-matic echoes between the two writers.3 Of such studies, P.M Wethe-

rill’s Charles Baudelaire et la poésie d’Edgar Allan Poe is the most

complete and enlightening.4 Other traditional paths of enquiry areconcerned with Baudelaire’s knowledge of the English language and

of English literature, and generally highlight his faulty knowledge ofthe language and patchy understanding of the literature.5 His interest

in Poe is often quoted as an example of his poor appreciation of lish / American literature, as Poe’s status as a writer is questioned andbelittled Claude Pichois perpetuates that tradition when he writes that

Eng-‘deux écrivains du même nom: un Américain, plutôt médiocre, et unFrançais de génie’ hide under the name of Poe.6 The reasons for thissupposed improvement achieved through translation are rarely ex-plored, critics generally satisfying themselves with pointing outBaudelaire’s genius, although one does find some comparative studies

of source and target texts such as P.M Wetherill’s

In comparison with the Poe translations – which, admittedly,constitute the largest part of Baudelaire’s translation corpus – Baude-laire’s other translations and adaptations have been very little studied.The most notable and useful contributions of critics in the field have

3Among the best of early studies of this type are Léon Lemonnier’s Les Traducteurs

d’Edgar Poe en France de 1845 à 1876: Charles Baudelaire (Paris: PUF, 1928), Edgar Poe et la critique française de 1845 à 1875 (Paris: PUF, 1928), Edgar Poe et les poètes français (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1932) These

works consider Baudelaire’s translations of Poe in context and explore – and

minimize – Poe’s influence on Baudelaire Also very useful is Patrick F Quinn’s The

French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957),

which despite its general title concentrates in fact on Baudelaire’s reading of Poe See

also Louis Seylaz, Edgar Poe et les premiers symbolistes français (Lausanne:

Imprimerie la Concorde, 1923).

4 P.M Wetherill, Charles Baudelaire et la poésie d’Edgar Allan Poe (Paris: Nizet,

1962).

5 See for instance Francis Scarfe’s ‘Baudelaire angliciste?’, Études anglaises, 21

(1968), 52-57, or Margaret Heinen Matheny ‘Baudelaire’s Knowledge of English

Literature’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, 1970, 98-117.

6 Pichois, ‘Baudelaire ou la difficulté créatrice’, p 246.

been through the publication of parallel text editions W.T Bandy andClaude Pichois’s ‘Un inédit: “Hiawatha Légende indienne”, adapta-tion de Charles Baudelaire’ offers the French and the English texts inparallel, and includes a short section on ‘Baudelaire traducteur’.7 L e

Jeune Enchanteur has also benefitted from W T Bandy’s scholarship,

culminating with the publication in 1990 of an excellent parallel-textedition.8Similarly, Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages is an ex-

cellent edition by Bandy of Baudelaire’s text in parallel with its

Mangeur d’opium and its source texts, Thomas De Quincey’s sions of an English Opium-Eater and Suspiria de Profundis, Michèle

Confes-Staüble-Lipman Wulf’s edition has provided the most complete duction to the source and target texts, together with a parallel edition.10

intro-In addition to the above studies, there has been in recent yearsonly a slow movement towards a recognition of the importance oftranslation for Baudelaire Nicole Ward Jouve devotes a section of her

Baudelaire: A Fire to Conquer Darkness to ‘Baudelaire and

Transla-tion’, and suggests that ‘translating from one language into anothercalls into play attitudes not altogether different from translating paintinto words, or life into art’.11 She does not, however, pursue that line

of enquiry, and instead produces a study of Baudelaire’s reading of DeQuincey rather than of his work as a translator Alan Astro’s ‘Allegory

of Translation in Un Mangeur d’opium’ explores the hybrid nature of

this text in terms of translation;12 Mary Ann Caws’ ‘Insertion in anOval Frame: Poe Circumscribed by Baudelaire’ looks at the interac-tion between Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’

with its source text and the poem ‘Un Fantôme’ in Les Fleurs du

mal;13 and Mira Levy-Bloch’s ‘La traduction chez Baudelaire: Les

7 Études Baudelairiennes II (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1971), 7-68.

8 Le Jeune Enchanteur, A critical edition by W T Bandy (Nashville: Publications of

the W T Bandy Center for Baudelaire Studies, 1990) See also W T Bandy,

‘Baudelaire et Croly – la vérité sur Le Jeune Enchanteur’, Mercure de France (1

February 1950), 230-47.

9 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973).

10 Études Baudelairiennes VI-VII (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1976) The only other

notable study of Baudelaire and De Quincey is to be found in G T Clapton,

Baudelaire et De Quincey (Paris: ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1931).

11 Nicole Ward Jouve, Baudelaire: A Fire to Conquer Darkness (London: Macmillan,

1980), p 200.

12 Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 18, 1-2 (Fall-Winter 1989-90), 165-71.

13 in Harold Bloom (ed.), Charles Baudelaire, New York, New Haven, Philadelphia,

[Footnotes continue on next page]

trois imaginations du poète-traducteur’ explores the links betweentranslation metaphors and imagination for Baudelaire (but does nottake into account Baudelaire’s translations).14 These articles are veryvaluable but remain inevitably limited in scope There has been to date

no overall study of Baudelaire’s translating technique or of his use ofEnglish texts in general, nor has there been any contextualized study

of his translation corpus Nor indeed has there been any attempt tolink Baudelaire’s translations and adaptations to his other writings

This book is part of a growing movement in translation ies to reassess the significance of the act of translation, and a ques-tioning of the ancillary position of translation Particularly representa-tive of this movement is the work of the so-called ‘manipulation’school, inherited from the polysystem theories of the 1970s and early1980s.15As its name suggests, the manipulation school focuses on thetransformative powers of translation, which are dictated by the trans-lator’s subjectivity but also, as importantly, the translational norms ofthe target system (that is to say the prevalent approaches to translation

stud-of the receiving culture) as well as the socio-cultural context to whichthe translations are being transplanted This resolutely target-orientedapproach to translation has the advantage of moving away from con-cerns of faithfulness to a sacrosanct original It should be seen, how-ever, in parallel with studies such as those of Lawrence Venuti orAntoine Berman, who explore the appropriating dimension of the act

of translation, and emphasize the fallacy of fluency and transparency

in translation, arguing that these hide in fact the translator’s tendency

to take over the source text and erase the source author’s voice.16

Moving away from the theory of creative incapacity, my aim

is, therefore, to respond to the lacuna in Baudelaire criticism and topursue the line of enquiry set by translation studies by reassessing the

Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp 101-23 (initially published in The French

Review, 56, April-May 1983).

14 Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 20, 1-2 (Fall-Winter 1991-92), 361-83.

15 See Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘Polysystem Theories’, Poetics Today, 1, 1-2 (Autumn 1979), 287-310; Gideon Toury, In Search of a Theory of Translation (Tel Aviv: Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, 1980); Theo Hermans (ed.), The Manipulation of

Literature, Studies in Literary Translation (London: Croom Helm, 1985).

16 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, A History of Translation (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Antoine Berman, L’Épreuve de l’étranger, Culture

et traduction dans l’Allemagne Romantique (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), and Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).

significance of the translating act in the Baudelairean corpus and itsimportance in Baudelaire’s writing technique In order to achieve that,this study will focus on the interaction between translation and crea-tion and will move away from traditional distinctions betweenBaudelaire’s derivative and original writings Instead, it will aim touncover a common approach to writing both in the translations and inthe rest of Baudelaire’s corpus.

The scope of this study will be deliberately wide, therefore Itwill explore Baudelaire’s translations from English for signs of sub-jectivity and creativity, and will try and discover forms of translationother than intralingual in the Baudelairean corpus In other words, itwill not only explore the direct translations of Poe’s texts, but insteadwill also focus on more ambiguous texts, such as the ‘adaptations’

from English (Un Mangeur d’opium, for instance), and other forms of dual writing in Baudelaire’s works as the doublets and transpositions

d’art.

Thus the term ‘translation’ will be taken in a wide sense, compassing a range of forms of derivative writings (that is to say textscreated through the rewriting of an earlier text), an approach largelyinfluenced by Roman Jakobson’s seminal ‘On Linguistic Aspects ofTranslation’.17Jakobson defines three types of translation:

en-1) Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language.

2) Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language.

3) Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of non-verbal sign systems 18

Jakobson’s definitions have the advantage of opening up the sion of translation to forms of writing which would not necessarily beincluded in more traditional approaches ‘Translation proper’, that is

discus-to say from one language discus-to another, is only one form of translation,which includes rewriting (intralingual) and transposition (intersemi-otic) The traditional distinction between translation, adaptation andversion should not indeed hide the fact that all these are forms of dual,

17 in On Translation, ed by Reuben A Brower (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1959), pp 232-243 See also Aron Kibédi Varga’s commentary on

Jakobson’s three types of translation in ‘Pragmatique de la traduction’, RHLF, 1997,

3, 428-36 (pp 428-30).

18 Roman Jakobson, p 233.

or derivative, writing, and are, therefore, part of a common approach

to writing Henri Meschonic, in his article ‘Traduction, adaptation –palimpseste’, shows the links and differences between adaptation andtranslation:

Je définirais la traduction la version qui privilégie en elle le texte à traduire et l’adaptation, celle qui privilégie (volontairement ou à son insu, peu importe), tout ce hors-texte fait des idées du traducteur sur le langage, et sur la littéra- ture, sur le possible et l’impossible (par quoi il se situe) et dont il fait le sous- texte qui envahit le texte à traduire 19

Meschonic emphasizes translation as a source-oriented exercise, andadaptation as target-oriented As Yves Gambier argues, the divisionbetween translation and adaptation is based, then, on the implicit ideathat translation is ‘un effort littéral, une mimesis de l’original’.20Gam-bier attacks what he calls ‘une antinomie intenable’: ‘d’une part, latraduction serait vouée à la littéralité, d’autre part, elle se changerait

en “adaptation” dès que son souci cibliste dominerait’.21

From this point of view, Reuben Brower’s approach offers analternative to the traditional division between translation and adapta-tion Brower argues that the word ‘version’ is a better term to refer tothe ‘scale of varying but related activities that we call “translation”’,22

because it does not carry the same overtones of literalness as the word

‘translation’ He then details the range of approaches possible:

A few of the many degrees on a scale of versions might be named here – from the most exact rendering of vocabulary and idiom to freer yet responsible translation, to full imaginative re-making (‘imitation’), to versions where no particular original is continuously referred to, to allusion, continuous or spo- radic, to radical translation, where a writer draws from a foreign writer or tra- dition the nucleus or donnée for a wholly independent work 23

While Brower’s open concept of version may be too wide for the pose of the present study (allusions, for instance, will not be consi-dered as forms of translation), his inclusion of varying degrees of

22 Reuben Brower, Mirror on Mirror, Translation, Imitation, Parody (Cambridge

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), p 1.

23 Brower, p 2.

closeness to and variation from a source is very helpful as a basis for astudy of varying forms of translation in Baudelaire’s works.24

An inclusive (or ‘totalizing’, to use George Steiner’s phrase)25

definition of translation clearly brings the present study within theframework of intertextuality, and the study of palimpsestic writing asexplored by Gérard Genette.26 Genette’s analysis of the five levels oftranstextuality (transtextuality being ‘tout ce qui met [le texte] en re-lation manifeste ou secrète avec d’autres textes’) provides indeed thenecessary theoretical framework in which to look at the relationshipbetween Baudelaire’s translations and his other writings, and alsobetween the translations and their source texts Genette details fivetypes of transtextuality – the first type, ‘intertextualité’, is defined as a

‘relation de coprésence entre deux ou plusieurs textes’, as encounteredfor instance in quotation, plagiarism or allusion; the second type,

‘paratextualité’, which is ‘la relation, généralement moins explicite etplus distante, que, dans l’ensemble formé par une œuvre littéraire, letexte proprement dit entretient avec ce que l’on ne peut guère nommer

que son paratexte’, that is to say the relationship between the text and

everything that surrounds it (for instance its title, prefaces, cover,etc ); the third type, ‘métatextualité’, is ‘la relation ( ) de commen-taire qui unit un texte à un autre texte’; the fourth type (the most im-portant within the context of this study), ‘hypertextualité’ describingthe relationship between a text B (‘hypertexte’) and an earlier text A(‘hypotexte’) in a relationship which is not metatextual, but rather,based on a creative transformation of text A by text B; and, finally,

‘architextualité’, ‘relation tout à fait muette, que n’articule, au plus,qu’une mention paratextuelle de pure appartenance taxinomique’.27

Genette’s classification has the advantage of providing a ful terminology and a clear distinction between different types of rela-tionships between texts Underlying the analysis of the place of trans-lation in Baudelaire’s work is the question of the status of

24 George Steiner advocates a similar approach in After Babel, Aspects of Language

and Translation (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), where

he underlines the study of ‘all meaningful exchanges of the totality of semantic

communication (including Jakobson’s intersemiotic translation or “transmutation”)’

as the most instructive trend in translation studies (p 279).

25 Steiner, p 279.

26 Gérard Genette, Introduction à l’architexte (Paris: Seuil, 1979); Palimpsestes, la

littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982).

27 Genette, Palimpsestes, pp 7-16.

Baudelaire’s translations in relation to their source texts – whether ornot they can be considered as hypertexts depends on Baudelaire’screative input in the target text, and assessing that input will be central

to this study

In order to explore the importance of translation in laire’s works, this book will start with an analysis of the corpus ofBaudelaire’s interlingual translations It will detail the range ofBaudelaire’s approaches to the English text and aim to demonstratethat they all represent different forms of translation It will then re-place these approaches within their translational context and outlinethe main issues at stake in the practical and theoretical hesitations and

Baude-debates of the 19th century, before focusing on Un Mangeur d’opium

as emblematic of the link between translation and creation in laire’s writing method, and of his ambivalence to his source text Thisstudy will then turn to the issues raised by the ambiguous status ofBaudelaire’s translations and adaptations in his corpus, exploring firstthe questions of translation and literary property and responding to thetheory of Baudelaire’s creative incapacity as the main reason for hisinterest in translation, before situating Baudelaire’s creative transla-tions as part of a wider aesthetics The final chapter of the book willexplore the possibility of an aesthetics based on the concept of trans-lation It will, therefore, look at other forms of dual writing in Baude-laire’s works, starting with the links between translation and criticismand then turning to intersemiotic and intralingual translations If thehypothesis of a common approach to all dual writings is verified, thecentrality of translation in Baudelaire’s works will have been demon-strated It will, consequently, shed new light on the poet’s creativemethod and the means by which poetic alchemy is achieved

‘L’AMOUR DU MÉTIER’?

BAUDELAIRE’S APPROACHES TO TRANSLATION

Baudelaire’s approaches to English texts were far from uniform,ranging from very close translation to free adaptations.1 They can,however, be divided into two main strands On the one hand, there arewhat could be called source-oriented, direct translations (that is to saytranslations in which the source text is paramount, and the translatingact focuses on the faithful rendering of the original); and, on the other,there are target-oriented adaptations and transformations, in which thesource text is appropriated, sometimes even hijacked, to suit Baude-laire’s aims In the latter, the target text becomes paramount, thesource text serving mainly as the bottom layer of the creative palimp-sest As in most classifications, variations do exist within these twomain strands, as will revealed in the course of this study It is never-theless useful to examine the specific features of direct translationsand adaptations separately

The direct translations constitute the bulk of Baudelaire’s ties: this is the approach adopted with Edgar Allan Poe’s works anddespite his experiments with freer approaches, Baudelaire never aban-doned the use of direct translation Although the most remarkable ofBaudelaire’s direct translations are the Poe translations, other textsfollow similar approaches His first and last translations are both direct

activi-translations: Le Jeune Enchanteur, based on an 1836 story by the

Reverend Croly,2 was published in 1846 while ‘Le Pont des soupirs’,

based on Thomas Hood’s ‘Bridge of Sighs’, was dictated to Arthur

Stevens in 1865 This approach was also applied to English songs by

1 See the chronology of Baudelaire’s translations, in Appendix A.

2 ‘The Young Enchanter – From a papyrus of Herculanum’, in The Forget me not; A

Christmas, New Year’s, and Birthday Present for mdccxxxvi (London: Ackermann

and CO., 1836).

T E Walmisley and Doctor Cooke.3 These, published in Paris on 29

January 1853, were translated for Alfred Busquet, who inserted them

in an account of London (Londres fantastique, published in Paris from

16 December 1852 to 30 January 1853) In most direct translations,the source text is fully acknowledged and respected as an original to

be reproduced as faithfully as possible The situation is not always so

straightforward, however, as the example of Le Jeune Enchanteur

suggests a more complex relationship with the source text Indeed, W

T Bandy showed in 1950 that Le Jeune Enchanteur, first published in

1846 under Baudelaire’s name, is in fact an unacknowledgedtranslation That a relatively close translation should pass as a text byBaudelaire is remarkable and may be an early hint of the link betweenhis translations and his other works and of the fluency of histranslation Such fluency, linked with the dissimulation of the transla-

tional nature of Le Jeune Enchanteur, poses clear questions of literary

property, questions which also arise from the freer translations wherethe source text is very infrequently acknowledged

The adaptations, although less numerous than the direct lations, form an important part of Baudelaire’s translation corpus As

trans-in the case of the direct translations, the free translations trans-include work

done at the request of a third party In the same way as the English

Songs were translated at the request of Alfred Busquet, the unfinished

translation of Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha’ was ordered by Robert August

in 1860, and became the occasion for experiments with the rendering

of poetry and with varying levels of transformation Edgar Allan Poe,

sa vie et ses ouvrages and Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses œuvres,

al-though presented by Baudelaire as his own account of Poe’s life andworks, are in fact essays based on American articles which are

blended with Baudelaire’s personal comments on Poe’s art In Les

Fleurs du Mal, ‘Le Guignon’ is based on Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a

Country Churchyard’ and Longfellow’s ‘A Psalm of Life’, while ‘LeFlambeau vivant’ is a loose translation of a section from Poe’s ‘ToHelen’ In both cases, there is no direct recognition of the source text

Finally, Un Mangeur d’opium is, openly this time, both a presentation and a reflexion on Thomas De Quincey’s autobiographical Confes-

sions of an English Opium-Eater and Suspiria De Profundis.

Despite the wide range of approaches adopted by Baudelaire inhis translations, one is struck by the fact that they stand in their own

3 Published by Alfred Busquet in Paris, on 29 January 1853.

right, independently of their original, be it acknowledged or not In theintroduction to his Pléiade edition of Poe’s prose works, Y.-G LeDantec emphasizes the fact that the translations are a Baudelaireantext,4 and that Poe’s stories are ‘magistralement transcrites’ byBaudelaire.5 It is revealing that, in his project to present Poe’s tales toFrench readers in the highly prestigious Pléiade edition, Le Dantecshould choose to omit the stories which were not translated byBaudelaire on the grounds that Baudelaire’s text cannot be supple-mented by another translator’s versions, and that French readers areused to Baudelaire’s presentation and selection Thus Baudelaire’sversion has taken over its original and the canon established by him iseventually seen as more important than Poe’s.6 Claude Pichois ex-presses the same idea when he writes that:

les traductions de Poe sont devenues la substance de Baudelaire et constituent une œuvre d’art appartenant au patrimoine français Ce qui faisait dire à un humoriste qu’il y avait deux écrivains du même nom: un Américain, plutôt médiocre, et un Français de génie, par la grâce de Baudelaire et de Mallarmé 7

Similarly, Le Jeune Enchanteur is still classified as part of

Baude-laire’s ‘essais et nouvelles’ in Claude Pichois’ Pléiade edition,whereas the translations of Poe make up a separate volume In the

same vein, W T Bandy’s excellent 1990 edition of Le Jeune

En-chanteur does not mention on its title page the fact that the text is a

translation, and there is no reference to the source author It is as if thecritics’ last verdict on Baudelaire’s appropriation of Croly’s text wasthat it was successful, although of lesser importance than Baudelaire’s

4 ‘Bien que ce volume ne fasse pas partie des Œuvres de Baudelaire éditées dans la

Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, c’est encore un texte baudelairien que nous donnons ici, en

publiant une édition des œuvres d’Edgar Allan Poe’, EAP, p 7.

5 EAP, p 7.

6 This common view of Baudelaire’s translations seems in contradiction with the no less common critical tendency to see his translating activity as a sideline in the corpus

of his works – a contradiction to which we shall return at a later stage.

7 Pichois, ‘Baudelaire ou la difficulté créatrice’, p 242 ‘La substance de Baudelaire’ describes well the impregnation of Poe’s text with Baudelairean elements, and the phrase ‘une œuvre d’art appartenant au patrimoine français’ calls to mind once more the concept of appropriation through translation already mentioned.

8 Pichois’ notes to Le Jeune Enchanteur state somewhat disappointedly that ‘cette

nouvelle n’est qu’une traduction d’un texte anglais’ (ŒCI, p 1405, emphasis added)

and yet ‘on a néanmoins recueilli cette traduction dans cette section [essais et

nou-[Footnotes continue on next page]

Mangeur d’opium, although often presented as secondary to its

origi-nal, is also seen as belonging fully to Baudelaire’s works Such viewsimply a strong dimension of appropriation through translation, con-scious or unconscious, which will be studied at a later stage in thisbook They also emphasize the strength of Baudelaire’s voice as atranslator, a voice which makes itself heard not only in the free trans-lations, but also in apparently source-oriented, direct translations.The present chapter will present the corpus of Baudelaire’stranslations from English and explore the target texts for the presence

of his voice and subjectivity, starting with the direct translations fore turning to the free translations.9

be-Le Jeune Enchanteur is a useful starting point in a study of

Baude-laire’s direct translations As a ‘pseudo-original’ (to use AnthonyPym’s terminology),10 that is to say a translation presented and read as

an original, this text is engaged in a very specific relationship with the

target culture and the target translator’s corpus The reasons why Le

Jeune Enchanteur should have been believed for so long to be part of

Baudelaire’s ‘original works’ may be found both in the paratext and in

velles], celle des traductions ayant été réservée aux poésies.’ (ŒCI, p, 1404).

9 Studying such a large corpus poses methodological issues Antoine Berman’s Pour

une critique des traductions: John Donne (pp 64-97) provides a useful framework.

Berman’s method is complementary to polysystem approaches in so far as it insists on the importance of target-oriented criticism, and contextual studies, and has the addi- tional advantage of highlighting, as Lawrence Venuti does too, the fallacy of a trans- parent translation The main characteristic of Berman’s method is that he sees com- parisons of source and target texts as only a step in the study of a given translation, advocating an approach which would look at the target text as a text in its own right before turning to the close analysis of passages revealing the foreignness of transla- tional writing, and would take into account the translator’s translational context (the target culture in general as well as its favoured translational approaches in particular, and also the translator’s other translations and creative works if available) The pre- sent study of Baudelaire’s translation approaches will be inspired by Berman’s method and will endeavour to look at the target texts as self-standing works before engaging in detailed comparisons of source and target texts The translations will be replaced in their context in the next chapter.

10 Anthony Pym, Method in Translation History (Manchester: St Jerome, 1998).

Pym’s method of translation analysis is focused on the target system and treats pseudo-translations as authentic translations, because they function as such in the tar- get system and display the characteristics expected from a translation by that target system Similarly, pseudo-originals erase their source and function as authentic origi- nals, thereby revealing the conventions for creative writings of the target system.

the text of the story Baudelaire’s statements on Le Jeune Enchanteur

claim the story as his own in very unambiguous terms:

Tu ignores sans doute qu’il paraỵt maintenant une nouvelle de moi dans

L’Esprit public – j’ai traité à 3 sols la ligne – ce n’est payable qu’à la fin du

mois 11

J’ai eu, comme tu sais, une nouvelle à L’Esprit public ces jours derniers.12

The strength of both statements makes it very tempting indeed to take

them at face value and to accept Le Jeune Enchanteur as Baudelaire’s

without more analysis, and it is not surprising that Baudelaire’s claims

of authorship should have remained unchallenged for so long More

importantly, there are in Le Jeune Enchanteur some Baudelairean

elements which seem to confirm the paratextual claims The oriental setting of the story allows descriptions and scenes which nodoubt appealed to Baudelaire Callias’s love for luxury and his cyni-cism make him close to a Baudelairean dandy – and a precursor forHuysmans’ Baudelairean hero, Des Esseintes His paintings and hisarrangement of them according to light reveal the character of an art-lover close to Baudelaire To cite just one example, the description ofsunlight as it reaches paintings, rich and dark, announces the transla-tions of Poe’s stories:

classico-le soclassico-leil prenait plaisir à tamiser ses rayons cramoisis à travers classico-le cristal des fenêtres, 13

while the fantastic element in the description of the painting coming to

life with sunlight is very close to the thematics of Poe’s Oval Portrait, suggesting a unity in Baudelaire’s translational corpus Sempronius’s

quest for the mysterious priestess, on the other hand, announces the

quest for the ideal of Les Fleurs du Mal:

Il était amoureux d’un être aussi idéal qu’un brillant habitant des nuées; son amour était l’amour insensé d’un homme qui voudrait faire descendre Diane

de la sphère ó elle trơne glorieusement sur le bord des cieux, 14

11 Letter to Madame Aupick, 20-22 February 1846, CI, p 133.

12 Letter to Madame Aupick, end of February 1846, CI, p 134.

13 ŒCI, p 525.

14 ŒCI, p 533.

while his relationship with his father, referred to in phrases such as

‘cet instrument de la tyrannie paternelle’, echo that of Baudelaire andthe General Aupick

To these elements of the plot, one must add the style of theFrench text, which contains many Baudelairean elements Somephrases sound distinctly Baudelairean and may have contributed to the

lasting impression that Le Jeune Enchanteur is an original work by

Baudelaire Phrases such as ‘amoureuse et pestilentielle étoile’, lement accouplés dans notre enfance dans le burlesque desseind’apprendre à nous aimer’, ‘les commandements funèbres d’un père’,

‘fol-‘les étranges et diaboliques délires’ – to quote but a few examples –

announce some of the vocabulary, and themes, of Les Fleurs du Mal.

In such instances, Baudelaire’s strategy is clearly to domesticate hissource, to cover the source author’s voice with his own

And yet, at the same time, the foreignness of the text cannot be

denied As Antoine Berman shows in his excellent L’Épreuve de

l’étranger, translation is both appropriation and dialogue with the

Other Caught in the tension between an ethnocentric target systemand the foreignness of the source system, the translator is forced to bedoubly violent: first to his / her own language on which he / she im-poses the foreignness of the source language, and secondly to the fo-reign language, forced into contact with the translator’s own language.And indeed the ‘injonction appropriatrice’ of translation (that is to saythe natural way in which translation domesticates the foreign)15 which

has been noted about Le Jeune Enchanteur is balanced out by a very

strong presence of the foreign within Baudelaire’s text First of all, thetext is sprinkled with anglicisms, which point to its origin Such angli-cisms are sometimes lexical, as in the case of ‘accointance’, ‘désap-pointé’, ‘ce maître en magie manègera ses démons’, ‘un couple dechiens’, ‘actuellement’.16 They are also syntactical, the most obviousand repeated example of this being the place of adjectives which inBaudelaire’s text often follows an English order, and give to the target

text an almost précieux flavour: ‘la malheureuse, – non, – la désolée,

la lamentable situation de mon âme’, ‘religieuses offrandes’, ‘entêtécompagnon’, ‘insigne folie’, ‘fatal couteau’ (to quote but a few exam-ples).17 These incursions of English-inspired elements in the Frenchtext are symptomatic of the foreignness inherent to translation and of

15 L’Épreuve de l’étranger, p 16.

16 ŒCI, pp 538 and 542 (these ‘false friends’ are used in their English meanings).

17 ŒCI, pp 528, 537, 538, 543.

the tensions between the Baudelairean and the foreign elements of Le

Jeune Enchanteur Such tensions between inside and outside elements

are in many ways emblematic of Baudelaire’s approach to translation,and are made all the more obvious as the link between translation andcreation was only starting to appear in those early days of Baudelaire’screative life, and would become more subtle and difficult to grasp in

later works such as Un Mangeur d’opium.

Moving on from the examination of the target text to a son between target text and source text, one of the most striking ele-ments is the general closeness of the translation Baudelaire’s aimseems to be to render the original text with as few changes as possible.There are, however, a number of modifications operated in the Frenchtext – the most obvious (and the most noted by critics) being Baude-laire’s so-called ‘mistranslations’ of the original text.18 I have alreadyquoted examples of ‘false friends’ translated literally into French byBaudelaire, thus changing the sense of the original (‘actual / actually’translated as ‘actuel / actuellement’, for instance);19 more interestinglyperhaps, such interferences between the two languages seem to triggermore creative translations –

compari-a flcompari-ash of rich-coloured rcompari-adicompari-ance rose, quivered for compari-a moment on the crown of the temple, and then disappeared, high in heaven.

une longue flamme rose, d’une riche couleur, trembla un moment sur le ton du temple, et disparut ensuite dans les hauteurs du ciel 20

fron-The English verb ‘rose’ reappears in the French version, this time asits French homonym, the colour adjective ‘rose’ thus creating whatappears as a translation mistake, but also conjuring up in the Frenchtext a very different image, which, when the French text is read with-out reference to the English text (as it was for more than a century),seems most appropriate to the context Another example of this phe-nomenon may be found in the translation of one of Callias’s directspeeches:

18 These have been the basis on which critics have argued that Baudelaire’s knowledge of English in 1846 was still very faulty P M Wetherill, basing himself on so-called ‘translation mistakes’ in the Poe translations, argues that such knowledge

was never perfect (see chapter on ‘Baudelaire et la langue anglaise’, in Baudelaire et

la poésie d’Edgar Allan Poe, pp 155-68).

19 See for example ŒCI, p 542.

20 The Young Enchanter, p 26, ŒCI, p 536.

I am an Epicure I am delicate in my tastes, choice in my acquaintance, careful

in my loves and fastidious in my country-houses.

Je suis un véritable Épicure; délicat dans mes gỏts, réservé dans mes tances, tendre dans mes amitiés et mes amours, je ne suis cruel et dédaigneux que pour mes pauvres maisons de campagne 21

accoin-The use of the archaic ‘accointances’ in the French text is clearly amanifestation of an interference between the English original and itsFrench source, shown by Georges Mounin to be a natural consequence

of the act of translation.22 In addition, the translation of the end of thesecond sentence is based on a transformation of the sense of the word

‘fastidious’, which modifies the meaning of the whole sentence, butwhich, if read without reference to the English text, makes perfectsense A similar phenomenon occurs in other early translations, as forexample the English songs:

Then she made the shepherd call

All the heav’ns to witness truth.

Never lov’d a truer youth.

Puis elle contraignit le berger à appeler

Tous les cieux en témoignage

Qu’il n’avait jamais aimé une fille plus candide 23

Baudelaire’s translation of ‘never lov’d a truer youth’ overlooks theinversion and makes ‘truer youth’ the object of ‘lov’d’ whereas it isthe subject of the verb in the original, and refers to the shepherd ratherthan to the girl While this choice may be seen as a misreading on thepart of Baudelaire, the target text, if read independently from itssource, makes sense, does not in any way betray the spirit of its origi-

21 The Young Enchanter, p 11, ŒCI, p 524.

22 Georges Mounin, Les Problèmes théoriques de la traduction, (Paris: Gallimard,

1963): ‘[L]’influence de la langue que [le traducteur] traduit sur la langue dans laquelle il traduit peut être décelée par des interférences particulières, qui dans ce cas précis, sont des erreurs ou fautes de traduction, ou bien des comportements linguis- tiques très marqués chez les traducteurs: le gỏt des néologismes étrangers, la ten- dance aux emprunts, aux calques, aux citations non traduites en langue étrangère, le maintien dans le texte une fois traduit de mots et de tours non-traduits’ (p 4).These interferences, born from the contact between the target and the source language, are the manifestation of the foreignness of the source text.

23 ŒCI, pp 1276 and 242.

nal and in this respect is successful In this example, as in the previous

one, Baudelaire’s deviations from his original might be an indication

of his faltering knowledge of English, as critics generally see it, but,

on the other hand, his way of overcoming this difficulty reveals thestrength of his voice, and is, therefore, a sign of his creative input inthe translations.24

Similarly, when it comes to adjusting the target text to the nius of the French language, as is necessary in the act of translation,Baudelaire’s personal stylistic preoccupations come to the fore Evi-

ge-dence of this may be found throughout Le Jeune Enchanteur, as in the

following examples:

Among the chambers of the house of Alcmæon, opened in the excavations made in presence of the King of Naples, on his restoration in 1815, there was

found a large fresco, of remarkable beauty, representing a group of nymphs

gazing on a principal figure, with a Cupid whispering in her ear.

Pendant les fouilles faites en présence du roi de Naples, lors de la restauration

de 1815, on trouva dans une des chambres de la maison d’Alcmœon une grande fresque d’une beauté très particulière, qui représentait un groupe de nymphes, dont les yeux étaient tournés vers une figure principale Derrière celle-ci, un jeune Amour, penché galamment vers son oreille, avait l’air de lui chuchoter quelque mystère 25

The typographical transformation of the name of Alcmæon intoAlcmœon may well be due to a printer’s mistake We can also read it

as symptomatic of Baudelaire’s lack of attention to the name or, moreinterestingly for our present concerns, an unconscious desire to trans-form his source, to make it his In addition to this rather small detail,the above passage has more striking examples of Baudelaire’s ma-nipulations of his source text His version produces two sentences out

of one in the source text, thus making the French lighter and morenatural while at the same time focusing more on the figure of the Cu-pid than in the source The elements of the source are redistributed:the circumstances of the discovery of the fresco are moved to the be-ginning of the sentence; the main interest of the fresco – the ‘figureprincipale’ – is pushed to the end of the first sentence, which, because

of the preceding four clauses and the delay in its appearance,

24 One could even argue that these mistranslations are a form of deliberate misreading

on the part of Baudelaire, as will be seen in Chapter 4.

25 The Young Enchanter, p 10, ŒCI, p 523.

lights it as central The additions to the description of the Cupid rière celle-ci’, ‘penché galamment’, ‘avait l’air’, ‘quelque mystère’)bring more life to the scene and attribute more importance to him, an-nouncing the main theme of the story to come This blending of ele-ments directly translated from the original and Baudelairean elabora-

(‘der-tions faithful to the spirit of the story are the rule in Le Jeune

En-chanteur Extended further, this blend leads Baudelaire to add a whole

passage of his own at the end of the translation:

‘Contemplez mon bonheur, incrédule ami’, dit Sempronius en jetant un regard

de passion indicible sur la beauté de sa femme qui tenait déjà un bel enfant dans ses bras.

Notre épicurien touché, mais souriant toujours, murmurait tout bas l’hymne sentimental de l’excellent poète latin:

C’est l’heure favorable aux baisers; la tempête,

Qui blasphème le ciel et fait trembler le faîte,

Invite les bons vins du fond de leur grenier

À descendre en cadence au conjugal foyer.

Car l’intime chaleur de l’âtre qui pétille

Sert à rendre meilleurs les pères de famille

Et la foudre fera, complice de l’amour

L’épouse au cœur tremblant docile jusqu’au jour.26

This is the occasion for Baudelaire to add yet another translation, this

time a free version of the Ode to Thaliarch by Horace The poem

pro-duced follows French metre (alexandrines) but its antique origins areappropriate to the context of the Herculanum manuscript What wehave here is Baudelaire’s own reaction to the text he is translatingthrough the introduction of an intertextual link That this interactionbetween himself and the source text would go undetected without aconfrontation of the source and target texts, suggests a close blending

of his creativity and the act of translation, and goes some way to fying his claims to authorship of the text

justi-Baudelaire’s first translation is revealing in several ways, then:

the presence of this substantial addition to the English text in Le Jeune

Enchanteur prefigures Baudelaire’s later manipulations of his

hypo-text(s) in works such as Un Mangeur d’opium; and yet, at the same

time, the general strategies of closeness to the source text to be found

in this early translation announce the more systematic approaches toPoe’s works With this first contact with translation, Baudelaire shows

26 ŒCI, p 544.

himself to be aware of the possible choices at his disposal regardingthe text of the Other – choices which his later translations exploremore fully.

While Le Jeune Enchanteur displays many characteristics to be found

in later translations, the Poe translations offer a more complex, tailed picture Looking at the target texts without referring to theirsources, as a preliminary to a more detailed study of translation ap-proaches, one is struck by the unity and harmony of the Poe corpus.This of course is hardly surprising since all the stories belong to the

de-œuvre of a single author But there is more to the overall effect of

Baudelaire’s collections of Poe’s works than this natural unity Patrick

F Quinn’s statement that ‘we find represented in the translations ofBaudelaire very nearly all (I would say all) of Poe’s greatest and mostmemorable stories, and enough samples of his less successful ones toillustrate the variety of the work he attempted’ is an early critical ac-knowledgement of the importance of Baudelaire’s selection of the sto-ries.27 And indeed the two volumes of Histoires extraordinaires and

Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires reflect clearly Baudelaire’s

per-ception of Poe’s stories Thus the order in which he presents them isfar from innocent:

Le premier volume est fait pour amorcer le public: jongleries, conjecturisme,

canards, etc Ligeia est le seul morceau important qui se rattache moralement

au deuxième volume.

Le deuxième volume est d’un fantastique plus relevé; hallucinations,

maladies mentales, grotesque pur, surnaturalisme, etc 28

The stories in Histoires extraordinaires and Nouvelles Histoires

ex-traordinaires were published between 1848 and 1857, first in

periodi-cals (mainly Le Pays) and then in book form in 1856 (Histoires

ex-traordinaires) and in 1857 (Nouvelles Histoires exex-traordinaires).29

The thirteen stories of Histoires extraordinaires are thematically

united while offering a representative sample of the generic range ofPoe’s stories: the first three (‘Double Assassinat dans la rue Morgue’,

‘La Lettre volée’, ‘Le Scarabée d’or’) each presenting a particular vestigation; the next four (‘Le Canard au ballon’, ‘Aventure sans pa-

27 The French Face of Edgar Poe, p 111.

28 Letter to Sainte-Beuve, 26 March 1856, CI, pp 344-45.

29 See appendix A.

reille d’un certain Hans Pfaal’, ‘Manuscrit trouvé dans une bouteille’,

‘Une Descente dans le Maelstrom’) each giving accounts of travel ventures; the last seven (‘La Vérité sur le cas de M Valdemar’,

ad-‘Révélation magnétique’, ‘Les Souvenirs de M Auguste Bedloe’,

‘Morella’, ‘Ligeia’, ‘Metzengerstein’) dwelling on the supernatural

and the fantastic The Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires are less united, thematically, than the stories in the Histoires extraordinaires.

As announced by Baudelaire in the passage quoted above, the fantasticelement is more developed, however.30 A very strong philosophicalcontent also unites the stories in the volume: ‘L’Homme des foules’,

‘Le Cœur révélateur’, ‘Le Puits et le Pendule’, ‘Petite Discussion avecune momie’, and, more importantly, ‘Puissance de la parole’, ‘Collo-que entre Monos et Una’, ‘Conversation d’Eiros avec Charmion’,

‘Ombre’, ‘Silence’ and ‘L’Ile de la fée’ all explore the question of thenature of human life and the difference between life and death, themeswhich are also present in the numerous stories involving catalepsy

(such as ‘La Chute de la maison Usher’ and ‘Bérénice’ among others).

Les Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym, first published in Le Moniteur in

1857, is, as its title amply suggests, primarily an adventure novel, and from that point of view closely linked to similar texts in Histoires ex-

traordinaires The fantastic element is, however, also a very strong

component, in particular in the final episodes of the exploration to thepole.31 ‘Eureka’, first published in part in the Revue internationale

mensuelle (Geneva) in 1859-60 before appearing in book form,

pub-lished by Michel Levy, in 1864, furthers the philosophical trends of

stories translated earlier Finally, the volume of Histoires grotesques

et sérieuses, published in 1864 by Michel Lévy,32 is the least united ofthe volumes with a blend of fiction and philosophy texts, some storiesbelonging to the two trends.33 Thematically, however, the texts pursuetrends already noted in the other Poe translations

30 It is particularly prominent in ‘Le Chat noir’, ‘William Wilson’, ‘Bérénice’, ‘La

Chute de la Maison Usher’, ‘La Barrique d’Amontillado’, ‘Le Portrait ovale’.

31 The final voyage leading to the fantastic white apparition is the most striking ple of this dimension.

exam-32 Most of the individual texts contained in the volume were first published between

1854 and 1862 in magazines and newspapers (see appendix A).

33 ‘Le Mystère de Marie Roget’, ‘Éléonora’, ‘Un Événement à Jérusalem’, ‘L’Ange

du Bizarre’, ‘Le Système du Docteur Goudron’ are above all works of fiction, though not devoid of philosophical content, while ‘Le Domaine d’Arnheim’, ‘Le Cot-

al-tage Landor’, ‘Philosophie de l’ameublement ‘and ‘La Genèse d’un poëme’ are either

mainly descriptive or theory texts The lack of unity of the volume is convincingly

[Footnotes continue on next page]

Beside the presence of Baudelaire’s subjectivity in the choice ofstories to be translated and subsequent organisation of the volumes, it

is noteworthy at this stage to emphasize the recurrence of themes ofinterpretation and decoding at the core of many of Poe’s tales, and

which may be seen as mises en abyme of the translating act, itself

based on interpretation and decoding Particularly obvious in the tective’ stories,34 the theme of investigation is also prominent is storiessuch as ‘Le Scarabée d’or’, in which the (mis)interpretation of charac-ters’ speech, actions, secret codes and even drawings underlies thenarrative.35 Even more strikingly, the final chapter of Gordon Pym,

‘de-‘Conjectures’, centres around the decoding of mysterious words inancient tongues spelt out by the shape of some caves The theme ofthe double (or Doppelgänger) is also very strong in the stories, mir-roring not only the act of repetition at the core of translation but thesense of identification between source author and translator ‘Odleb’

in ‘Les Souvenirs de M Auguste Bedloe’ is, for instance, Bedloe’sdouble (and his name Bedloe’s reverse translation, so to speak) In

‘Morella’, Morella’s daughter is her mother’s double, and the storyculminates with the discovery that the double is in fact the same, thesecond Morella appearing as a re-incarnation of the first In ‘Ligeia’,Lady Rowena and Lady Ligeia are described as opposites but in thefinal scene merge into one ‘William Wilson’ of course is entirely

explained by Patrick F Quinn (The French Face of Edgar Allan Poe, p 112) by the

fact that the translations were made under the pressure of Michel Lévy who refused to publish a new edition of the earlier volumes which would have contained the stories in

Histoires grotesques et sérieuses.

34 Such as ‘Double Assassinat dans la rue Morgue’, ‘La Lettre volée’ and ‘Le Mystère

de Marie Roget’ The latter, being set in an imaginary Paris, which is in fact a position of New York (numerous footnotes, duly reproduced by Baudelaire, indicate

trans-the original locations of trans-the story) encourages trans-the reader to perform an act of

transla-tion Interestingly, ‘La Lettre volée’ and its significance in terms of translation theory have been noted by deconstructionists See Fritz Gutbrodt, in ‘Poedelaire: Translation

and the Volatility of the Letter’, Diacritics, 22.3-4 (fall-winter 1992), 49-68 and John

P Muller and William J Richardson (eds), The Purloined Poe, Lacan, Derrida, and

Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press,

1988).

35 To a lesser extent, ‘Maelzel’ presents the interpretation of a phenomenon by the narrator; ‘L’Ange du bizarre’, by its presentation of a stereotypical German accent in the dialogues, leads both the narrator and reader to decode what is being said by the

‘angel’; ‘Le Système du Docteur Goudron et du Professeur Plume’ hinges around the theme of interpretation and duality of reality (the doctor and his friends are both sane and insane, depending on how one looks at them).

built on the thematics of the alter ego A final example among many is

‘Le Portrait ovale’, which explores the relationship between art and itsorigin, through the opposition of the young bride and her picture.36

The source texts, then, contain in their very thematics issues ofduality, identity and interpretation, which are at the core of the act oftranslation Given Baudelaire’s ambiguous relationship to his source

texts – an ambiguity already present in the appropriation of Le Jeune

Enchanteur – and use of translation for creative ends, the fact that

Poe’s texts should themselves play with such questions may well havebeen a reason for his fascination with Poe and of his choice to trans-late his works In addition, if we follow the Benjaminian notion oftranslatability, that is to say the idea that certain works call for trans-lation, contain the need for translation at their core, and reach theirfulfilment only when translated, then Poe’s tales, by their very the-matics, not only announce Baudelaire’s transformation and fusionwith his source text, but in fact also call for them.37

This fusion makes itself felt in the style and the presentation of theFrench versions The translations read as French texts, the presence ofthe foreign inherent to all translations remaining only a minor part.The Baudelairean dimension of the text appears in many ways, notleast through a large number of footnotes and prefaces, in which thetranslator’s voice comes to the forefront.38 First and foremost, twodedications to Poe’s mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, both by their placeand their content, reveal Baudelaire’s voice in the clearest way Thefirst dedication takes the form of a letter to Maria Clemm, and was

published in Le Pays on 25 July 1854, with the first of the long series

of tales which appeared in the journal until 20 April 1855, and which

would then be published in book form as Histoires extraordinaires and Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires The letter is the occasion for

Baudelaire to express his profound admiration for Poe; more

36 The opposition between the young healthy Bérénice and the diseased woman she becomes may be seen as a further example of doubles in the stories Similarly the schyzophrenic personality of many of the narrators of the stories, not least in

Berenice, is a variation on the theme In La Chute de la maison Usher, Roderick and

his sister are two sides of the same personality.

37 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, translated by Harry Zohn, in

Theo-ries of Translation, ed by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: Chicago

Uni-versity Press, 1992), pp 71-82.

38 The importance of the paratext in the ‘transaction’ between author and readers has

been established by Gérard Genette in Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987).

tantly, it presents his own reading of his author’s character, and veals Baudelaire’s perception as central Although the letter is un-doubtedly a tribute to Poe, the predominance of the first personthroughout the text and the focus on Baudelaire’s work (‘L’Edgar Poeque mon imagination avait créé’; ‘cette ironique antithèse me remplitd’un insurmontable attendrissement’; ‘son fantơme m’a toujours ob-sédé’; ‘le travail que j’ai composé’; ‘vous me direz si j’ai bien com-pris’)39 make him ultimately the focus of the text One could say,therefore, that the letter is more about Baudelaire than about Poe Thesecond dedication, which replaced the first in 1856, is made up of an

re-envoi and the translation of Poe’s To my Mother, and lessens the

pre-sence of Baudelaire’s voice However, the wording of the envoi gests the importance of the translation as an independent text It alsopresents a Baudelairean reading of the relationship between Poe andhis adoptive mother close to Baudelaire’s own aspirations

sug-CETTE TRADUCTION EST DÉDIÉE

À

MARIA CLEMM

À LA MÈRE ENTHOUSIASTE ET DÉVOUÉE

À CELLE POUR QUI LE POËTE

A ÉCRIT CES VERS40

Even more strikingly, prefaces and introductions (such as the opening

page of Genèse d’un poëme) present Baudelaire’s voice and

interpre-tation of Poe’s life and work as paramount.41 Such presence of thetranslator may also be felt in the footnotes to the translations Thecontents of the footnotes range from remarks on the translation to pre-

cisions on Poe’s art and aims In Double Assassinat dans la rue

Morgue, the following footnote brings information to the French

read-ers about Poe’s knowledge of Paris: ‘Ai-je besoin d’avertir à propos

de la rue Morgue, du passage Lamartine, etc., qu’Edgar Poe n’est mais venu à Paris?’42 At the same time, it creates a foreign space,which is not the Paris known by the French, and, is, therefore, a

39 EAP, p 16.

40 EAP, p 13.

41 The fact that Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages, which was the preface of the

Histoires extraordinaires, was largely based on English and American sources,

suggests a complex relationship between the translator’s voice and that of his source,

as will be seen later on in this chapter.

42 EAP, p 1097.

French translation of the foreign space presented to American readersthrough the creation of a fictitious Paris Elsewhere, as in ‘La Lettrevolée’, the footnotes are explanatory, for instance: ‘Encore un meurtredont Dupin refait l’instruction – ‘Le Double Assassinat dans la rueMorgue’, ‘Le Mystère de Marie Roget’ et ‘La Lettre volée’ font uneespèce de trilogie’,43 which puts the story within its context Thetranslator’s role is metatextual, here: rather than only rendering thesource text, he comments on it.44 More importantly, the footnotessometimes supplement the translation when the latter fails to restitutefully the source text In ‘Le Scarabée d’or’, for instance, a pun on thewords ‘antennae’ and ‘tin’ in the source text prompts Baudelaire to

offer an analysis of Poe’s text in a footnote (‘La prononciation du mot antennæ fait commettre une méprise au nègre, qui croit qu’il est ques-

tion d’étain: Dey aint no tin in him Calembour intraduisible’),45 and

at the same time to acknowledge a failure in the translating act to produce exactly the original.46 In ‘Aventure sans pareille d’un certain

re-Hans Pfaall’, a lengthy note offers an account of a note by Poe on

various stories on the same subject The method used by Baudelaire in

that note is close to that chosen in Un Mangeur d’opium: paraphrases,

translations and commentaries by Baudelaire all form the text of thenote.47 In other instances, Baudelaire comments on Poe’s text and jus-tifies modifications made to the original in the target text For in-

stance, in ‘Metzengerstein’, the footnote to a quotation in French starts

as follows:

J’ignore quel est l’auteur de ce texte bizarre et obscur; cependant je me suis permis de la rectifier légèrement en l’adaptant au sens moral du récit Poe cite quelquefois de mémoire et incorrectement, 48

thus implying that the translator’s sensitivity to the source text is asimportant as its author’s In ‘Révélation magnétique’, first published

43 EAP, p 1098.

44 This metatextual dimension of translation will be explored in greater detail at a later stage.

45 EAP, pp 1098-99 Baudelaire’s translation strategies in this story will be looked at

in more detail in Chapter 2.

46 On the other hand, in ‘L’Ange du bizarre’, Baudelaire’s choice is to restitute the

‘angel’’s German accent and, therefore, to contradict the translation approach outlined here.

47 EAP, pp 1100-02.

48 EAP, pp 1109-10.

in La liberté de penser in 1848, Baudelaire’s voice is even stronger, as

extracts from a note to the text will show:

Le morceau d’Edgar Poe qu’on va lire est un raisonnement ment ténu parfois, d’autres fois obscur, et de temps en temps singulièrement audacieux Il faut en prendre son parti, et digérer la chose telle qu’elle est Il

exceptionnelle-faut surtout bien s’attacher à suivre le texte littéral Certaines choses seraient devenues bien autrement obscures si j’avais voulu paraphraser mon auteur,

au lieu de me tenir servilement attaché à la lettre J’ai préféré faire du français

pénible et parfois baroque et donner dans toute sa vérité la technie que d’Edgar Poe 49

philosophi-Baudelaire describes here the two options offered to him in his entation of Poe’s text: either paraphrase or, in his own words, ‘servile’word for word translation Although the terms in which the latter isalluded to (‘servilement’, ‘français pénible et parfois baroque’) maywell imply that the chosen solution is only a compromise, and the di-gestion metaphor suggests that some sort of appropriation may betaking place, Baudelaire nevertheless favours literal translation anddiscards a freer approach (‘servilement’ makes the implicit reference

pres-to free translation quite clear, by a process of opposition) The dangers

of close translation, which are presented as a possible awkward ness ofthe target text, could be described, in Berman’s terms, as a presence ofthe foreignness of the source text and language, and therefore a naturalpart of the act of translation

This reference to a literal approach is confirmed in other places

of the paratext to the translations, not least in Baudelaire’s dence His worries before the publication of ‘Le Mystère de MarieRoget’ are particularly enlightening in this respect.50

correspon-Vous avez sans doute quelque fois lu de l’Edgar Poe, et vous savez quels sont

les procédés de l’auteur Je n’ai ici que le texte anglais Marie Roget est une instruction criminelle Or il y a des paragraphes des dépositions des témoins,

et des citations de journaux (PLUSIEURS FOIS RÉPÉTÉS, relatifs à une

om-brelle, à une écharpe, à un mouchoir, à une robe, à un jupon, etc.; il faut que

49 EAP, p 1506 (emphasis mine).

50 Y.-G Le Dantec retraces in the Pléiade edition (pp 1138-39) the circumstances of

the publication of this story, which was refused by L’Opinion nationale in 1864 and

Le Figaro in 1865 and was finally published as part of the Histoires grotesques et sérieuses in 1865 The fact that Baudelaire’s concerns for faithfulness and accuracy to

the original should have been expressed as late as 1864 is a sign of his life-long commitment to close translation.

ces paragraphes soient répétés strictement DANS LES MÊMES TERMES, à

la fin 51

– Un travail comme Marie Roget, étant une instruction judiciaire, comme L’Assassinat dans la rue Morgue, – demande une exactitude minutieuse dans les plus petits détails, et, en cas de citations tirées du commencement, une si- militude absolue dans la répétition de ces citations à la fin ( )

Vous savez, mon cher, que je ne tire vanité que d’une seule vertu, c’est de l’amour du métier 52

Baudelaire’s rigorous approach to his work as translator is well trated in the two extracts above, which by their repetitiveness showhow important the exact reproduction of the style of the original was

illus-to Baudelaire In fact, the complex hisillus-tory of the publication of ‘MarieRoget’ is emblematic of these concerns: many letters from Baudelaire,then in Brussels, to Michel Lévy and Noël Parfait, are linked with thelong process of checking the translation against its original and at-tempts to stay as close to Poe’s text as possible ‘L’amour du métier’remarkably emphasizes the craft of translation as opposed to its crea-tivity: in the same way as the fact that Baudelaire dictated his closetranslation of ‘Bridge of Sighs’ as late as 1865, the publication of

‘Marie Roget’ in the same year, that is to say after more ‘creative’

translations such as Un Mangeur d’opium had been achieved, points to

the important place of literal translation in Baudelaire’s approaches offoreign texts.53

One should not take Baudelaire’s professed concerns for racy and subservience to the source text entirely at face value, how-ever The Poe translations read like Baudelairean texts in many places,both thematically and stylistically In ‘William Wilson’, the hero leadsthe debauched life of a dandy In ‘L’Homme des foules’, the narrator

accu-is a flâneur in the city.54 Roderick in ‘La Chute de la maison Usher’ isdescribed as a ‘mangeur d’opium’,55 while opium visions play an im-

51 Letter to Noël Parfait, 31 May 1864, CII, p 371.

52 Letter to Michel Lévy, 1 June 1864, CII, p 373.

53 The closeness of Baudelaire’s translations of Poe is noted by Pamela Faber in

‘Charles Baudelaire and his Translations of Edgar Allan Poe’, Meta, 34, 2 (1989),

253-58.

54 In this respect, it is revealing that at least one of Baudelaire’s prose poems, ‘Les Foules’, should be closely linked to this story, both thematically and stylistically (see Chapter 6).

55 EAP, p 349.

portant role in ‘Les souvenirs de M Auguste Bedloe’ and are the

oc-casion for poetic prose close to Baudelaire’s creative texts:

Cependant, l’opium avait produit son effet accoutumé, qui est de revêtir tout

le monde extérieur d’une intensité d’intérêt Dans le tremblement d’une feuille, – dans la couleur d’un brin d’herbe, – dans la forme d’un trèfle, – dans

le bourdonnement d’une abeille, – dans l’éclat d’une goutte de rosée, – dans le soupir du vent, – dans les vagues odeurs qui venaient de la forêt, – se produi- sait tout un monde d’inspirations, – une procession magnifique et bigarrée de pensées désordonnées et rapsodiques 56

The transformations operated by opium on the vision of nature are

thematically very close to the Paradis artificiels, which, incidently, do

quote this passage.57 Moreover, the rhythm of this passage, which is

punctuated by regular pauses, and the inspiration and correspondances

derived from the spectacle of nature makes this passage almost a

doublet of ‘Correspondances’.58 Monos addresses Una, in ‘Colloque

entre Monos et Una’, as ‘ma très-belle et très chère’,59 an appelation

trouvé dans une bouteille’, the solitary narrator facing the infinity of the sea gazes at a spectacle close to that conjured up in the Spleen et

Idéal section of the Fleurs du Mal61 (phrases such as ‘nous

prome-nions nos regards avec amertume sur l’immensité de l’Océan’,

‘descendant avec une horrible vélocité dans un enfer liquide’, for stance, offer a Baudelairean worldview);62 in ‘Le Puits et le pendule’,

in-the term ‘joujou’ in ‘je restai étendu, souriant à cette mort étincelante,comme un enfant à quelque précieux joujou’63 echoes the title of ‘Mo-

rale du joujou’ In ‘Morella’, the narrator’s alternation between

de-pression and elation is described in terms which are evocative of thedialectics of spleen and ideal in Baudelaire’s works:

56 EAP, p 238.

57 Le Poème du hachisch, ŒCI, p 428.

58 The references to opium also take a Baudelairean tone in ‘Ligeia’, in particular in

the description of the bedroom.

59 EAP, p 476.

60 see ‘Que diras-tu ce soir’ and ‘Hymne’.

61 The figure of the albatros is present, while the sea is described in similar terms as in

‘L’Homme et la mer’.

62 EAP, p 185.

63 EAP, p 380.

Et ainsi, la jouissance s’évanouissait soudainement dans l’horreur, et l’idéal

du beau devenait l’idéal de la hideur, comme la vallée de Hinnom est devenue

la Géhenne 64

In ‘La Chute de la maison Usher’, the oxymoron in ‘une nuit d’orage

affreusement belle’ conjures up a Baudelairean aesthetics of tion, while the phrase ‘antique bouquin’, by its mix of registers be-longs fully to Baudelaire’s style rather than Poe’s The descriptions in

opposi-texts such as ‘Le Cottage Landor’ are true prose poems presenting

aesthetics which are close to Baudelaire’s own concerns Such ples, which emphasize the close link between Baudelairean and Po-esque thematics and vision have fuelled the theories of affinity alreadymentioned, and it is not the purpose of this chapter to review them ex-haustively More importantly, they imply a strong element of creati-vity in Baudelaire’s act of translation, and show that Baudelaire’stranslations of Poe are impregnated with his own poetic sensitivity in away that makes them part of the Baudelairean corpus

exam-In parallel to the strong Baudelairean presence highlighted above,however, the translations do reveal their foreign origins in places Theclearest indication of the presence of the foreign is through the Englishwords which appear throughout the texts: these may be used for placenames, names of characters, measurements, and create an effect oflocal colour In ‘Les Souvenirs de M Auguste Bedloe’, the name ofthe Ragged Mountains is kept in English, although Baudelaire trans-lates that name as ‘montagnes déchirées’ in a footnote.65 In the samestory, distances are expressed in yards,66 and officers are called ‘gen-tlemen’.67 In ‘L’Homme des foules’, English is used to describe con- cepts which do not have French equivalents (‘la gentry’, ‘des steady

old fellows’, ‘ce qu’on appelle gentility’).68 Similarly, in Gordon Pym,

most place names and distances are expressed in English, as well asnames of animals, and objects without equivalent in French The very

title of Le Cottage Landor uses an English word, and one can find in

‘Le Domaine d’Arnheim’ an incursion of English with the phrase ‘la

fashion du moment’ (following the French vogue of the word

68 EAP, pp 326-27 The italics are Baudelaire’s; their effect is both to emphasize the

foreign phrases and to create a distance from the foreign.

shionable’).69 At the same time, the American origin of the tions shows through anglicisms in the French prose, in the same way

transla-as Croly’s text makes itself felt in Le Jeune Enchanteur Such

angli-cisms appear in the use of French words with English meanings: in

‘Double Assassinat dans la rue Morgue’, the word ‘évidence’ is used

with its meaning of the English ‘evidence’, that is to say, ‘proof’.70 Inthe same story, the phrase ‘détails additionnels’ is another intervention

of English into the French text.71 Similarly, ‘magnificence terrifique’

in ‘Manuscrit trouvé dans une bouteille’ reads like a word for wordtranslation of the original, even without reference to the source text.72

In Gordon Pym, the adjective ‘subséquent’ is used repeatedly, and

al-though it exists in French, it seems that it is dictated by English use.73

More frequently, the foreign may be felt by syntactic choices, which

seem influenced by English syntax As in Le Jeune Enchanteur, the

place of adjectives often reflects an English order In ‘Manuscrit

trouvé dans une bouteille’, the substitution of ‘vieux’ to the more

customary ‘vieil’ in ‘le vieux homme’ reminds the reader, by the ring sound created by the hiatus, that the text is a translation: whereFrench usage would have the adjective placed before the noun, theforeignness of the text is created by another subversion of French, inthis case the use of an adjectival form which would not normally besuitable in such place The result is a jarring effect for the reader, to-gether with the awareness, if the reader knows English, that the reasonfor this awkwardness might be found in the original text Reminders

jar-of the translation nature jar-of the text may also be found in coinages orphrases rarely used in French This is best exemplified in ‘Le Démon

de la perversité’, where the philosophical nature of the text drivesBaudelaire to create words to express the ideas of the text, his taste forneologisms finding expression in the act of translation through thefollowing phrases: the ‘organe d’alimentivité’, the ‘organed’amativité’, ‘de combativité, de l’idéalité, de la causalité, de la con-structivité’.74