Review: Michael Robbins on a new Baudelaire

A new translation shows “the text as disturbing intruders” beneath the morbid lyric persona

The Flowers of Evil—what a title, summoning vagrancy and crime, brothels and opium dens, dark Satanic swill. “Infernal litanies of praise,” J.-K. Huysmans called Baudelaire’s poems, written “in imitation of those chants intoned on the nights of witches’ sabbaths.” Satan, vampires, drunkards—the gang’s all here. But I’ve always found it easier to appreciate the prose poems of Paris Spleen in English. They go down like the wine—or poetry, or virtue—Baudelaire urges readers to get drunk on:
ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the clock will all reply: “It is time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, poetry, or virtue, as you please.”

But the verse? T. J. Clark, in a blurb for Nathan Brown’s new translation of Les Fleurs du mal, says he’s never been able to read verse translations of Baudelaire, which “always sounded too lofty in English.” Before Brown’s edition, he preferred the prose versions of Francis Scarfe. My own preference has been for the prose of Carol Clark, but I agree, as do several other poets I know.

Baudelaire’s French is often beyond me—I had to translate Derrida for my language exam in graduate school, but that was after weeks of study, a long time ago. I always heard in college that Richard Howard’s was the go-to English Flowers of Evil. According to the back cover, it’s “indubitably the English edition to acquire,” “the definitive translation,” an achievement that “will long stand as definitive.” “Readers of English do not have to take Baudelaire on faith any longer.” But when I investigated, I found what sounded like someone translating a French translation of Wallace Stevens back into English.

Here’s my favorite stanza in “La Vie antérieure”:
Les houles, en roulant les images des cieux,
Mêlaient d'une façon solennelle et mystique
Les tout-puissants accords de leur riche musique
Aux couleurs du couchant reflété par mes yeux.

Here’s Howard’s translation:
Solemn and magical the waves rolled in
bearing images of heaven on the swell,
blending the sovereign music that they made
with sunset colors mirrored in my eyes.

And here’s Keith Waldrop’s prose version: “Breakers, swelling with celestial images, solemn and mystical, mingled omnipotent harmonies of rich music with the sunset colors my eyes reflected.”

Finally, a literal crib from the Harvard edition of Walter Benjamin’s Selected Writings (credited to Harry Zohn but clearly altered by a Harvard editor, since Zohn’s translation in Illuminations and Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism contains slightly different language):
The breakers, tumbling the images of the heavens,
Blended, in a solemn and mystical way,
The all-powerful chords of their rich music
With the colors of the sunset reflected in my eyes.

Compare these three Englishings and maybe you’ll agree that the crib is by far the best, Waldrop’s a distant second, and Howard’s a clunky travesty. The problem is that Howard has moved the adjectives from the second line to the beginning of the sentence so that the action is diluted. Instead of the image of breaking waves we are confronted first with wispy abstraction. He also pads out the second line, so that the rolling waves are bearing images “on the swell.”

Enters now the fray Brown, whose translation arrives festooned with the plaudits of luminaries. I was surprised at first not to see Patti Smith’s name among them, but then I spotted her blurb, in a place of honor above the breathless back-cover copy (which begins “Probing the depths of the modern psyche” and goes downhill from there).

And yet despite the cool-kid hype this is very good stuff. Brown’s solution to the breakers is not as appealingly straightforward as the Harvard translators’ crib but is more musical without seeming strained like Waldrop:
The swells, enfolding images of skies,
Mingled in a manner mystical and solemn
The omnipotent accords of their rich music
With the sunset colors reflected in my eyes.

The rhyme of “skies” and “eyes” is, for once, the very one found in the original—“cieux” and “yeux.” One might quibble with this or that word choice, but overall, simply by following Baudelaire’s syntax, Brown produces an effect in English not unlike Baudelaire’s in French.

Again and again throughout the volume, where Howard makes me wince, Brown makes me nod. Take the first stanza of the famous “The Swan,” in which Haussmann’s transformation of Paris is allegorized as the fall of Troy, and Baudelaire’s flâneur identifies with a pitiful swan escaped from its cage:
Paris changes … But in sadness like mine
nothing stirs—new buildings, old
neighborhoods turn to allegory,
and memories weigh more than stone.
(Howard)

Paris changes! But nothing in my melancholy
Has stirred! new palaces, scaffoldings, blocks,
Old neighborhoods, for me everything becomes allegory,
And my cherished memories more weighty than rocks.
(Brown)

It’s not that Howard is bad, exactly—he’s just not Baudelaire (here he sounds more like Pessoa somehow). “Mélancolie” becomes “sadness,” palaces and scaffoldings and city blocks are collapsed into “buildings,” cherished (“chers”) memories are just “memories.” As if specificity were a matter of indifference. The first person drops out of the poem. And line breaks, forget it—Howard enjambs in accordance with some private principle.

As a general rule, what I want from a translation is the strict sense of the original line, syntactically elegant (assuming the original is not intentionally inelegant). I waited till I’d written the above to check out Brown’s “Translator’s Note.” I’m gratified to discover there a confirmation of my idea of what he’s up to: “one has only to get out of the way, allowing sense and syntax to guide the composition.” Couldn’t have put it better myself. Why, he asks, does Howard translate “l’erreur” as “delusion” rather than, well, “error”? “I attempt semantic exactitude,” Brown says, which is not to say there is no music in his versions.

Benjamin astutely sidestepped the usual emphasis on Baudelaire’s morbid themes, his pursuit of what Rimbaud will call dérèglement de tous les sens, by focusing on his conspiracy “with language itself.” Baudelaire, he noted, “always avoided revealing himself to the reader.” His very similes “give the lie to the lyrical person and get into the text as disturbing intruders.” It’s easier to hear this in Brown’s versions, and the morbidity is more entrancing. The terrors of the night “crush the heart like a crumpled page”; “we feed our friendly regrets / Like beggars nourish their lice.” The clarity of Baudelaire’s ennui—“I am an old boudoir full of withered roses”—finds in Brown’s English a second home. Get lost in this mean world, get jostled by the crowd.

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Michael Robbins is the author of three books of poems, most recently Walkman, and a book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music. He has written for Book Post on translation of Rilke and Ovid, as well as Marcel Proust, Paul Muldoon, Allen Ginsberg, apocaplypse by fire, “Nancy,” the destruction of animals, and cheesy reading.

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