The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal) by Charles Baudelaire, Translated by Aaron Poochigian
I like the pink cover
The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal)
By Charles Baudelaire (Author), Aaron Poochigian (Translator), Dana Gioia (Introduction by), Daniel Handler (Afterword by)
400 pages. Liveright. $27.95.
I.
It is easy, in our age of informational over-abundance, to assume that there are no surprises left, either in literature or in life. One can, without even realizing it, believe that, just as there are no hidden cities unknown to anyone with an internet service provider, history’s greatest authors have all appeared, been discovered, and left their mark on the world, and that their once-revolutionary works have now become part of the common firmament of our culture. You can always read new poets, new novelists, but what are the chances of a just-written volume having the same world-shaking power as a classic book? It is a dreary way to view the world, and a wrong one.
Baudelaire was a poet who delighted in surprises. His poem “To One Who Is Too Cheerful” (which was banned in an 1857 obscenity trial) begins with Baudelaire raphsodzing upon a woman who is as “lovely as the countryside./Like breezy days without a cloud.” His sentimental, almost cloying encomiums to this woman belie the fact that when Baudelaire turns to nature itself, he only finds “great ennui.” Finally, his adoration for the woman becomes dark obsession:
I wish I could
glide thief-like over to your bed
and climb your body’s treasure-house
and spoil your all-too-healthy rind
by mutilating your tempting breast
While “To One Who Is Too Cheerful,” like all of the verse in The Flowers of Evil, defies reduction to a simple metaphor, it is easy to imagine Baudelaire’s beloved as the poetic tradition that he defiles in a mix of ardor and madness. Baudelaire filled his poems with allusions to Greek and Roman classics (one of them is even written entirely in Latin) and wrote in rigorously formal verse, but The Flowers of Evil indulges in all sorts of grotesqueries of violence and sex, praises narcotic delirium, and refuses any kind of moral meaning. The transgression is one not just of subject matter but of form: the syntax of his verse is frequently knotty, ambiguous, and hard to decipher.
His great influence was Poe. From Poe’s gothic intimations and velvety, ornamented verse, Baudelaire added the grit and blood of the Paris streets. Whereas Poe the poet is a shadowy hidden enigma, Baudelaire’s poetic personality is upfront, alive to all the senses. Poets before Baudelaire had written baroquely, with meanings hard to decipher under many layers, but The Flowers of Evil defies any meaning at all. It is just itself.
But it is also much more than that. The real surprise of Baudelaire’s verse is not merely that he makes the shift from love poetry to violence in “To One Who is Too Cheerful” - any adolescent with a fevered mind could make such a move (though with far worse prosody).1 It is that Baudelaire can appreciate a much wider spectrum of misery. In “Reversibility,” he confronts the “Healthy Angel” with the image of the diseased man who “limps through hospital rooms” with the hope to see “a few stray beams” of sunlight and “does his best to speak but just makes noise”; to the “Angel of Beauty” he poses “the hideous/torment of seeing, in a person’s eyes,/ a former passion turning to a chore.”
All the same, Baudelaire’s vision is not one of infinite pessimism. He finds in squalor not just beauty but also a spirit and energy for living. Just two poems after “Reversibility,” he is rhapsodizing about the “white-rosy dawn” which “opens and yawns with infinite allure,/for downcast men who ache and still aspire.” Angels and Devils exist in Baudelaire’s poetry, but they interest him largely in so far as they recast or change our perception of the world - of the murky middle between salvation and damnation.
Similarly, as Dana Goia observes in his introduction to the volume under review, Baudelaire’s politics were generally of a reactionary aristocratic type, but in the fateful year of 1848, he embraced the most exhilarating currents of revolution (before turning back to the right soon enough). Both Baudelaire’s conservatism and his radicalism come from his sense of nobility, his feeling that there must be something higher than the everyday.
II.
Have I read Les Fleurs du mal? It would be strange to write this review if I hadn’t, but in a truly precise sense the answer is no: I’ve only read in full the Aaron Poochigian’s translation, The Flowers of Evil. His translation, however, is followed directly by the full French-language version of the book, allowing for comparisons between the two.
Examine this stanza from Baudelaire’s “Autumn Sonnet”:
Aimons-nous doucement. L’Amour dans sa guérite,
Ténébreux, embusqué, bande son arc fatal.
Je connais les engins de son vieil arsenal
Here it is Poochigian’s translation:
Let us love sweetly. Ambushed in his lair,
dark Cupid pulls his lethal longbow tight.
I know the weapons that he keeps in there.
You do not have to have any sort of proficiency in French to see how Poochigian fails to capture the tense but seductive rhythm of Baudelaire’s original verse. In particular, the absence of those fine three-syllable words in the second line - Ténébreux, embusqué - makes Poochigian’s lines seem a little flabby, a little thin.
Poochigian writes in his translator’s note that because “English has a far larger vocabulary than French,” he has used “the full breadth of the English lexicon” rather than use the same English word each time a French word recurs in Baudelaire’s poetry. Yet for the most part I found his vocabulary to consist of commonplace words of 21st century English. Poochigian has, however, admirably made his translations rigorously formal, with rhyme and meter that are intended to give some approximate sense of the style of the French original.
Funnily enough, one of Poochigian’s translational habits is to Frenchify his version of the verse: he adds to Baudelaire’s poetry words such as “Malbec Cabernet,” “derriere,” and “negligee” (that last word, interestingly, is only used to mean a women’s dressing gown in English, per Wikipedia). At one point, “soufle de cœur” becomes "cri de cœur" - though I don’t have enough knowledge of French to rate the plausibility of this substitution, I found it a choice worth noting down.
The afterword to this translation, by YA author Daniel Handler, is a bit too twee in tone for a treatment of a poet as transgressive and original at Baudelaire. At one point, Handler notes that the first section of The Flowers of Evil, “Spleen and Ideal,” shares its name with “an album by the arty music group Dead Can Dance, who combine music from disparate cultures and eras into long, drony pieces perfect for making out in a dorm room, and that’s just about perfect.”2
While Handler uses his afterword to lament “the haphazard hierarchies by which pedants try to regulate art,” the poet and critic Dana Goia in his introduction jumps right into one of those haphazard hierarchies by declaring in his first sentence that “Charles Baudelaire was the first modern poet.” Per Goia, Baudelaire is the first modern poet because of his “aestheticization of evil” which “overturned conventional notions of beauty and offered for admiration ‘objects repugnant’ in both sensory and moral terms.”
While I bristle at Goia’s generalizations and categorizations, he does provide in his introduction a brief, effective biographical sketch of Baudelaire, an illuminating analysis of Les Fleurs du mal as a whole, and some persuasive arguments about Baudelaire’s overall poetic outlook. Handler, and Poochigian in his translator’s note, also have worthwhile claims to make. The real flaw, it seems to me, in the critical commentary attached to this translation of Les Fleurs du mal is the air of certainty regarding a poet you can never be certain of. Part of the visceral immediacy of Baudelaire’s poetry is its disorienting effect, and a successful commentator on Baudelaire should capture some of this disorientation.
Of a particular problem in this regard are Poochigian’s endnotes to the poems, which simply catalog every reference, no matter how un-obscure. He explains who King Midas, Abel and Cain, and Victor Hugo were.3 When there is a mystery regarding Les Fleurs du mal, such as what “Drawing by an Unknown Master” inspired his poem “A Martyr” or the identity of “Delphine and Hippolyta” (two women who are the subject of a poem but seem unconnected to any real life persons or literary work), Poochigian simply notes that scholars have been unable to come up with answers. There may be some scholarly standards Poochigian is getting after in his terse footnotes, but I would have wanted some analysis, some interpretations, some theories.
With this in mind, here’s my note to the reader: with Baudelaire, your greatest surprise may be what you find inside yourself.
But perhaps the simple transgressions of adolescence are also inventions of Baudelaire.
As atrociously written as that sentence is, it introduced me to Dead Can Dance, so I can’t harangue it too much.
Edward Mendelsohn: “The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway seems to have been edited for readers who do not exist, readers who use scholarly editions but who need footnotes identifying Tolstoy and Picasso.”