30 The New York ReviewEnjoyment is a science... when you
have given to society your knowl-
edge, your industry, your labor and
your money, you claim back your
payment in enjoyments of the body,
the reason, and the imagination.This tone, while jeering, is not yet cur-
dled; the poet is strong- minded but im-
bued with youthful optimism. Young
Baudelaire will be recognizable in late
Baudelaire, but stripped of politics
(after the defeat of 1848, he was “depo-
liticized”) and hope.
Looking at art was for the young
Baudelaire what it would be for Rilke
half a century later—an apprenticeship
to poetry. A year before The Salon of
1846 , he had published his first poem,
“À une dame créole,” dedicated to his
girlfriend, the French Haitian dancer
and demimondaine Jeanne Duval. He
was working on a poetry collection with
the title Les lesbiennes, and other writ-
ing projects—some fiction, a collection
of aphorisms. He was also living a life-
style that rock stars a century later imi-
tated. It began in earnest after he passed
his baccalauréat exam (though he was
expelled from his lycée) and enrolled
in law school. Richard Sieburth puts it
pithily in his extensive chronology at the
end of Late Fragments: “1840... First
poems. Debts. Prostitutes. Syphilis.”
At their wit’s end, his mother and his
stepfather, General Jacques Aupick,
sent the twenty- year- old Baudelaire to
Calcutta on a steamboat; he hopped off
at Mauritius and Réunion before wan-
dering back to France. Following that,
he came into his father’s inheritance
and started squandering it immedi-
ately on a fancy address, to which he
brought Duval as his mistress, treat-
ing her and his cohort to all the perks
of the high life in Paris. The Aupicks
came down on him again—this time
naming a notary, one Narcisse Ancelle,
as the trustee of Baudelaire’s estate.
He was, in modern terms, placed under
conservatorship, which remained until
his death. But this did nothing to stop
Baudelaire’s profligacy. In defiance of
Ancelle, parents, society, and even the
syphilis that was wrecking his health,
he persisted in his habits and merely
racked up debt, which tormented him
and led him down a treacherous path of
evasions and double- dealings.By 1857 Les lesbiennes had evolved
into Les Fleurs du mal, exactly one hun-
dred poems in five thematic sections,
meticulously assembled and organized,
assiduously copyedited, formally per-
fected. Baudelaire, now thirty- six, had
been working on these verses since he
was twenty- one. The book was brought
out by an anarchist publisher, Poulet-
Malassis, in an edition of 1,300 copies.
Shortly after, the Ministry of the Inte-
rior brought both poet and publisher to
trial on charges of obscenity and blas-
phemy, and won its case. Only partly,
though: the book was allowed to stand
if six particularly egregious poems
were excised (they were not reinstated
until 1949). Even this was a crushing
blow: it maimed the architectural and
numerical perfection of the book. The
notoriety resulting from the trial did
not translate into sales, and Les Fleurs
du mal was a commercial failure.
Baudelaire embraced his aesthetic
martyrdom. He continued to add to the
book, publishing a second edition in
1861, with a sixth thematic section, Ta b -leaux parisiens, including new poems
written during a creative storm at his
mother’s house in Honfleur, on the Nor-
mandy coast. These poems are notable
for what Sieburth calls Baudelaire’s
“evolution toward the prosaic,” away
from Romanticism and into the modern.
In Honfleur he produced one of his
most powerful and tender poems, “Le
cygne.” Its thirteen quatrains, whose
alexandrines are almost bursting with
imagery too newfangled for them to
contain, toggle between a Paris in the
throes of Haussmann’s modernization
schemes and Andromache after the fall
of Troy. Andromache is a figure of exile;
in the Aeneid, she builds a “toy Troy”
and feeds its river, the Simoïs, with her
tears. Baudelaire, too, is in exile, as
the medieval warrens of his youth are
demolished: “The old Paris is gone.”
He sees, incongruously, a swan in the
street where a menagerie once stood
(here in Poochigian’s translation):a swan, who had somehow found
freedom, passed
clumsily, wings laid flat, along the
walk.
His wealth of feathers draggled in
the dust.
Right by a ditch, he opened up his
beak.Flapping excitedly, wings on the
ground,
heart roused by lakes he once was
giddy with,
he said, “Come on and rain, sky!
Thunder, sound!”
I see him as a strange and fatal
myth.Although Baudelaire thinks of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, this isn’t Zeus in dis-
guise. This swan with no lake is closely
related to an earlier bird in Les Fleurs
du mal (there are numerous doubles
throughout the collection, reinforc-
ing his theory of nature’s “correspon-
dences”)—the albatross, a symbol for
the poet. Graceful and at home in the
sky, he is ungainly and out of place on
the ship where he lands, exhausted, only
to become sport for bored sailors. There,
in a precursor of the lines above, he “lets
his expansive white wings dangle, like/a
pair of oars, clumsily at his side.”
A valediction for Paris, “Le cygne”
is also a valediction for Duval, his on-
again, off- again paramour, who was, at
this point, dying faster of syphilis than
he was (he financially supported her,
however meagerly, to the end):I think of a black girl, tubercular,
searching with tired eyes, as she
slogs through mud,
for palms she knew in Africa
somewhere
behind a massive barrier of cloud.For Baudelaire, the ideal of beauty will
always be punished on this earth. And
that is perhaps why, after this final burst
of metrical, rhymed verse, he ceased to
write it. He turned—to punish himself,
or the world?—to the prose poem.Is there a definitive English translation
of Les Fleurs du mal? Richard How-
ard’s 1982 edition may come close, but
it always seems a labor that ever falls
short of its ideal. The disparity between
English, a rattlebag containing some
600,000 unique words, and French,
containing a more mellifluous 100,000,is the first obstacle. If the literary apo-
theosis of English is Shakespeare, for
French it is Racine: Clair, simple et
logique—clear, simple, and logical,
which may strike an English reader as
verses stripped of poetry. Likewise, iam-
bic pentameter doesn’t map onto the
French alexandrine at all well.
And then there is the problem of
rhyme in modern times—with our ears
being so out of tune with it, how can
quatrains escape the taint of light verse?
There’s nothing light about Baudelaire.
Histrionic, indignant, lustful, scathing,
and even sometimes, more than some-
times, tender and tremulous—think
luxe, calme et volupté—but never light.
Ideally, one wants a language austere
and chaste to discipline high- pitched
tones, vocatives that seethe, imagery
that rubs our noses in filth. The danger
is that devils and angels and corpses and
odalisques inevitably appear anachro-
nistic and poncif to contemporary eyes.
Aaron Poochigian’s translation was
written at breakneck speed. “The
months I spent summoning and sub-
mitting to Baudelaire (the months of
March, April, May, and June of 2020,
as the Covid- 19 pandemic raged) were
intense and exhausting,” he writes in a
translator’s note. The correspondence
between a world enveloped in a miasma
of disease and Baudelaire’s sickly an-
thology (a word whose Greek derivation
means a floral bouquet) is aptly evoked.
Four months seems a rather short
time to translate 133 poems, and
Poochigian’s versions do bear the traces
of haste. Take the famous prefatory
poem, “To the Reader,” a direct address
in the manner of “To the Bourgeois” in
the Salon. Here is how Stanley Kunitz
and Robert Lowell begin their versions
of that poem, both with a hammering:Ignorance, error, cupidity and sin
Possess our souls and exercise
our flesh;
Habitually we cultivate remorse
As beggars entertain and nurse
their lice.
(Kunitz)Infatuation, sadism, lust, avarice
possess our souls and drain the
body’s force;
we spoonfeed our adorable
remorse,
like whores or beggars nourishing
their lice.
(Lowell)And here’s Poochigian:For all of us, greed, folly, error,
vice
exhaust the body and obsess the
soul,
and we keep feeding our
congenial
remorse the same way vagrants
nurse their lice.Baudelaire’s line “La sottise, l’er-
reur, le péché, la lésine” loses its force
in Poochigian’s version, which begins
with a weak prepositional phrase that
isn’t there in the original. The empha-
sis on the list is important: it is echoed
later in the poem in the lines “Si le viol,
le poison, le poignard, l’incendie” and
“Mais parmi les chacals, les panthères,
les lices, /Les singes, les scorpions, les
vautours, les serpents... ” The list is a
rhythmic, incantatory device, but the
trick is to maintain it within the integ-
rity of the line, as Kunitz’s and Lowell’stranslations do. Likewise, the enjamb-
ment of the third line—“ congenial/
remorse” is an infelicity committed for
the sake of a weak rhyme.
A similar problem besets another
important poem early in the collection.
In “Correspondences,” the first line
is immediately enjambed and made
awkward: “Nature, a temple in which
porticoes/are growing, gives at times
confounding talks.” Richard Wilbur
(God rest his soul!) has it thus:Nature is a temple whose living
colonnades
Breathe forth a mystic speech in
fitful sighs;...The mastery of rhythm here—from the
trochees that switch into iambs on the
other side of the caesura in the hexame-
ter of the first line, to the perfect iambic
pentameter of the second, gratifying
the ear—suggests to us what Baude-
laire might sound like. (As he says in
“La Beauté”: “Je hais le mouve ment
qui déplace les lignes.” Poochigian: “I
hate excitement that displaces lines.”)
Occasionally a line struck me as
appallingly maladroit. “Sur ce teint
fauve et brun, le fard était superbe!”
from “Jewels” is rendered, ludicrously,
“What great artiste had daubed her
outside brown?”(Compare that to
Richard Howard’s translation, in which
the room’s dim firelight “flushed that
amber-colored flesh with blood!”) Call
it a first draft that simply needed more
time to ripen. Yet the haste with which
it was produced, the short, tacked- on
afterword by Daniel Handler (aka
Lemony Snicket), and even Dana
Gioia’s introduction, which is compre-
hensive but passionless—left me won-
dering who this book is for.In 1861, after publishing the second
edition of Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire
did an about- face: he campaigned for a
vacant seat at the Academie française.
He was deeply in debt, his health was
going, and he wanted to redeem him-
self after the humiliation of his trial
and the mangling of his book. He was
also fighting, in a way, on behalf of
other nonmembers of the establishment
who shared Baudelaire’s belief in l’art
pour l’art, like Flaubert and Théophile
Gautier (to whom Les Fleurs du mal was
dedicated). The effort failed miserably,
and the poet, waking up to his mistake,
wrote, “Today, January 23, 1862, I was
given a special warning: I felt the wind
of the wing of imbecility pass over me.”
Baudelaire had entered, as Sieburth
puts it, his endgame. That is where Late
Fragments begins. Composed of un-
finished works written after 1861 and
appearing in English together for the
first time, Flares, My Heart Laid Bare,
Belgium Disrobed, and a selection of
“late prose poems and projects” deliver
what their titles seem to promise: a soul
stripped of guises and illusions. They
were unpublished in his lifetime, except
for the prose poems, which he published
(sometimes repeatedly) to generate in-
come. “From the very outset,” Sieburth
writes, “Baudelaire conceived the prose
poem as a form that emerges after or
that belatedly displaces” the lyric.Baudelaire’s late turn toward the
fragmentary—or toward the form
of the unfinished, the abandoned,
the aborted, the ruined, or the à
venir—involved not only a con-Mlinko 29 31 .indd 30 3 / 9 / 22 2 : 05 PM