Dandy, prodigal, debaucher, voluptuary, opium addict, convicted blasphemer and offender of public morals, Charles Baudelaire is considered one of the two or three greatest French poets, and is assuredly the most widely read around the world. Born in Paris in 1821, he died there forty-six miserable years later, in that fabulous city he both loved and hated -- and turned to so often in his writings -- died of syphilis in his mother's arms, having squandered his inheritance, drowning in debt, moving from one squalid furnished room to another, one step ahead of the landlord and his creditors, scorned by those he scorned, a failure in his own eyes and to the smug, stuffy, self-righteous bourgeoisie he so loathed.

Archetype of the poete maudit, Baudelaire is known chiefly for his Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), a collection of impeccably rhymed and metered poems, containing -- his recklessly disordered life notwithstanding -- scarcely a single vulgar, scatological or obscene word. It was, rather, the subject matter that got him into trouble with the law, ostensibly for the half dozen poems considered too sexually explicit, to use one of our lovely current euphemisms, but more likely, I suspect, because the work as a whole posed an intolerable threat to the received ideas of the times -- the perfectibility of man, progress unending, prosperity and happiness for all, liberte, egalite, fraternite -- those luminous ideals handed down from the Enlightenment, now become hypocritical shibboleths masking the avarice, venality and concupiscence of the despised bourgeoisie.

Upon first reading these poems, the astute Victor Hugo, preeminent novelist, playwright and poet of his age, pronounced them "un nouveau frisson" (a new shiver). And so they were. For beside casting a cold eye on the world around him, Baudelaire dug deep into the darkest recesses of his own mind and soul and discovered -- rediscovered -- Original Sin. The malevolent Imp of the Perverse, the irrational, blood-lusting Beast in Man, the dark side of eternal Human Nature.

More surely than Marx stood Hegel on his head, Baudelaire turned the Enlightenment inside-out, and, prophetic like most great writers, helped set the emotional and intellectual tone of the coming century, our century, this benighted century of mind-boggling, gut-churning, soul-searching atrocities (Need I enumerate?), side by side -- irony of ironies -- with the most astounding advances in science and technology. How quaint, how hollow those noble Enlightenment ideals now seem to us Thoroughly Post-modern Millies!

pictured, French engraver Charles Meryon's 1853 view of Paris is the cover artwork for this 1962 edition of Baudelaire's prose poems.

For but one manifestation of Baudelaire's prescience, consider the present fraternal savagery in the Balkans (for are not the contending parties all Slavs?), and consult Baudelaire's prose poem "The Cake," a parable in which two young peasant boys, apparently brothers, fight viciously over a scrap of "almost" white bread that to them was cake. (But not even Baudelaire could have envisaged the sui generis Holocaust.)He set the tone, and the tone was, is, ironic, sardonic, cynical, foreboding. And the dominant emotions were, are, anomie and alienation, dissolution and desperation, bitterness and resignation, and, alas, more than a hint of self-pity. With such a perspective on life, it was only natural that he would carry on long-term flirtations with the Prince of Darkness and the Grim Reaper, the former affair more fanciful than real, the latter more real than fanciful.

This tone and these sentiments permeate Baudelaire's works, and, given the history of our time, only the most dedicated Pollyannas could be insensitive to them. But lest this Weltanschauung seem too bleak, too morbid, too forbidding, be assured that there is another side to Baudelaire, indeed several other sides, more positive, more sanguine, more contemplative, more exuberant. There are, for example, his worship of beauty, "Goddess and Immortal," his obsession with artistic integrity, his mordant, sardonic wit, his compassion for the downtrodden and destitute, his adoration of beautiful women and their sensuality (never mind his hatred of their "impermeability"), and above all and throughout, there is the magic of his language, which elevates and redeems even the darkest of the poems. As with Baudelaire, so it is, in varying degrees, with the rest of us poor mortals. We live our lives in different spheres, spheres within spheres, from small to large, from nuclear family to wide world, and in some of them we may, with a little luck, experience more joy than sorrow, more adventure than tedium, more success than failure, more warmth than coldness, more love than hatred or, worse, indifference.
 

With such a perspective  on life, it was only natural that he would carry on long-term flirtations with the  Prince of Darkness and The Grim Reaper, the former affair more fanciful than real, the later more real than fanciful.

In form, if not in content, Flowers of Evil marked a culmination of all the French poetry in verse that preceded it, and the beginning of its demise. To take its place, it was Baudelaire himself who, for all intents and purposes, originated a brand new genre, the prose poem, to which he devoted the last dozen years of his life, and which, indeed, he considered his crowning achievement. In a letter to his friend and publisher, which serves as an introduction to the collection Le Spleen de Paris, ou Petits Poemes en prose, Baudelaire wrote:

"Who among us on his more ambitious days has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical but with neither meter nor rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to lend itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the undulations of reverie, to the jolts and spasms of conscience?"

And such, too, was my own ambition in rendering in English the fifty pieces that comprise this work. The task was not easy, for the rhythms of the French language are considerably different from those of English. When translations fail, as they so often do; that is, when they read unmistakably like translations, it is not so much, I believe, because of an occasional mistake in meaning or an unidiomatic phrase here and there, but precisely because the translator has failed to take into account the differences in the music of the two languages.

It had always surprised me that until recently there existed but one complete English version of these prose poems, for Le Spleen de Paris is a truly seminal work, translated and imitated numerous times in many languages. Within the space of a few short years following its initial publication in France (1869), no fewer than four different versions came out in Russian! It was not until 1947 that the first complete English translation appeared, and while it is a competent, workmanlike rendition, it is hardly a triumph of the art, suffering in particular from being somewhat bland and rather dated in its language. The other complete translation, published just three years ago, and apparently done as part of a doctoral dissertation, is not worth the paper it is printed on. It is replete with errors, including a few unforgivable blunders that not even a careful second-year French student would commit; moreover, the English is anachronistic in both directions, a mongrel mixture of old hat on the one side, and up-to-the-minute on the other. Did the felon who perpetrated this abortion have a tin ear? More like lead.

It has often been said that every generation needs a new translation of the classics, which is only partly true, and then usually because the preceding ones have been frankly bad. But exceptions -- translations that have become classics in their own right -- leap to mind: the King James Bible, for one, Fitzgerald's Rubayat, for another; and in France, Baudelaire's own renderings of the poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849), by whom he was greatly influenced. In Baudelaire's case. what gives these translations, as well as his own poetry, both prose and verse, their enduring value is the elegance, the purity, the timelessness of his language, a language that, with few changes, could well have been written in the 17th century -- or just yesterday. No ephemeral slang or jargon, no localisms, archaisms or neologisms. Nor is there any trace of the pompous, turgid, florid style so popular in his own time, and which he despised. If in content Baudelaire can be said to represent the nether side of Romanticism, in form he is a perfect exemplar of Classicism.

Thus, wishing to remain loyal to the spirit of Baudelaire, I ruled out the ornate English of the mid-19th century, along with the slangy, trashy English of today. No forsooths or bounders, no rip-offs or scuzz bags. I strove, rather, for the language of a Joseph Conrad or a Vladimir Nabokov (It's interesting, is it not, that of these two masters of English, one's native tongue was Polish, the other's, Russian). I strove, that is, for an English as timeless as a Harris tweed, an English that might wear well for at least a century.

In short, in translating Le Spleen de Paris my ambition was to create a classic on its own. "What's that you say, presumptuous old fool?" shouts Calliope in my ear. "You aspired to create a masterpiece? You? What nerve! At your age?" Well . . . yes. Why not? Better to aim high and miss than to aim low and shoot yourself in the foot. Besides. my doctor tells me I'm in fine fettle and good for another sixty-six years.

Aside from my personal affinity for Baudelaire and the challenge that translating him presented, the other reason that impelled me to undertake this task -- a task more arduous than the uninitiated might imagine -- was to make this marvelous little work more available to the general reading public, from which it has been largely hidden. Overshadowed by the very famous (notorious?) Flowers of Evil, though much less so in continental Europe than in the English-speaking world, it seemed to me high time to do justice to this collection of prose poems and provide the reader with a translation that approximates the beauty of the original. Whether or not I have succeeded remains for others to judge.

A few words on the title of the work. Occasionally known in France as Petits Poemes en prose, but much more commonly as Le Spleen de Paris, which seems to have been Baudelaire's choice (It was published posthumously, with the issue undecided), the collection is generally referred to as Paris Spleen in critical writing in English, and it is the title carried by the first complete translation.

Paris Spleen, however, is a serious mistranslation. Perhaps the closest approximation to the common French use of the word spleen is Weltschmerz, but since Paris Weltschmerz would hardly do as the title of an English-language edition, I hit upon -- eureka! -- Paris Blues. And, indeed, this work speaks much more of boredom, melancholy, weariness and despair than of anger, malice and irascibility. As for the translator of the more recent edition, he simply gave up on finding a good English equivalent and manufactured a title of his own, The Parisian Prowler, which sounds like we might be in for a long evening with a novel about a French Jack the Ripper.

The three selections that follow were chosen from among a dozen or so pieces that, with a stretch, could be classified under the rubric "women." (Nothing in Baudelaire's oeuvre is easily classified.) The other 35 to 40 poems in the book are so disparate in both topic and tone that one would be hard put to squeeze even any two into a single category; thus, it seemed to me that to choose, perforce, only a very limited number of these diverse pieces might leave the reader with a false impression of the whole, and I abandoned the attempt. Here, then, is a small sampling from the one subject Baudelaire returned to again and again: women, in all their sublime and inscrutable variety. I hope you enjoy these three little poems in prose. In fact, I hope you enjoy them so much that you will be inspired to read the entire collection, even in bad or mediocre translation. (click on the link below to read the translated works).

Dr. Friedman's publications include the translation of Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins.