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Reviewed by:
  • Baudelaire’s World
  • William Olmsted
Lloyd, Rosemary. Baudelaire’s World. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002. Pp. xv + 248, Illus: 14 b/w. ISBN0-8014-4026-2

Rosemary Lloyd's latest book brings a fresh approach to Baudelaire studies, thanks to the savvy use of English translations to stress elements easily lost or unappreciated by non-French readers. These elements are not confined to prosody or meaning. Unlike Clive Scott's sharply focused Translating Baudelaire (Exeter: Exeter UP, 2000), Lloyd's scrutiny relates Baudelaire the poet to the other "Baudelaires": the critic, the essayist, the translator, the irritable thinker, the prose-poet, the would-be dramatist. Although not a biography in the full sense, her study avoids separating the man and the work. Lloyd wants to indicate how a reading that honors the complexities of his writings might proceed. And in this respect Baudelaire's World achieves its goal.

The book's organization follows a thread of suggestions prompted by images from "Le Cygne." Although Lloyd slightly deviates from this scheme (Chapter 4 on Baudelaire's esthetic convictions, Chapter 7 on friendship, Chapter 10 on his ekphrastic appropriations), most of her study develops motifs gathered in "Le Cygne" and explored throughout his work: childhood, women, reading, the city, dreams, art, nature, death (2). Her analysis centers on how Baudelaire "read" the Parisian scene in terms of collisions between literature and banal reality, immediate impressions and memories both personal and collective. The poem emerges as a palimpsest of other texts (Ovid's, Defoe's, Chateaubriand's, Baudelaire's youthful "A une Malabaraise"); but, as Lloyd astutely notes, "the reading of texts and of memories is echoed and intensified by the determination to read the city itself as a series of symbols and suggestions" (20). Lloyd skips theoretical controversy (Walter Benjamin and his German successors are not discussed) in order to trace the interlocking patterns among poem, poet and those surreptitious interpreters the translators. Accordingly, Chapter 2 examines how eleven translators (twelve if we include her own superb version) have dealt with key phrases and stanzas of "Le Cygne." These pages alone, thanks to their extraordinary attunement to Baudelaire's French and the resources of English, are worth the price of the book.

Chapter 3 begins by observing how the alexandrine line of "Le Cygne" lends prominence to the word "veuve"; Lloyd then explores the archetypal relation of widows and children in Baudelaire's works. She takes us from his poems on childhood through his comments on De Quincey to the prose poems, judicially weighing the nostalgic elements against the brutal description of a child's suicide in "La Corde." Chapter 5 commences with a reminder of the drive to escape manifested in "Le Cygne" and often repeated in Baudelaire's works. Lloyd bridges the years separating his journey to the Indian Ocean, with its novice sonnet "A une dame créole," to the later writings on intoxicants, and carefully articulates the complex interrelations among escapism, dreams, memories and artificial stimulants. Equally rich is the discussion of women in Chapter 6. Less interested in convicting Baudelaire for his bad attitudes than in understanding "the wonderful variety of Baudelaire's [End Page 196] women, their quirks and their perversity, their individuality and their courage" (113), Lloyd notes the difference between him and Nerval. She then compares various translations of "Le Balcon" and plays off Proust to disclose the more disquieting aspects of the famous (but rarely scrutinized) "Les Petites Vieilles." Chapter 7 shows us a neglected aspect of Baudelaire, his "somewhat prickly, somewhat formal, capacity for friendship" (116). Professor Lloyd's steady gaze neither glosses over nor adds tarnish to Baudelaire's relations with figures like Banville, Champfleury, Delacroix, Manet, Asselineau, and Poulet-Malassis. Although brief, the treatment is panoramic, ranging from the disillusionment that marked his relations with Champfleury to the love felt for him by Asselineau. Chapter 8, "City of Dreams," returns to motifs derived from "Le Cygne." Professor Lloyd frames Baudelaire against other city poets - Nerval, Barbier, Banville, Esquiros - to good effect, eliciting the distinctive features of Baudelaire's handling of urban scenes. The argument persuasively locates the poems of "Tableaux parisiens" within the dual context of Baudelaire's...

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