Alchemy and Amalgam: Translation in the Works of Charles Baudelaire (review)

This book is extremely welcome: Baudelaire as a translator remains relatively neglected, and, besides, our way of thinking about translation in Baudelaire's work needs to be pluralized. Salines sets out to trace 'the interaction between translation and creation' and to move away from 'traditional distinctions between Baudelaire's derivative and original writings'; the ultimate objective is to find 'a common approach to writing both in the translations and in the rest of Baudelaire's corpus' (p. 15). This opens up material ripe for revisitation: not just the translations, but the doublets, the adaptations, and the transpositions d'art. The first chapter surveys the range of Baudelaire's translational activity, looking for the presence of his voice and subjectivity in the target texts. Translation provides a valuable opportunity to act out in writing the dramas of spiritual ancestry, duality and identity, intuition and interpretation, evident, for example, in the particular selection of Poe's tales that Baudelaire makes for his Histoires extraordinaires and Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires. The book might in fact have begun with its second chapter, which provides a larger, national context for Baudelaire's various translational strategies. While nineteenth-century France fostered an outward-looking journalistic environment which treated foreign texts to multi-discourse treatments (translation, paraphrase, commentary, quotation, extract) and encouraged free, audience-orientated translation (Vigny, Sand), there was a strong counter-strain of scrupulous, source-orientated rendering (Madame de Staël, Chateaubriand). It is the former of these traditions that Baudelaire's version of De Quincey espouses (Chapter 3), constituted as it is of admirative translation, summary, paraphrase, commentary, syntactic reordering, restructuring, abbreviation, addition, complication of narrative temporality and a shifting narratorial relationship with De Quincey. The fourth chapter considers Baudelaire's attitudes to translation within the context of the literary property laws, developing notions of authorship and their connections with capital, and deconstructionist theories of translation, while Chapter 5, on Baudelaire's aesthetics of amalgame, explores the range of metaphors from alchemy, food and drugs, by which Baudelaire expresses his translational relationship with his sources: 'Text, drug, and alchemy all belong to the same thematics of transformation and transmutation, and are inextricably linked in Baudelaire's expression of creation' (p. 189). The final chapter is an absorbing meditation on the scope of translational practice in Baudelaire's work through a study of his doublets, his art criticism and his transpositions d'art. Salines's exploration of the intricate interactions of intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translation, of the textual, the metatextual and the intertextual, provides a significant insight into Baudelaire's pluralistic writing, into its constant slippages across the layers of critical/creative sedimentation. On occasion, Salines's arguments are perhaps too spelled out and there is some proneness to repetition. But these are small flaws in comparison with the wealth of textual insights and material for further thought and investigation that this book provides. This is a fascinating opportunity not only to see Baudelaire's engagement with 'dual writing' in the round, but also better to understand translation's part in Baudelaire's tireless elaboration of his own creativity.