Poe's Tattoo: Reading Fraternity in Baudelaire

In the prefatory essay to Histoires extraordinaires—the first collection of his translations of Poe's stories—Baudelaire points to his predecessor's forehead:

Dans ces derniers temps, un malheureux fut amené devant nos tribunaux, dont le front était illustré d'un rare et singulier tatouage: Pas de chance! Il portait ainsi au-dessus de ses yeux l'étiquette de sa vie, comme un livre son titre, et l'interrogatoire prouva que ce bizarre écriteau était cruellement véridique. Il y a dans l'histoire littéraire des destinées analogues, de vrais damnations—des hommes qui portent le mot guignon écrit en caractères mystérieux dans les plis sinueux de leur front.

Recently, a poor wretch was called to appear before our courts. His forehead was illustrated with a rare and singular tattoo: Pas de chance! He bore thus, above his eyes, the label of his life, like a book bears its title. And the trial proved that this bizarre notice was cruelly accurate. There are, in literary history, analogous destinies, true damnations—men who bear the word guignon written in mysterious characters in the sinuous folds of their foreheads.

("Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses oeuvres" 296)¹

To read Poe in Baudelaire's translation is, in the first place, to read the tattoo on Poe's brow. This is no straightforward, preliminary exercise. The tattoo of the convict to whom Baudelaire compares Poe is "rare and singular." Poe's tattoo—the mark of his "true damnation"—is even stranger. It is inscribed, says Baudelaire, not in alphabetic writing but in "mysterious characters." And its dark word, "guignon"—a word for bad luck that, unlike "pas de chance" or "malchance," is not formed by an accident of "chance"—deepens that mystery.²

The difference in meaning between "pas de chance" (the convict's tattoo) and "guignon" (Poe's) is not clear-cut. The two wordings substitute easily for one another, and Baudelaire easily could have had Poe's tattoo say "pas de chance" instead of "guignon." Baudelaire's insistence upon such a seemingly negligible difference has a strange effect. Paradoxically, were the two tattoos worded identically, the analogy between them would be less close. The material difference between them—the difference between the inked, alphabetical characters of the one tattoo and the "mysterious characters" of the other—would widen. Mirroring each other more perfectly, literal and figurative inscription would oppose each other more symmetrically, making it easier to dismiss Poe's tattoo as a mere decal of figurative language, to be tossed away once it had illustrated its point (namely, that "there are in literary history . . . true damnations," of which Poe's case is an example). In insisting upon a difference that would seem to make no difference, Baudelaire presents Poe's tattoo—the tattoo itself, and not only the fate it illustrates—as a matter of unchangeable fact. Though Poe's inkless tattoo is not available to observation in the same straightforward way that the convict's inked tattoo is, Baudelaire's description of it takes the form of hard reporting.

No matter how accurate Baudelaire's reporting may be, however, the strange fact of Poe's tattoo is bound to remain more difficult to believe than the fait divers reported in the papers, as it can be established only through a highly unreliable process of reading. The question about what is or is not there to be read on Poe's forehead inevitably falls back upon the head of the reader. There is no safe position from which to decide upon the authenticity of the mark of a "true damnation." If the damnation is true, then no amount of recognition of it can reverse it; the poet can be recognized only as unrecognized. Under such conditions, no reconciliation between the damned poet and the damning world is possible. Rather, the reader is forced to take sides. In the process, he or she is likely to stumble into a false position, especially if he or she comes down on the side of the "truly damned" poet. Finding him or herself on this side, even...