Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Richard Howard (review)

Book Reviews87 the artes moriendi especially illuminating. Aries's discussion of the continuity between the medieval and the Renaissance periods is a particularly persuasive strand of the argument. Inevitably the occasional brief treatment of crucial issues and the scattered comments on the matters out ofcontext are irritating, but they are minor blemishes in a book so learned and probing. One is left after completion of the text with many thoughts and speculations on the shifting image of death in Western civilization: gentle, macabre, beautiful, invisible. BETTIE ANNE DOEBLER Arizona State University Charles Baudelaire. Les Fleurs du mal. Translated by Richard Howard. Boston: David R. Godine, 1982. 336p. Illustrated with nine original monotypes, Richard Howard's translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal is without doubt one of the most attractive new books of French poetry around. This is not to say, however, that there are no bones of contention. In his "Foreword," Richard Howard reveals that in regard to individual poems, "I have endeavored to serve them by an attempt to leave them alone, to get out of their way rather than to domesticate them." He further asserts that "wanting to keep Baudelaire, I wanted to keep him at a certain distance" (p. xxi). Howard's originality, then, consists of translations that in their freedom of expression only at times approximate the original. This originality is questionable when it concerns Baudelaire's verse. The verses of "A une Mendiante rousse": "Maint page épris du hasard/Maint seigneur et maint Ronsard/Epieraient pour le déduit/Ton frais réduit!" are unrecognizable in translation: "gentlemen sending flunkeys to find out/who owns the carriage always told to 'waitVat your smart address" ("To a Red-Haired Girl," p. 89). In the poem, "In Passing," Howard comes close to the thoughtof Baudelaire, but he loses the piquant force in the verse: "But where/is life — not this side of eternity?" (p. 98) as a substitute for: "Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?" ("A une Passante"), where the emphasis is on the woman, the fugitive beauty. Even more impoverished is the verse of "The Death of the Poor": "where we can count on lodging for the Night" for "Où l'on pourra manger, et dormir, et s'asseoir" of "La Mort des Pauvres." AU the evocations of the verb "s'asseoir" are lost in translation, namely that the poor, who have stood in attendance upon the rich during their lives, finally get a chance to sit down as part of their spiritual reward. It would seem that in his use of alliterative verse, Howard fails to maintain equilibrium. The "banal buckram" ("To the Reader," p. 5) for "canevas banal" might, perhaps, pass inspection, but "the dear departed dowdy years" of "Meditation" (p. 173) for "les défuntes Années" ("Recueillement") presents difficulties. It might be the translator's license to substitute "Senegal" (p. 103) for "du Gange," "Bourbon" (p. 89) for "Valois," or to credit Hippocrates (p. 20) with the remark that time is short and art is long; still, what is gained poetically from this procedure? The naming of Faust in "Autumn Sonnet" (p. 68) is conjecture, as the identity of "ô ma si froide Marguerite" is not known for certain. At times, certain expressions appear to be trop recherchées as opposed to the simplicity of Baudelaire's vocabulary. To say that "Horror coruscates amongyour gems" ("Hymn to Beauty," p. 29) or to refer to "History's hecatombs" ("A Fantastic Engraving," p. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW 72), the "drunken maenads" ("Conversation," p. 61), and birds that sing "endless obbligatos to my trysts" ("Parisian Landscape," p. 87) might well correspond to the basic situation evoked in the respective poems, but these expressions accomplish little else than to illustrate the distance between the translator and the poet. Certain poems ("The Balcony" and "Evening Harmony") capture to a great extent the atmosphere and the feeling of the originals; in these poems, though, Howard has remained closer to the originals. Undeniably, some liberal translations are actually more precise in an English context (e.g. "the primrose path" [p. 39] of "Posthumous Regret" for the more vague "course aventureuse"). An instance of alliteration that is...