Baudelaire and the Translation of Modernity‪.‬

INVOLVING questions of fidelity and distance, and the reduction of the foreign to the familiar, translation enacts an ethical relation. Perhaps because of its potential to provoke ethical questioning, translation--as both an instrument of comprehension and a self-reflexive discovery of alterity--preoccupied Charles Baudelaire throughout his career, from his early rendering of Edgar Allen Poe into French to his "retranslation," in a larger sense, of modern life in his move from poetry to prose. Etymologically derived from trans (across) and latus (the past participle of ferre, to carry), translation evokes the idea of transportation or transfer. In the Middles Ages, for instance, the notions of translatio studii and translatio imperii carry with them this sense of transfer, the transfer of knowledge and political power from one civilization to another, respectively. In its more common usage, translation conveys the transmission of meaning from one language to another. In a wider sense, however, translation is more or less synonymous with the activity of interpretation: to translate is to make something comprehensible, accessible in terms of something else. As such, translation includes the act of rephrasing within a single language, as well as the use of one medium to reinterpret concepts expressed in another. This broader definition opens up a space for a consideration of form: what is communicated becomes inseparable from how it is communicated. This essay explores Baudelaire's engagement with translation as a means for unsettling understandings about poetry and reality and, more urgently, for thinking differently about the experience and framing of modern life. Beginning with an analysis of Baudelaire's art criticism and profound attraction to the visual arts, especially painting and caricature, I will examine the insights into modernity that each genre provided him, insights that he sought, in turn, to translate into poetic language. (1) I will then turn to the ethical dilemmas of translation that increasingly concerned Baudelaire, especially in his later prose poems, which betray a growing attention to what can be described as the limits of translatability.