Trans-verse: Prose Poetry, Translation and Border Crossing in Baudelaire and Emerson

Abstract

This essay proposes theorizing the genre trouble of prose poetry by way of the matrix of translation. Through examinations of various nineteenth-century prose-poetry projects, (for example, those of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Schlegel, and Poe), it asks whether we might better understand the function of the prose poem by abandoning the antagonism implicit in the assignment of generic distinction, and instead approaching such texts as interweavings of the poetic into the prosaic, and the prosaic into the poetic. “Translation,” as a model not only of cross-linguistic transference, but of any process of cross-pollination, would therefore be an analogon of prose-poetry composition. This essay therefore proposes that we read prose poems as translations, not of other texts (such as Baudelaire’s prose poems have commonly been read, with respect to the verse poems of the Fleurs du mal), but of the genres of “prose” and “poetry” themselves. At the same time, it asks how the hybrid form of prose poetry informs 19th-century conceptions of the relation between languages, or translation, specifically in the work of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and ultimately argues that each project shaped the other.