Baudelaire Research Articles

Creating a Poetics of Allusion in Two Early French Translations by Seamus Heaney

Early in his career, Seamus Heaney translated two French poems, an unpublished Renaissance ‘spiritual sonnet’ and a nineteenth-century narrative poem in rhyming quatrains that appeared in North. The translations invite attention to his methods in creating the sonorities and prayerful themes of a Renaissance sonnet, and the linguistic and political significance of a poetics of allusion in his translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Le Squelette Laboureur’. Heaney’s use of an allusive technique in translating Gabrielle de Coignard’s ‘Sonnet Spirituel’ (‘Prayer’) and his politically charged English version of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Le Squelette Laboureur’ (‘The Digging Skeleton’) lay the foundation and supply the encouragement for his later work in translating Sweeney Astray, Beowulf, Pascoli’s The Last Walk, and Aeneid Book VI. These French translations demonstrate his skill and inventiveness with diction and syntax. They reveal his use of Northern Irish locutions on two occasions: portraying the private prayer of a soul in extremis and showing the sufferings endured by physically weakened and exploited labourers.

Mandan Dandies: Trade, Intimacy and Ornamental Excess in a Destroyed 1832 Portrait by George Catlin

Abstract This essay considers the role played by economics and sexuality in the development of the imaginary of US settler colonialism by considering George Catlin’s destroyed 1832 portrait of an anonymous Mandan ‘dandy’. Catlin’s representation of Indigenous dandies likely informed Charles Baudelaire’s account of the dandy as an avatar of the transition to modernity, but during the gay and Indigenous liberation movements of the 1970s, the Mandan dandy was reclaimed as evidence of pre-colonial queer sexualities. Synthesising these conceptions, the essay argues that this figure illuminates the material conditions of modernity in the fur trade: an unstable assemblage of contradictory Indigenous and Euro-American systems of economic exchange, political power and sexual intimacy. The dandy figures a form of queerness that was conceived as an effect of these socioeconomic conditions, which Catlin condemned as perverse: a queerness that lay at the foundations of settler colonialism rather than in opposition to it.

A REVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF THE TRANSLATION OF EDGAR ALLAN POE’S WORKS INTO THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IN THE XIX CENTURY

The literary legacy of Edgar Allan Poe transcends borders, captivating readers worldwide with his haunting tales of mystery, macabre, and psychological depth. Among the numerous languages into which Poe’s works have been translated, the French language occupies a prominent place, reflecting the enduring fascination of French readers with his oeuvre. This paper undertakes a comprehensive examination of the history of French translations of Poe’s works made in the 19th century and the special passion French artists had for the American writer. Through a meticulous overview of archival materials, literary criticism, and translation studies, this research illuminates the evolution of French translations of Poe’s writings, shedding light on the cultural, linguistic, and editorial factors that have shaped their reception in France. It explores the pivotal role played by translators, such as Charles Baudelaire and Stephan Mallarmé, in introducing Poe to the French literary scene and examines the strategies employed to render his unique style and thematic preoccupations into French. In analyzing the translations, we have drawn on some archival material from the French press, literary criticism, and a body of existing research on the subject. This study considers the ways in which French translators have interpreted and reinterpreted Poe’s works in light of changing literary and cultural sensibilities. By tracing the trajectory of French translations of Poe’s works, this paper not only contributes to our understanding of the reception of one of America’s foremost literary figures in France but also offers insights into the dynamics of literary translation and cultural exchange. It underscores the enduring relevance and adaptability of Poe’s writings across linguistic and cultural boundaries, highlighting the ways in which they continue to resonate with readers in France and beyond.

Cosmopolitanism and Affect in Henry James’ The Ambassadors

This essay explores the interplay between cosmopolitanism and affect in Henry James’ The Ambassadors. It reads the novel’s protagonist, Strether, as an embodiment of the cosmopolitan flâneur and examines how he complicates and challenges this identity as conceptualised by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. Due to his evasive cosmopolitan identity, Strether fails to maintain affective bonds with other characters. As such, The Ambassadors challenges James’ own sense of cosmopolitanism by staging various iterations of affect, most notably grief, guilt and loss, as undermining the cosmopolitanism the novel at first seems to promote. I conclude that Strether’s acute emotional responses can be read as a critique of the cosmopolitan flâneur who possesses a level of detachment that is not desirable. The novel levels a critique against cosmopolitanism’s seeming universalism. This tends to promote an abstract ideal that disregards the cosmopolite’s individual emotions and sensations – in The Ambassadors, cosmopolitanism is a fundamentally unethical way of living.

Gifts for No One or Anyone: Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida on Personne

In Parages, Jacques Derrida writes that the ‘Donner – le temps’ seminar ‘led up to’ a study of Maurice Blanchot’s La folie du jour. That study is the improvised fourteenth session of Donner le temps II. Derrida turns to La folie du jour to treat in more explicit terms the structure of the ‘ récit’ which was particularly relevant to his reading of Charles Baudelaire’s récit ‘La fausse monnaie’ earlier in the seminar, but which is almost entirely absent from the sessions included in Donner le temps II. This paper proposes one possible reason for Derrida’s insistence on Blanchot in the seminar and for thinking the gift: La folie du jour’s narrator, which is not someone determinate, but personne (which, in French, can mean either an indeterminate ‘no one’ or a substitutable ‘anyone’ depending on the context). I argue that the aporetic structure of the gift is best expressed when the gift’s subject and object are indeterminable and substitutable, which is the case when the gift is given to or received from an impersonal personne (to or from no one or anyone).

Street Scenes: Langston Hughes, Lyric Pop, and Walter Benjamin’s Baudelaire

This article frames Langston Hughes’s 1947 collaboration with composer Kurt Weill on the “Broadway opera” Street Scene as a privileged opportunity to explore modern history’s extraordinary claims on poetic language and the limitations of allegoresis as a critical mode. Foregrounding Hughes’s understudied career as a pop songwriter, the article argues that the fragmented, unruly archive of the poet’s songwriting demands to be read allegorically, after the fashion of Walter Benjamin’s writings on Charles Baudelaire, whose own fusion of lyric and commodity forms anticipates Hughes’s pop lyrics. Ultimately, when we position Hughes as a successor of sorts to Benjamin’s Baudelaire, that “poet in the age of high capitalism,” we are invited at least temporarily to relieve the allegorical gaze of its restless search for hidden springs of critical agency and to relieve it, too, of its quest for the consolations of utopia. Hughes’s collaborative work on Street Scene instead teaches us how to locate and extol in seemingly compromised cultural artifacts an allegorical resourcefulness that precedes reception and is in fact synonymous, in Hughes’s case, with poetic making.

Eugene O’Neill and the Unity of Addiction

ABSTRACT Eugene O’Neill has cast a long shadow over the discourse on drug addiction in American theater. Yet, his conception of addiction is unique in theater history. This article explores the ways he infuses his dramaturgy with the cycles and themes related to addiction. It also places O’Neill in a literary context by tracing some potential influences on his conception of addiction. With a primary focus on Long Day’s Journey Into Night and a secondary focus on A Moon for the Misbegotten and The Iceman Cometh, this article examines how the cyclical nature of habituation serves as a scaffolding for characterizations, dialogue, and dramatic structure. It reveals O’Neill’s activation of addiction as part of a grand ontological metaphor and a manifestation of an existential philosophy. This article parses these uses and how they relate to other authors, including Thomas De Quincey, Charles Baudelaire, the British Decadents, and philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

‘Endless circumlocutions’: Speaking To and Away from the Point Before and After Melmoth the Wanderer

Circumlocution has been an important stylistic feature of the Gothic novel since its inception in the eighteenth century. Might this rhetorical feature be thought of in national or even geopolitical terms? Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe in the eighteenth century had linked circumlocution to a Shakespearean blending of comedy and tragedy that marked a distinctively British artistic sensibility against the constraints of French neo-classicism. However, Maturin’s use of the trope in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) brought in new national and transnational inflections linked to the central character’s own ability to circle around the world and the presence of colonised others within the text. This article asks whether circumlocution after Maturin’s novel becomes an end in itself, a walking around the borders of speech and meaning that would appeal to later writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire.

Antiquity and Modernity at a Standstill—Interpretating Walter Benjamin’s Allegorical Image and Dialectical Image Through Charles Baudelaire

Abstract In the preliminary schematization of the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin conceived the title “Antiquity and Modernity” for the second part of the book. In his unpublished paper “Introduction to Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,” Michael Jennings asserts that the second part of the book on Baudelaire develops, as a formal element of allegorical perception, the “dissolve” through which antiquity comes to light in modernity and modernity in antiquity. In Baudelaire’s terms, nothing in his own century comes closer to the task of the hero of antiquity than the task of giving form to modernity. This paper investigates how Walter Benjamin, by interpreting Baudelaire’s two poems—“The Swan” and “To a Woman Passing By”—processed a symptomatic diagnosis of modernity and attempted different methods of salvation for modernity. In the first attempt, Benjamin resorts to the allegorical images of ancient myths to break through the projection of the linear chain of historical progress, but he suffers from a sense of incurable melancholy and nostalgia due to the irretrievable ancient grandeur in modernity. In the second attempt, he replaces these melancholic allegories with dialectic images in the hope of awakening the masses from the Capitalist phantasmagoria. Nevertheless, from a fundamentalist Marxist point of view, Walter Benjamin’s mystification of Marxist dialectics and his revised Marxism focus mainly on the transformation of consciousness. It is thus arguable that Benjamin distorted and reversed the hierarchy of superstructure and economic base in the orthodox Marxist historical materialism. More regrettably, Benjamin’s dialectic image pales into insignificance due to its confinement within the transformation of mass consciousness and its renouncement of revolution in the economic and production realms.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUDLER'S POETRY

This paper explores the poetics of Charles Baudelaire, one of the key figures of French symbolism, through the analysis of his poetic actions, themes, and influences. Baudelaire, known for his vision of a modern world shrouded in dark melancholy and despair, creates a poetic universe that transcends traditional aesthetic norms and lays the foundations of symbolist aesthetics. Through the analysis of Baudelaire's verses, we discover the complex relationship between beauty and evil, as well as the deep melancholy that permeates his poetry. Baudelaire's relationship to man and his view of human nothingness and conflict with the world are also explored, and thus we mark the inseparable connection between poetry and philosophy. Through the use of symbolic language and metaphors, Baudelaire creates poetic images that express existential anxiety and the inner struggle of man with himself. In addition, we analyze the role of poets in the development of Marxist aesthetics and political thought. Through it all, his poetry is a complex, deeply introspective, and universally relevant body of art, as summarized in the book Flowers of Evil, which continues to inspire and provoke readers around the world.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0758/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

How to be not economic: abundance and the history of strolling

ABSTRACT This essay offers an interpretation of the canonical history of strolling as a non-economic practice, that is, as a practice free of purpose and means. I consider strolling as a state of mind that discloses abundance in a similar way as rationality discloses scarcity. I inquire into the multiple facets of this state of mind by re-reading three phases in its literary and cultural history: the early modern artist-stroller of the nineteenth-century panoramic literature that finds its peak in Charles Baudelaire; the high modern consumer-stroller as described in the inter-war period, notably in the work of Walter Benjamin; and the late modern subversive stroller that is re-discovered in the mid-twentieth century by the Situationist Guy Debord among others. This interpretation both sheds light on the social preconditions of economic rationality as an organizing principle of a market society, as well as the potential to step out of this principle.

Translation motivation and foreword by Charles Baudelaire "Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses œuvres" to the edition of E. A. Poe's texts

Charles Baudelaire is primarily known as a French poet, the author of the internationally acclaimed poetry collection "Flowers of Evil" ("Les Fleurs du Mal"). However, he is also known as a translator: it was he who created the translations that changed the literary fate of the genius not recognized at the time – Edgar Allan Poe. He wrote a 24-page preface to the collection of his translations "Histoires extraordinaires", on the basis of which the author analyzes the poet's approach to translation, records his argumentation and motivation. Within the framework of this article, the author provides an analysis of the preface by Sh. Baudelaire studies why the connection between these figures has been repeatedly called absolutely exceptional by researchers. The subject of the study is the motivation of Sh. Baudelaire's translation of E. A. Poe's texts, which he explains both in the preface to the publication of the texts of the American writer and in personal correspondence. The object of the study is the preface under the heading "Sa vie et ses œuvres", written by Sh. Baudelaire's edition of E. A. Poe's texts in his own translation, published by the publishing house "Michel Lévy" in 1869. The main research method was a detailed analysis of the text of the preface by Sh. Baudelaire's "Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses œuvres" to the edition of E. A. Poe's texts in his own translation of 1869. A special contribution of the author to the study of the topic is a detailed study of the preface by Sh. Baudelaire as an artifact containing the formulation of translation motivation directly by the translator himself. The artifact is presented to the author all the more valuable because the translator is a famous poet with a special, recognizable style, which obviously leaves its mark on his translations. The main conclusions of this study are: the need to study the phenomenon of the Baudelaire translator not only from the prefaces to the translations, but also from his statements in correspondence, as well as in the study of the cultural era accompanying the creation of these translations and containing events such as the confrontation of the Romantics and the Parnassian school. The scientific novelty lies in the creation of a detailed analysis, based on which more specific episodes of the life and work of S. Baudelaire as a translator can be studied.

Loser Takes All: Graham Greene’s Theological Puzzle Box

Abstract Graham Greene’s novella Loser Takes All has been unfairly ignored in the critical literature. Rather than the mere frivolity it is taken to be, it is a humorous examination of some serious theological issues. By means of an inversion of Pascal’s Great Wager, Greene makes the case that attempts to rationalize the mystery that is the object of our faith will cheapen and diminish that faith. In the course of so doing, he alludes to and has fun with his earlier works, particularly Brighton Rock, and critiques the inversion of the Wager by Albert Camus. He shows the influence of Miguel de Unamuno, who years later would influence Greene’s Monsignor Quixote. Greene also invokes a poem by Charles Baudelaire, which Greene has quoted in many works, that the possibility of damnation adds meaning to life, though it may drift into what von Balthasar called Greene’s indulgence of the mystique of sin.

DANDYISM: TYPE AND IMAGE. CRITERIA OF CULTURAL IDENTITY

The article presents a cultural interpretation of dandyism, a notable phenomenon in Western culture of the 19th century. The scientific relevance of the article is determined by the polar assessments of dandies as a form of culture in bourgeois society. The article’s aim is to clarify the factors that mark the dandy identity, such as costume, accessories, manners, body language, norms of behavior in society. Their manifestations are considered in interaction: costume symbolizes material luxury and an idle lifestyle, while updating the new aesthetics of body; body language with the costume, provokes ways of communication and public behavior, allowing the dandy to become the standard of style. The subject of the article is not only the total view for dandyism, as a set of cultural norms and attitudes, but also its historically differentiated types. Thus, the dandy culture of the early 19th century was conditioned by the "game of aristocracy", a parody imitation of the lifestyle of high society. Late dandyism is identified as decadent, reflecting the alienation of man and his passive protest against capitalist values of the second half of the 19th century. The classic and decadent versions of the dandy lifestyle are personified by the example of two typical heroes, George Brummell and Charles Baudelaire. The first is presented as the personification of dandyism as a "form of culture", the second is an expression of its gradual marginalization. The results of the study can be used both in broad (cultural studies and history) and in specialized areas of humanitarian knowledge, primarily in everyday life culture studies and local history.

«Цветы зла» Шарля Бодлера в переводах и под редакцией Николая Гумилева (неосуществленный проект издательства «Всемирная литература»)

Based on hitherto unpublished archival documents from the Gorky Archive at IWL RAS and TsGALI, the article analyses the work of Gumilyov as a compiler, translator, and editor of the book Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, prepared for publication in “World Literature” in 1918–1921. For researchers, the most significant activity of Gumilev of this period was his work on preparing for publication outstanding French poets, widely represented in the Catalog of the publishing house “World Literature” (1919). The example of the poem “Death of Lovers” demonstrates the particular attitude of Gumilyov as an Acmeist to Baudelaire’s poetics associated with his religious spiritualism. An analysis of the translation of this poem shows that Gumilyov “narrowed” Baudelaire, abandoning the mystical component of his poetry, which caused criticism from the symbolist poet Alexander Blok, whose opinion remained in the protocols of the publishing house. The article establishes the number of translations by Gumilyov: 18 instead of the previously known 16. The appendix provides a reconstruction of the composition of the book Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire, which Gumilyov was preparing for publication: of the six sections, one remained untranslated (“Wine”); of Baudelaire’s 151 poems, almost half were translated (73).

ISOLATED IN THE BIG CITY: (RE)FORMING THE IDENTITY OF THE PROTAGONIST-FLÂNEUR IN TEJU COLE’S OPEN CITY AND SRĐAN VALJAREVIĆ’S PEOPLE AT THE TABLE

The goal of this paper is to establish a connection between the ways identity is formed in the novels Open City by Nigerian-American author Teju Cole and People at the Table by Serbian author Srđan Valjarević. The protagonists of the aforementioned novels are immigrants who have found themselves in the isolated and urban space of the metropolis and are now trying to establish their place within it. We shall explore Charles Baudelaire’s notion of the flȃneur in an urban environment that greatly differs from the narrators’ previous homes. A reconfiguration of identity is necessary and this is accomplished through walking – an unconscious search for identity and its roots. We may ask ourselves: Is the city a constitutive element of the subject, or is the subject a social product of the city? The streets of New York and Amsterdam present the protagonists with opportunities to think about not only their current positions but their pasts. Confused and dissatisfied, they move within the big city searching for ways to accept their fates. A common element of both novels is the continual reflection of the past and social positions. The city forms the protagonists’ identities to the point that it creates a sense of disorientation and helplessness, thus destroying them. Walking is the most significant aspect of both novels, as only in movement can the identity of these flȃneurs come to light.

The Cuenca Family: Two Visions of Poe in Spain

Abstract The reception of Poe’s works in Spain begins in the mid-nineteenth century. Many interpretations of Poe were plagued with misconceptions and stereotypes derived from Charles Baudelaire’s influential writings. However, in 1930 Carlos Fernández Cuenca published a seventy-page prologue to a selection of Poe’s stories titled “La caja oblonga.” Fernández Cuenca offers a series of comments on Poe’s secondary writings, such as letters, criticism, and marginalia. His avant-garde aesthetic ideas also play an influential role in the prologue. That level of accuracy would be lost in Spain for decades. Fernández Cuenca’s distant relative Luis Alberto de Cuenca, a poet and a scholar on myth criticism and fantasy literature, has been publishing essays on Poe for the past twenty years. In spite of his expertise in other fields of the genre, those essays seem to have lost a great deal of their heights achieved in 1930. This article analyzes how the image of Poe has evolved in Spain over the past ninety years, juxtaposing the writings of two members of the same family to determine how preconceived depictions and mythical errors have had a strong weight.

Water Theme in the Poems of Cahit Sitki Taranci and Charles Baudelaire

Antik çağlarda toprak, ateş, hava, su elementleri varoluşun tözü olarak görülmektedir. Dünyanın oluşumunun temel unsuru olarak kabul edilen bu maddeler Grek felsefesinin cevabını aradığı ilk soruya da yanıt niteliğindedir. Varlıkların mevcudiyetleri ve yok olmaları hep ilk unsurla açıklanmaya çalışılır. Bu noktada özellikle suya farklı dönemlerden pek çok filozof büyük önem atfeder. Su sadece felsefenin değil insanlığın sözlü ve yazılı edebî verimlerinin de en önemli kaynaklarından biridir. Gaston Bachelard bu elementlere, ekseriyetle suya büyük önem atfeden çok önemli isimlerden biridir. Suyu insan bilincinde derin anlamlar taşıyan bir sembol olarak bakan Bachelard, onun bir iç mekân olduğunu, kişinin iç dünyasını yansıttığını savunur. Suya arketip olarak bakar ve doğayı, insanın iç dünyasını keşfetmek için kullanılabileceğini söyler. Psikanaliz, fenomenoloji gibi farklı disiplinlerin etkileri ile oluşturduğu bu düşünce sistemine göre suyu anlamak insanın varoluşsal ve psikolojik deneyimlerini anlamlandırmak noktasında son derece mühim bir rol oynar. Bu çalışmada farklı coğrafyalarda, farklı zamanlarda doğmuş fakat gerek hayatları gerek dünyaya bakışları gerekse sanatları hayli benzer olan Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı’nın Otuz Beş Yaş kitabındaki şiirleri ile Charles Baudelaire’in Kötülük Çiçekleri kitabındaki şiirleri Bachelard’ın su felsefesine göre karşılaştırmalı edebiyat yöntemi ile değerlendirilmiştir.

The Initial Expression is the Final Impression: The First Sentence of Baudelaire's "Le Peintre de la vie moderne"

Abstract: In his "Études sur Poe," Charles Baudelaire makes the following provocative remark: "Si la première phrase n'est pas écrite en vue de préparer cette impression finale, l'œuvre est manquée dès le début." This essay seeks to disinter the dialectical contradictory logic at the core of this sentence—its identification of first and final in the work of art—by submitting the injunction contained within it to Baudelaire's own work. Attending to three underexplored elements of the first sentence of "Le Peintre de la vie moderne," I claim that the 1863 text provides us with the paradigmatic example of Baudelaire's response to the injunction. The first sentence is replete with an entanglement of unresolvable contradictions that are constitutive of the forms of perception, experience, and subjectivation immanent to modern life. The "impression finale" of the work is that it extends this entanglement of contradictions to the level of a general systemic operation of irony. What the exaggerated, anatomical analysis to the opening sentence will show is that at the center of the text is the attempt to give sense to the possibility of holding fast to the experience of modern life as an experience in a constant state of disappearance that plays out at the level of form.

The Possibilities of Plant Vocalization

The poetic possibilities of plant vocalization take new directions in the poetry of Lőrinc Szabó and Attila József, feeding on the traditions of romantic and modern poetry, but also renewing them, as we see in the translations and reading methods. They come into contact with the poems of Percy Shelley, Charles Baudelaire, and George Meredith. The study focuses on two poems: Attila József’s “Trees” [Fák] and Lőrinc Szabó’s “In the Black Forest” [A Fekete Erdőben] contextualized with other poems in the oeuvre, the antecedents of the poetic forms, and the comparative influences. In the case of “Trees”, plant thinking and biological operations are paralleled, creating the sound effects of the poem together; in the poem “In the Black Forest”, the equivalence of human and plant life is emphasized through sensual-poetic communication.