Read the preceding installments here: Part I, Part II, Part III.

Translation mediated Baudelaire’s absorption of Poe to the innermost core of his work. Baudelaire conquered and internalized Poe’s aesthetic achievement in his translations, which allowed him to further realize it in his poetry. Perhaps the structure of Baudelaire’s instincts as a translator steered him toward only those genres and individual works in which Poe most excelled. Baudelaire retold Poe’s stories to himself, word for word, and recorded that telling in French. An aphorism by Benjamin from his book One-Way Street provides a metaphor for such an act of translation:

The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power it has when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.[1]

Translation is walking the road on foot, a copying of the text at a higher level which must concern itself with winning an autonomy and integrality for the copy itself. It says the same thing in a different language (therefore, a different thing), remaining what it is by becoming something else. The distinction between reader and copier — or reader and translator — stems from the strangely productive nature of the latter’s labor. Even the most servile copy cannot help but reverberate in the original. It is always mimetic and transformative vis à vis its predecessor. The copyist reproduces the objectivated subjectivity or imagination of the original — not the perceptions themselves of which it consists. The experience and process of writing (embodied as an original) are what the translator imitates. As secondary as the translator may be, an utterly passive comportment is not possible. If the critical moment of aesthetic experience does not reconstitute itself in the translation, it is not only a failure of the translator; it also a failure of the original. Its unrealized potential will continue to haunt. That of Poe urgently haunted Baudelaire.  A consideration of several moments in Baudelaire’s translations gives a sense of the power Poe’s text commanded and the mimesis it initiated.

“The Man of the Crowd” invites interpretation here for its centrality to Benjamin’s conception of Poe’s importance in Baudelaire and its primary status in the career of the masses as literary figure and absorbed element in the Fleurs du mal. Early in the story, Poe’s narrator makes a move analogous to the displacement of Benjamin’s airplane passenger onto the ground, an echo heightened by Poe’s unusual choice of word to denote passers-by. Perceiving the throng circulating around him in London, he recounts: “At first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations. Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.” Baudelaire renders the moment of reflection emphatically Cartesian: “ma pensée ne les considérait que dans leurs rapports collectifs.” A literal translation of Baudelaire’s version would be: “my mind considered them only in their collective relations.”  Thought acts on its own in the translation’s subtle introduction of an intermediary between perceived object(s) and perceiving subject. This more fully fleshed out — or rather, thought out (pensée) — figuring of mediation is noteworthy in isolation, but it only proves significant through its interaction with every other crafty turn Baudelaire gives to Poe’s original. It is not reducible to single words. This is the folly of fetishizing the “untranslatable,” which relies on wrenching a moment out of a process and privileging the part over the whole. But coming down flatly on the side of a totality blind to the movement of its protean components does not suffice either. The mind of the translation’s narrator goes farther, considering the people — however momentarily — only in terms of their collective relations before synching back up with the original in the descent to details. The brief caesura of Baudelaire’s que discerns the static conception of movement itself. What do “leurs rapports collectifs” look like? What is the individuated mind latching onto here, if not the fleeting image of totality? 

Poe and Baudelaire go on to enumerate behaviors of the crowd whose mechanistic quality Benjamin highlights for its correspondence to the reflexive behavior of contemporaneous workers at their machines. Here a structuring feature of the socio-historical totality shines through. As Adorno put it: “Poe and Baudelaire… were aware of the truly chthonian changes undergone by men, as it were, anthropologically, at the beginning of the modern industrial age: by human behavior and the total setting of human experience.” [2] This chthonian change manifests in the narrator’s projection onto the crowd of a sensation he himself experiences: “as if feeling in solitude on account of the very denseness of the company around.” In Baudelaire, it was “comme s’ils se sentaient seuls par le fait même de la multitude innombrable qui les entourait.” Literally: “as if they felt alone by the very fact of the innumerable multitude that surrounded them.”  Baudelaire could have assigned the cognate of solitude to this feeling. Characteristically, he forgoes the pathos of loneliness. His translation casts the phantasmagoria of the crowd in its diabolical aspect, all the more so for its coldness. The fact of the innumerable multitude that surrounds each figure in the crowd registers increasing social rigidification, the collapse of a dynamic mutual constitution of individual and collective into a negative dialectic. If, as Benjamin wrote, “Baudelaire found this experience of a world entering rigor mortis set down with incomparable power in Poe,” his translation gives a push to what he saw already falling. [3]

Poe’s narrator considers the impression the scene is making on him. It was “all full of a noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear, and gave an aching sensation to the eye.” Ear and eye — his and ours — both bear the burden of sensory deluge. Such a sentence seems to beg for the “decent masking” Harold Bloom prescribed. The amorphous “vivacity” floods the narrator’s ears but arrives at his eye via its packaging into a distinct sensation. Baudelaire’s translation pushes the ear back and focuses the eye at its center: “tous pleins d’une activité bruyante et désordonnée qui affligeait par ses discordances et apportait à l’œil une sensation douloureuse.” / “all full of a noisy and disordered activity that afflicted with its discordances and delivered to the eye a painful sensation.” There is no ear to be found, and discord semantically reaches the eye even before it has been codified as sensation. Benjamin quotes Georg Simmel on the urban preponderance of the visual over the aural, a proposition not so much corroborated as it is displayed by Baudelaire’s slightly deviant translation. While Poe funnels his vivacity into the ear, the discordance of Baudelaire’s neutral activité cannot be contained as it travels toward its target in the eye. What Benjamin calls Baudelaire’s allegorical genius — crucially not shared by Poe — hinges on advances made by the French poet on just this point: “In allegory the original interest is not linguistic but optic. ‘Les images, ma grande, ma primitive passion.’” [4] And yet Baudelaire’s honing of the allegorical capacity relies upon what Benjamin called the relation of tension between “a highly intensified sensitivity” and “a highly concentrated contemplation” found in Poe. Baudelaire’s “mind” is needed in place of Poe’s “I.”  This comportment and its transformation appears in an adjectival constellation emerging beneath the rays of the gas-lamps. Their light throws over everything “a fitful and garish lustre. All was dark yet splendid….” Baudelaire gives us “une lumière étincelante agitée. Tout était noir, mais éclatant.” / “a light blazing and agitated. All was black, but dazzling.” “Fitful and garish” already tilt the scales in the direction of the nightmarish, tarnishing the “lustre” that follows. French syntax leads with the positively-tinged “lumière” of enlightenment that lingers fleetingly before its molecules speed up in “étincelante” and then tip over into the acutely kinetic “agitée.” Poe’s “splendid” attempts an injection of conventional beauty into the image, an effect toward which Baudelaire’s “éclatant” — which also means shattering or glaring — appears agnostic. In translation, Poe could be said to have explained a sensation that Baudelaire delivers with its ambivalence intact. Between them there is a difference in the imbalance struck between horror and splendor that circumscribes the sharpness of each, interdependent as these effects are. Both lights may be brilliant and dazzling, but — in the words of Whitman — how much heat does each give off? 

Just before the narrator pursues the man of the crowd through his urban ambulation, he pauses to study him. The eye moves again to the fore with the typically conjectural preface to observation: “my vision deceived me, or… I caught a glimpse...” Baudelaire writes “si mes yeux ne m’ont pas abusé… j’entrevis…” / “if my eyes do not deceive me… I glimpsed…” A quiet slippage inverts the earlier variance of Baudelaire’s exteriorized faculty of thought (ma pensée). In French, the narrator regards the information delivered to him by his eyes with suspicion, while the English version’s “vision” entertains the possibility of extrasensory distortion, of meaning bound up completely with what is seen. The speculative formulation does not amount to ultimately divergent outcomes, but the particular English words and the particular French words do show the event to be non-identical with itself. Either the narrator’s vision deceived him, or he saw something, and if the narrator’s vision did not deceive him, then he saw something. Baudelaire’s hypothetical construction institutes a dependent relation between events absent from but evidently latent within Poe’s parallel possibilities. 

Valéry ascribes a heroism to Baudelaire’s feat when he writes of Poe: “This great man would be completely forgotten today if  Baudelaire had not set himself the task of introducing him into European literature.” [5] It is not a contentious claim, and Valéry knows better than anyone that this is no mere case of literary reception and transmission, not simple influence of one writer on another. Baudelaire — more specifically, his work — acted upon the (immediate) past; it acted upon Poe, and vice versa. Valéry describes the phenomenon as follows:

...Baudelaire, Edgar Poe exchanged values. Each gives to the other what he possesses and receives in return what he lacks. Poe furnishes Baudelaire with an entire system of new and profound thought. He illuminates him, fertilizes him, and determines his opinion on a variety of subjects… All of Baudelaire is impregnated, inspired, deepened by Poe.

But, in exchange for these goods, Baudelaire procures an indefinite  extension for Poe’s thought. He offers it to the future. This eternity that changes the poet in himself — in the great line by Mallarmé — is the act of translation; it’s Baudelaire’s prefaces that open onto Poe’s wretched shadow. [6]

Benjamin wrote: “Poes Werk ging durchaus in sein eigenes ein” (“Poe’s work was definitely absorbed in his own”); with Valéry, we might add: Baudelaires Werk ging durchaus in Poes ein. Baudelaire could not have given to Poe on the same terms as he had received. The absorption of the American writer by the French poet could only be judged by its precipitate. Notably, Valéry specifies “Poe’s thought” as that which Baudelaire proposes to the future, or “the essential thing is the very idea of poetry that Poe had made.” [7] The line from Mallarmé’s poem “Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe” contains a dialectical philosophy of literary history, or history tout court: “Tel qu’en lui-même enfin l’éternité le change….”, “Such as into Himself at last eternity changes him”. History achieves its transformation of the poet into himself via the action of his readers, critics, and translators; he and his work are nothing but that transformation. In this case, those offices coincide in Baudelaire. He manifests the self-contradiction of this process, rendering it graspable; it is the appearance of the potential and necessity for change within the eternal return of the same. As Benjamin warns in his famous theses “On the Concept of History”: “The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again.” [8] Elsewhere, he says of his own aims in the Arcades Project that “It is thus, as an image flashing up in the now of its recognizability, that the past, in this case that of Baudelaire, can be conquered. The redemption which can be carried out in this way and in no other is always only to be won out of the perception of that which is being lost irretrievably.” [9] Such a perception “threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image.” [10] Baudelaire felt himself intended and aimed at by the image of Poe that appeared to him in the mirror. The psychological and agonistic element notwithstanding, what is really at issue revolves around a question of particular aesthetic objectifications of historical experience — the historical experience Poe and Baudelaire shared, and which Poe was the first to put down on paper. It was immediately threatened with irretrievable loss; Baudelaire carried out the minimum of its redemption. For Benjamin, history, even the history of the present through which the poet is living, “is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled full by now-time [Jetztzeit].” [11] The now of Poe’s recognizability is not then limited to any particular moment but is rather manifest in the ongoing potential of the Jetztzeit — only revealed as potential by its actualization. Eternity changes Poe’s oeuvre into itself — goes on discovering its truth content — through “a remarkable number of works that derive from it, that are not so much imitations as they are consequences.” [12]  //

[1] Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, ed. Michael William Jennings, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, ( Harvard, 2016), 27-28.

[2] Theodor W. Adorno, “On Kierkegaard's Doctrine of Love,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 8, no. 3 (1939): 424. "The Autodidact Project," Ralph Dumain.

[3] Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” in New German Critique, no. 34, trans. Mark Harrington and Lloyd Spencer, (Duke, 1985),  54.

[4] Benjamin, 54.

[5] Paul Valéry, “Situation De Baudelaire” (1924),in  Gallica, 1 Jan. 1970, 20. Gallica.

[6] Valéry, 20.

[7] Valéry, 21.

[8] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 4, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, (Harvard, 2004), 391.

[9] Benjamin, “Central Park,” 49.

[10] Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 391.

[11] Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 395.

[12] Valéry, 26.