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70% Project

Introduction:

For the 70% Project, I chose to analyse the translation of two of Edgar Allan Poe's tales by the

French poet Charles Baudelaire: The Black Cat and The Fall of House Usher.

The translations of Poe's work by Baudelaire have a particular importance in the field of

translation studies in France, and particularly in literary translation. In this discipline, it is often seen

that with every generation, a new translation of a given text appears. For example, between the

years 1745 and 2009, more than fifteen translations of Shakespeare's Hamlet have been published

into French. However, Baudelaire's translations of Poe have enjoyed an uncommon longevity, as

they have been completed (in the sense that other pieces of Poe's work have been translated since),

but not replaced and are still authoritative.

Out of the forty-seven texts written by Poe and translated by Baudelaire, I chose those two

tales for reasons that might be deemed arbitrary. First of all, I chose them because they were texts

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originally written in prose, for I don't think that my knowledge of the English language would have

allowed me to feel the nuances in the original poems accurately enough to be able to analyse

thoroughly their translation.

I chose to analyse the translation of The Black Cat because it is the very first piece of Poe’s

work that Baudelaire read, and which made such a huge impression on him.

I then chose to analyse The Fall of House Usher because it presents some challenges in terms

of translation. Whereas in The Black Cat, sentences are rather short and concise, in The Fall of

House Usher Poe incorporated a certain sense of doom though long descriptive passages and he

often used archaic formulations as a mean of emphasis.

I will now try to explain why Baudelaire chose to translate Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Poe was born in Boston in 1809 and died in Baltimore in 1849. Charles Baudelaire was

twenty-eight years old at the time of Poe’s death and even though he had already discovered and

started to work on Poe’s tales by then, the two authors never met, nor communicated in any way.

The place occupied by the macabre, the supernatural and mystery in general in Poe’s work is

of paramount importance in Baudelaire's choice to translate it. Baudelaire is one of the most

prominent figures of French poetry in the 19th century, and his writings have influenced the whole

of French literature after him. One of the distinctive traits of his work is the continued search for a

new type of beauty, outside of the existing canons. In this search, he introduces through an

extensive use of oxymora new aesthetic concepts such as oddity, vice, or even evil, which are at the

centre of his compositions.

Baudelaire first became acquainted with Poe's work in 1847 and soon became obsessed with it

(Asselineau ,1869). This strong admiration is easy enough to explain: in Poe’s work, Baudelaire

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found the bizarre beauty he aspired to in his own creation. As he wrote in a letter to art critic

Théophile Thoré “The first time I ever opened a book by him I discovered, with rapture and awe,

not only subjects which I had dreamt, but whole phrases which I had conceived, written by him

twenty years before1.” (Starkie 1957:218).

His enthusiasm was not only motivated by this spiritual proximity but also by the fact that

Baudelaire had great personal sympathy for Poe, because, as shown in the two essays attached to

each volume of the translations, he identified strongly with the American author, who, in

Baudelaire's opinion, was under-appreciated by his fellow countrymen.

Baudelaire published his translations of Poe’s work first in journals and newspapers before

they were compiled as Histoires extraordinaires (Extraordinary stories) (1852), Nouvelles histoires

extraordinaires (New extraordinary stories) (1857), Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym, Eureka, and

Histoires grotesques et sérieuses (Grotesque and serious stories) (1865). Even though other

translators had already translated some of it before him, Baudelaire’s versions shaped Poe’s

reputation in France through the great success they achieved among French readers.

Baudelaire’s motivation for publishing these translations was not, however, solely to make Poe

known to the French public, although considering his reported enthusiasm, this reason would have

been sufficient enough.

By disseminating a work that he felt was so close to his own, Baudelaire was, in a way,

preparing the French public for his own creations, in particular Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of

Evil), published in 1857 and for which he would be prosecuted for insult to public decency. And

since the quality of his translations was widely recognised, he was also building up his own

reputation.

The final motivation behind this endeavour was that Baudelaire, like any good writer, was a

great spender and had enormous difficulties to live from his art alone. To this regard, the publishing

1 « La première fois que j’ai ouvert un livre de lui, j’ai vu, avec épouvante et ravissement, non seulement des sujets rêvés par moi, mais des PHRASES pensées par moi, et écrites par lui vingt ans auparavant. »

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rights to his translations represented a steady and non-negligible income.

Before even starting to analyse detailed examples of Baudelaire's work as a translator, we

need to provide its context and replace it in the French tradition in the field of translation.

As explained by Myriam Salama-Carr in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies

(2009), translation in France in the 19th century takes a complete change of direction from what it

was during the two previous century. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the largely dominant aim of

translation was to make the translated piece fit the contemporary aesthetic and moral criteria,

leading to the creation of free (to say the least) translations, known at this time as belles infidèles

(beautiful unfaithful). These translations were so far away from the original texts that they are now

considered works of rewriting rather than actual translations.

In the 19th century, with the Romantic movement, morality was no longer concerned,

literalism became the new standard and the strategy was to find solutions in the target language that

were closest to the source text. Baudelaire, who started to translate Poe in 1848 was completely in

line with this approach. His translations of Poe's tales always remain as close as possible to the text

as he often chooses the most literal way to render the original message.

At the time, in the opinion of translators, the fluency of the French language in the target text

had become secondary to the message of the original text. Charles Baudelaire, however, as one of

the greatest French writers of the 19th century, managed to convey so precisely the sense of the

source text, not because he had a perfect knowledge of English, which according to Asselineau's

biography, he did not, but for other reasons.

First of all, if you look at the criteria based upon which a translator is considered talented or

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not, many theorists, including Eugene Nida, consider that although a “satisfactory knowledge of the

source language” is obviously needed, an absolute command of the target language is regarded as at

least equally important. Baudelaire may have had an approximate knowledge of English, but the

same cannot be said of his knowledge of French.

According to Justin O'Brien, as cited in Nida's Toward a Science of Translating 1964, “One

should never translate anything one does not admire, a natural affinity should exist between

translator and translated” and the secret for the quality of Baudelaire's translations lies precisely in

this aspect, he deeply admired Poe's work and also felt very close to him spiritually and artistically,

which allowed him to have an almost intimate understanding of his work.

In view of these precisions we can now begin to analyse Baudelaire's translations through

the lenses that are the theoretical concepts studied in class.

For the analysis of Baudelaire's translations, I chose to use mostly Vinay and Darbelnet's

classification (in Hatim & Munday, 2004 p.148-151) as it offers more flexibility while being highly

appropriate when it comes to rather short units of translated text. It is also particularly well suited

for my subject matter, since the theory was originally based on French and English.

Vinay and Darbelnet offer seven types of strategy in their classification, divided between

direct and oblique translation: borrowing, claque and literal translation on one side and

transposition, modulation, equivalence and adaptation on the other. We will see the importance and

the use made of each category in Baudelaire's translations.

Regarding the translations as a whole, Venuti's theory about the opposition between

“foreignizing and domesticating” translations proves also relevant and interesting in the analysis of

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Baudelaire's rendition of Poe's tales, and I would like to apply it as another prism, on top of Vinay

and Darbelnet's categories. We've seen that in the 19th century, the general tendency was to produce

“foreignizing” translations in order to retain some of the strangeness of the original text.

It is important to bear in mind that if today, a lot of foreign, and especially English words

have passed into French and are commonly used, this was not the case in Baudelaire's days, when

communication between languages was less developed. Although we cannot find, in the two tales

that I have chosen, any cultural marker allowing the reader to identify the text as being from

American origin specifically, we will see that there are occurrences in the translations, where

Baudelaire chose to resort to borrowing in order to give to the reader an indication of the Anglo-

Saxon origin of the story. For example, in each tale, Baudelaire chose to keep the English forms of

address:

“"Gentlemen," I said at last” (The Black Cat p.8 l.27)“– Gentlemen, – dis-je à la fin” (Le Chat Noir p.9 l.12)or:lady Madeline (The fall of house Usher p.7 l.4)lady Madeline (La Chute de la Maison Usher p.7 l.20)

At the end of La Chute de la Maison Usher, Baudelaire even kept the English title of the

book that the narrator is reading to Roderick Usher: the Mad Trist by Sir Launcelot Canning. As it

turns out, neither the book in question nor his author ever existed, Poe invented them, but since it

would have been almost impossible for Baudelaire to verify that information, he could not take the

risk of translating the title of a book in a certain way, when it could have already been translated in

another by someone else.

And these three examples represent the whole extent of Baudelaire's borrowing in the two

translations, but they are sufficient to notify the French reader that the stories are taking place in a

foreign country.

I will now look at Baudelaire's use of calques. In the two translations, I only found one

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lexical calque and a structural one.

[…] the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise. (The Black Cat p.3 l.4)[…] l’ancienne croyance populaire qui regardait tous les chats noirs comme des sorcières déguisées. (Le Chat Noir p.3 l.5)

In French, regarder is rarely used to translate the idea of “to regard” and estimer is often

preferable. This could be an indication of Baudelaire's alleged lack of knowledge of the English

language.

[…] and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within... (The fall of house Usher p.5 l.5)[…] et à une telle distance du noir plancher de chêne, qu’il était absolument impossible d’y atteindre... (La Chute de la Maison Usher p.5 l.12)

This structural calque gives us a very unnatural sentence in French, but this could have been

done on purpose by Baudelaire to provide a poetic feel. In this case we cannot be certain that

Baudelaire's sentence is a mistranslation.

I will now study the place of literal translations in Baudelaire's work. His translations as a

whole are quite close to the original text, and to analyse each sentence translated literally would be

almost equivalent to analysing the whole text. I therefore selected one example, which was rather

intriguing to me.

[…] an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison (The fall of house Usher p.5 l.21)[…] un œil large, liquide et lumineux au delà de toute comparaison (La Chute de la Maison Usher p.5 l.32)

In this sentence, the word order is exactly the same in French and in English. In the English

sentence, however, the fact that the adjectives follow their noun is quite unnatural, whereas in

French it is their normal place. Baudelaire's translation therefore offers an improvement in terms of

style. But it could be argued that, by staying too close to the text and therefore improving it, he

betrayed, to a certain extent, Poe's intentions, and that if he wanted to translate exactly Poe's phrase,

he should have used an awkward word order in French, too. Peter Newmark in his Texbook of

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Translation (1988) makes a difference between several types of translations, including faithful and

semantic. A faithful translation would be a translation that keeps “the degree of grammatical and

lexical abnormality”, while a semantic translation would have a more aesthetic approach. Between

those two types, Newmark states that only the semantic translation is acceptable, and this is

precisely what Baudelaire did, more than a hundred years before Newmark formulated the theory.

More often than not, however, for the sake of style and fluency, Baudelaire had to greatly

rearrange Poe's sentences through modulations, and this resulted in the fact that his translations read

much more naturally in French than the original texts do in English, because Baudelaire left out a

lot of the inversions and archaisms used by Poe in the original. Therefore in this regard, Baudelaire

“naturalizes” the text, in the sense meant by Schleiermacher: “he brings the writer towards the

reader” (1813).

Here are some examples of the stylistic modulations that Baudelaire used:

With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to increase. (The Black Cat p.6 l.10)Néanmoins, l’affection du chat pour moi paraissait s’accroître en raison de mon aversion contre lui. (Le Chat Noir p.6 l.21)

In this sentence, Baudelaire changed the word order to make it more natural to a French

reader. In French, adverbs (here néanmoins, for “however”) are more easily placed at the beginning

or end of the of sentences, so that they do not interrupt their flow. He also introduced a causal

relationship with the expression en raison de (because of), when Poe simply expressed simultaneity,

with the effect of stressing the powerlessness of the narrator.

Alas! neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing of rest any more! (The Black Cat p.6 l.32)Hélas ! je ne connaissais plus la béatitude du repos, ni le jour ni la nuit (Le Chat Noir p.7 l.12)

In this case, Baudelaire avoids the archaism of the English sentence by using the natural

French word order rather than reproducing Poe's inversion. However, the emphasis is still present in

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the French sentence because of the register of the word béatitude (bliss).

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, ... (The fall of house Usher p.1 l.4)Pendant toute une journée d’automne, journée fuligineuse, sombre et muette, … (La Chute de la Maison Usher p.1 l.4)

Here again, Baudelaire avoids the archaism of the English constructions but personifies the

day by using the adjective muette (dumb) to translate “soundless”.

In the following example, Baudelaire rearranges the sentence, not only to gain stylistically,

but simply to make it more understandable, as Poe's word order, in addition to being extremely

difficult to keep in French, lacks coherence, even in English:

[…] no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli. (The fall of house Usher p.8 l.6)[…] dont je n’ai jamais senti l’ombre dans la contemplation des rêveries de Fuseli lui- même, éclatantes sans doute, mais encore trop concrètes. (La Chute de la Maison Usher p.8 l.24)

He does the same, to a lesser extent in the following sentence:

[…] the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon’s unnatural shriek as described by the romancer. (The fall of house Usher p.15 l.8)[…] l’exacte contrepartie du cri surnaturel du dragon décrit par le romancier, et tel que mon imagination se l’était déjà figuré. (La Chute de la Maison Usher p.15 l.21)

When it comes to switches between passive and active voice, in a vast majority of cases,

Baudelaire uses modulation to go from a passive construction to an active one to make the

translated phrase seem as natural as possible to a French reader.

There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition […] served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. (The fall of house Usher p.4 l.3)Je ne dois pas douter que la conscience de ma superstition croissante […] n’ait principalement contribué à accélérer cet accroissement (La Chute de la Maison Usher p.4 l.8)

In this sentence, Baudelaire uses two modulations. First of all, for the sake of fluency he

turns the narrator into the grammatical subject of the sentence, whereas Poe used an impersonal turn

of phrase. He then, by not translating “rapid” in the first part of the sentence and by translating

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“increase” by an adjective in French, puts the emphasis on the superstition itself, which is more

logical in the sense that the superstition increases because the narrator is aware of its existence, not

because he is aware of its rapid increase.

[…] a barely perceptible fissure, which […] became lost in the sullen waters. (The fall of house Usher p.4 l.25)[…] une fissure à peine visible, qui […] allait se perdre dans les eaux funestes. (La Chute de la Maison Usher p.4 l.31)

The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded (The fall of house Usher p.5 l.29)Puis il avait laissé croître indéfiniment ses cheveux sans s’en apercevoir (La Chute de la Maison Usher p.6 l.7)

[…] the glimpse I had obtained of her person... (The fall of house Usher p.7 l.17)[…] le coup d’œil que j’avais jeté sur elle... (La Chute de la Maison Usher p.7 l.34)

There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. (The fall of house Usher p.16 l.17)Il y avait du sang sur ses vêtements blancs, et toute sa personne amaigrie portait les traces évidentes de quelque horrible lutte. (La Chute de la Maison Usher p.16 l.33)

The four examples above all show modulation from a passive construction to an active one,

whether it is done semantically (first and third sentences) or grammatically (second and fourth

sentences). In examples 1 and 3, it is due to the fact that the verbs idiomatically used in such cases

in French are more active than the English verbs used by Poe: “aller se perdre” (to go loose itself)

and “jeter un coup d'oeil” (to throw a glimpse). In example 2 and 4 however, Baudelaire

grammatically altered the structures because, as a general rule, passive structures are considered to

be heavy in French.

While reading the two texts and their translated version I found only one case where

Baudelaire switched from active to passive voice.

[…] and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster had I dared. (The Black Cat p.6 l.27)[…] et c’était là surtout ce qui me faisait prendre le monstre en horreur et en dégoût, et m’aurait poussé à m’en délivrer, si je l’avais osé. (Le Chat Noir p.7 l.5)

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In this case, Baudelaire uses a passive structure which has the effect of emphasising the

narrator's powerlessness in the face of this hatred that he feels growing inside him.

In some instances, Baudelaire uses slight translation shifts in order to be closer to French

idiomatic expressions or collocations.

popular notion (The Black Cat p.3 l.4)croyance populaire (Le Chat Noir p.3 l.5)

In this case, “notion”, if translated literally would remain notion in French, croyance

populaire however, is a much more idiomatic expression in French, with the same meaning. The

three following examples also serve the readability of the text by using fixed French collocations:

[…] I must abandon life and reason together (The fall of house Usher p.6 l.23)[…] la vie et la raison m’abandonneront à la fois (La Chute de la Maison Usher p.7 l.4)

mental existence (The fall of house Usher p.11 l.6)existence spirituelle (La Chute de la Maison Usher p.11 l.16)

oppressive atmosphere (The fall of house Usher p.11 l.31)atmosphère suffocante (La Chute de la Maison Usher p.12 l.1)

The next example, however, is slightly different because the modulation is optional, but, as

we will see, justified:

came in my way (The Black Cat p.3 l.18)se jetaient dans mon chemin (Le Chat Noir p.3 l.20)

Here, Baudelaire's translation is slightly stronger than the original, because he uses the verb

se jeter (to throw itself). But it is justified by the fact that in this context, this verb, to a French

reader, immediately evokes the common idiom se jeter dans la gueule du loup (to jump into the

lion's den) and comes as a warning of the danger that the pets are facing.

The least optional of the modulations that I encountered in Baudelaire's translations is

probably the following:

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The guilt of my dark deed... (The Black Cat p.8 l.15)La criminalité de ma ténébreuse action... (Le Chat Noir p.8 l.33)

Although this might seem to be a mistranslation because the French translation for guilt is

usually culpabilité, it cannot be used here because it can only be applied to a human being. The use

of the word criminalité (criminal nature) is therefore especially judicious.

To conclude the discussion of modulations, and this is one of the aspects that makes

Baudelaire's translation so subtle, he is first of all a poet, and as such, he is particularly sensible to

the musicality in Poe's texts, especially in The Black Cat. Whenever one of his translations seemed

a bit odd to me, I realised that when he drifted away from the original meaning, it was often to

preserve the sounds of the word used by Poe. Regarding these examples, only the original text is

referenced, as the context does not actually matters for the translation. For each, the reference is

followed by one of the possible literal translations in italic, followed in turn by Baudelaire's

translation, which is then followed by its meaning in brackets.

fond (The Black Cat p.1 l.13), attaché, fou (mad, crazy)

gin-nurtured (The Black Cat p.3 l.25) causé par le gin, saturé de gin (gin-saturated)

the soul remained untouched (The Black Cat p.3 l.30) l'âme demeura intacte, l'âme n'en subit pas les atteintes (the soul was not affected by it)

arousing me from sleep (The Black Cat p.5 l.6) me tirer du sommeil, m'arracher du sommeil (tearing me from sleep)

The following example does not enter the same category as the shift was not done for

musical reasons, but for a semantic and artistic one:

sternly beautiful (The fall of house Usher p.13 l.21) sévèrement belle, affreusement belle (horridly beautiful)

This translation is Baudelaire's artistic sensitivity concentrated in one expression. His whole

poetic work is based on the use of the oxymoron as a creative principle, and here he managed to

capture the meaning of Poe's expression but also to make it fit his creative ideal.

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In conclusion, whether we consider Baudelaire's translations as a whole, or through

particular examples , when we apply to it the concepts, theories and ideas of Newmark, Nida,

Venuti, Vinay and Darbelnet, we can see that they are of great quality. Baudelaire always translated

the meaning of Poe's work and whenever possible improved the readability, often adding poetic

value in the process.

The translation strategy that is most present in his work is modulation, and every time he

used it, it was by necessity and he prevented from taking any liberty with the source text. There

were some cases of transposition in the translations, but in my opinion, they were more the result of

an absolute grammatical or lexical necessity inherent to the French than a deliberate choice made by

Baudelaire or an expression of his personal style. I therefore chose not to include them in this study.

Word count: 4112

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Bibliography

Asselineau, C. (1869) Charles Baudelaire, Sa Vie et son Œuvre. Paris: Gallimard

Brown University Library, Baudelaire and the Arts [online] Available from: http://library.brown.edu/cds/baudelaire/translations1.html[Accessed 1 May 2012]

Pamela Faber, (1989), Charles Baudelaire and his translation Edgar Allan Poe [online] Meta: Translators' Journal, Volume 34, numéro 2, p. 253-259 Available from: http://www.erudit.org/revue/meta/1989/v34/n2/002735ar.html?vue=resume[Accessed 1 May 2012]

Garrait-Bourrier, A., (2002). Poe Translated by Baudelaire: The Reconstruction of an Identity [online] CLCWeb Volume 4 Issue 3. Available from: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/ [Accessed 1 May 2012]

Hennequet, C. (2005), Baudelaire traducteur de Poe [online]Available from: http://baudelaire-traducteur-de-poe.blogspot.co.uk/, [Accessed 1 May 2012]

Newmark, P. (1988). A Textbook of Translation. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice-Hall.

Nida, E. (1964) Towards a Science of Translating, Leiden: E. J. Brill.

Salama-Carr , M. in Baker, M. and Saldanha, G. (2009). The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London: Routledge.

Starkie, E. (1957). Baudelaire. London: Routledge.

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