Trask Roberts
on translating Charles Baudelaire
Whichever requirements for fidelity one has, the above translation does not meet them. This is immediately evident from my translation of the title, “Au Lecteur” which any good French 110 student would point out means, “To the Reader.” Where possible, through both my word choice and prosification of the poem, which renders it more letter-like, I highlight the poet’s complicity with the reader. The poem, as evidenced by its title, engages whichever reader happens upon it. “Au Lecteur” does not exclude the bourgeois reader, the uneducated reader, the unsympathetic reader, as certain earlier French writers are wont to do. Baudelaire chooses rather to begin in a manner that could be taken as a lament — au lecteur orally is the same as Ô lecteur (“Oh, reader”) — creating an immediate sense of intimacy and empathy between author and reader that the final stanza will cement.
about the author
Charles Baudelaire, born in Paris in 1821, was a poète maudit. He was a drinker, a revolutionary, a reluctant traveler, a translator, an opium addict, and an inspiration to countless poets who came after him, both in France and the world over.
He hoped for his poetry to be one whose beauty would transcend whatever theme or content it provided. His prosody is traditional while his content is revolutionary. By incorporating vampires and corpses into strict meter and rhyme, Baudelaire plays on the tension between attractive form and repulsive content. He creates an important bridge from romanticism to modernism, but, like many artists, was held in great contempt for the risks he took.
His most famous collection of poems, The Flowers of Evil, was published in June 1857 and, by August of that year, Baudelaire found himself in a courtroom on charges of obscenity. The result was the exclusion of six poems from the work as well as a fine.
He continued to write, publish, and lecture up until a debilitating stroke in 1866. He died the following year.
about the translator
Trask Roberts is a PhD candidate in French studies at Penn. He focuses mainly on twentieth-century French fiction and theories of translation.
