Complete Poems

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James Buchan, the Guardian

Bad behaviour gets good

Walter Martin's translations of Baudelaire impress James Buchan

Miserable in his life, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) has prospered in death. The scandalous subjects he introduced into lyric poetry, which provoked the suppression of six poems from his collection Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), are now the ordinary stuff of city life, conversation and art: crowds, pollution, traffic, noise, prostitutes, girl-on-girl sex, white-on-black sex, fetishism, S&M, false nostalgia, drugs, drink, blasphemy, tropical holidays, interior decoration, poverty, infantile satanism, stalking.

This farrago, to our forebears so depraved, is conveyed in language of great purity and sweetness, in which the French consonants dissolve like a labourer's morals and the vowels and dipthongs overflow the ear.

As his principal verse line, Baudelaire employs with scrupulous accuracy the heroic Alexandrine fashioned three centuries earlier by Pierre de Ronsard and the circle of court poets known as the Pleiade, and perfected in the next century by the dramatists Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. Les Fleurs du Mal is good verse for bad people. It is as if the Chapman brothers drew like Ingres.

Ever since Algernon Swinburne wrote his paean to Baudelaire 'Ave atque Vale', British and American poets have sought to capture and domesticate Les Fleurs du Mal for the English language. There are at least 20 English verse translations of 'Le Balcon' that have been printed and heaven knows how many more in bedroom drawers and on the internet.

The American Walter Martin is the latest to attempt this formal feat. Without fuss, he converts the Alexandrine into the good old iambic pentameter (five feet, de-dum). As Martin writes in an amiable set of 'Afterthoughts', he turned 'the commonest French line into the most ordinary English one, nothing more difficult than that'.

Martin translates all of Les Fleurs du Mal, including the medieval-Latin lyric 'Franciscae mea Laudes' ('In Praise of My Francoise'), the censored poems, the poems added to the third edition of 1868 and other verse bits and pieces. French and English texts face each other across the page like a constable with his prisoner in a railway carriage. The French text is not of the cleanest - 'Vers polls' for 'Vers polis' in 'A une Madone', 'quads poudreux' for 'quais poudreux' in 'Le Squelette laboureur' - but the book is still terrific value. One of Baudelaire's least noted qualities was a heroic industry, and Martin matches it.

Martin, who among other things owns a bookshop in Palo Alto, California, has another quality which Baudelaire did not possess and that is good nature. What might be termed the 'Baudelaire whinge', the unrelieved air of martyrdom that clings to every single line that Baudelaire wrote, prose and verse, Martin will not reproduce and must struggle not to caricature. Thus, in one of the 'Spleen' poems where Baudelaire cries out 'Avalanche, veux-tu m'emporter dans ta chute?', Martin has 'Come take me with you, avalanche. It's cold.' It's probably all the French deserves. (What did Baudelaire know of avalanches?). In the last stanza of 'La Vie anterieure', 'penetrate my sorrows' is not right for 'approfondir mes douleurs', but who cares because the line means nothing anyway?

Occasionally, the exigencies of the rhyme in English force Martin either into outright comic verse (the demimondaines/ponds rhyme in 'Reve parisien') or, more often, to alter the poet's meaning. In 'La Servante au grand coeur', one of the very few poems where Baudelaire drops his pose, Martin transforms a Paris graveyard into a small-town American cemetery. 'Remplacent les lambeaux qui pendent a leur grille' becomes 'To sweep the dead leaves off the old folks' tombs'. It's quite nice, actually. Baudelaire likes to build up elaborate structures of image and affinity, and sometimes Martin misses a component only to pick it up, like an expert snooker player returning for the black, one or even two strophes later.

Martin's greatest successes are in the sonnets and 'Le Voyage'. The last, Baudelaire's Odyssey in miniature, impressed the modernists and provoked imitations from TS Eliot and George Seferis. Beautiful as Martin's version is, I believe he is wrong to translate the final words, 'pour trouver du nouveau', as 'to find our own New World'. You don't have to fuss about commodity use-values like Walter Benjamin to see that 'nouveau' is not the boundless possibilities of America but 'novelty' in its modern meaning: the restless, banal, delusive and ultimately lethal 'new' of the age of mass reproduction.

Even where Martin is not successful, he is always worth reading. In 'Les Petites Vieilles', there is a stanza where one of the old ladies sits down on a park bench to listen to a military band. 'Pour entendre un de ces concerts, riches de cuivre, / Dont les soldats parfois inondent nos jardins, / Et qui, dans ces soirs d'or ou l'on se sent revivre, / Versent quelque heroisme au coeur des citadins.' Marcel Proust, writing in 1921, thought the stanza so beautiful it marked a sort of poetic outer limit ('Il semble impossible d'aller au dela').

Martin begins badly. 'On a public bench, singing to herself ...' If the old dame is singing to herself, how is she going to hear the concert, however 'riche de cuivre'? Then he recovers: 'Transported by a military band / The kind that inundates a city square / With fanfares'. He funks the golden evenings, and who is to blame him? As for the French republican 'coeur des citadins', it becomes the American republican 'to inspire the common man'. As shown by 'military' above, the translations should be read with American stresses.