Martin Turnell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964). A controversial, rewarding ‘existential psychoanalysis’, which presents Baudelaire as choosing his fate.

Turnell, Martin, Baudelaire: A Study of His Poetry (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953). A useful overview.

A CHRONOLOGY OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

1821

9 April: birth, in Paris, of Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, son of Joseph-François Baudelaire (age 63, painter and administrative officer in the Senate) and Caroline Archenbaut-Dufaÿs (age 28).

1827

Death of Baudelaire’s father.

1828

Baudelaire’s mother marries Major Jacques Aupick.

1832

Aupick is stationed in Lyons, where Baudelaire attends school.

1836

Aupick is transferred to Paris, where Baudelaire attends Lycée Louis-le-Grand.

1839

Baudelaire is expelled from school for refusing to surrender a note passed to him but is allowed to take his Baccalauréat exam (which he passes).

1839–40

Bohemian existence in Paris with a circle of young poets.

1841

Sent by his parents on a voyage to India designed to remove him from his bohemian milieu, Baudelaire disembarks in Mauritius and Réunion and, refusing to go further, returns to Paris.

1842

On turning 21, Baudelaire inherits 100,000 francs from his father, which would have given him a modest but adequate income, similar to Gustave Flaubert’s. Becomes involved with Jeanne Duval, a mulatto actress with whom he lives off and on for most of his life.

1842–4

Collaborates on various literary projects with his friends, writes poetry, including some of the poems of The Flowers of Evil, and contracts substantial debts.

1844

Because Baudelaire has been spending his capital and acquiring debts quickly, his family undertakes a judicial procedure to have his money removed from his control and placed in trust for him, under a ‘conseil judiciaire’ or trustee (Narcisse Ancclle, the family lawyer). This arrangement, to Baudelaire’s great irritation, will last for the rest of his life.

1845

April-May: first publications: the sonnet ‘To a Creole Lady’, later collected in The Flowers of Evil, and the Salon of 1845, a substantial article on the annual exhibition of contemporary painting and sculpture.
June: announces to Ancelle his intention to kill himself but recovers quickly from a slight wound.
October: advertisement of the imminent publication of The Lesbians, a collection of poems (which never appeared).

1846

Collaboration on a newspaper Le Corsaire-Satan; publication of further essays and of The Salon of 1846, a wide-ranging discussion of painting and art generally.

1848

February: Baudelaire throws himself into the February Revolution against the July Monarchy. Works on a shortlived left political journal, The Public Good (Le Salut public) (Feb-March), and for a moderate paper, The National Tribune (April-May).
July: participates in the uprisings against the conservative turn of new legislature created after the success of the February Revolution. Baudelaire’s first translation of Poe is published (‘The Mesmeric Revolution’).
October: appointed editor of a conservative provincial journal, The Indre Herald, but leaves after a few days. A collection of his poems entitled Limbo is announced.

1851

Eleven poems from the projected collection Limbo are published (they will be collected in The Flowers of Evil). Publication of part of Artificial Paradises.

1852

The first of three long articles on Edgar Allan Poe is published.

1852–4

Over a fifteen-month period sends six poems anonymously to Mme Sabatier, a beauty in whose salon artists and writers met.

1855

Eighteen poems of The Flowers of Evil are published under this title in the prestigious Revue des deux mondes.

1857

April: death of General Aupick.
June: publication of The Flowers of Evil.
July: seizure of the edition.
August: trial and conviction of Baudelaire and his publisher, Auguste Poulet-Malassis, for outrage to public decency. They are sentenced to pay fines and six poems are banned.
August: publication of six prose poems.

1859

Period of great productivity during a short stay with his mother at Honfleur.

1860

Publication of Artificial Paradises, on hashish and opium.

1861

February: second edition of The Flowers of Evil, containing thirty-two new poems. Publication of nine critical articles on contemporary writers.
November: publication of nine prose poems.
December: to the amazement of friends and enemies,
Baudelaire presents himself as a candidate for a vacant seat in the French Academy, finally withdrawing as it becomes obvious he is gaining no votes.

1862

Publication of twenty prose poems. Signs of poor health appear.

1863

Publication of seven more prose poems and the important essay, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’.

1864

Publication of more prose poems under the title ‘Paris Spleen’. Goes to Brussels to give lectures, where, despite his reiterated dislike for Belgium, he remains for two years.

1866

Physical condition worsens.
February: Les Épaves (The Waifs), a collection of twenty-three miscellaneous poems, including the six condemned Flowers of Evil, is published in Brussels.
March: Baudelaire collapses in Namur, Belgium. Beginnings of aphasia and paralysis. ‘New Flowers of Evil’ (16 poems) published in the journal Contemporary Parnassus in Paris.
August: Baudelaire is brought back to Paris.

1867

Baudelaire receives many visitors. He never recovers the power of speech and dies on 31 August.

1868

The third edition of The Flowers of Evil is published by Michel Lévy, as volume 1 in the Complete Works of Baudelaire.

1949

The Paris Appeals Court overturns the conviction of Baudelaire and Poulet-Malassis for outrage to public decency.

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

The translator’s pleasures and responsibilities are both heady and humbling. Presuming to translate a great poet, Charles Baudelaire, I was poignantly aware that he had not chosen me to be his collaborator, and that he would have no active say in what his work was to become in my hands. My first allegiance, then, is to Baudelaire, to be a colleague in some way worthy of him. But I have another allegiance as well, to the English-speaking reader of poetry, which requires me to produce in every case, to the best of my creative ability, a poem that will provide the kind of satisfaction to be gained from reading poetry originally created in English. It is unfortunately true that no translator succeeds in this ambition more than part of the time; still, one tries all of the time. As John Frederick Nims has put it, ‘the greatest infidelity is to pass off a bad poem in English as representing a good poem in another language’. I act as a poet when I am devising my translations, and it is as a poet that I hope to serve both Baudelaire and the modern reader.

Can there be too many translations of a poet of central importance like Charles Baudelaire? Perhaps so, but will there ever be enough good ones: accurate and poetic? Each translator necessarily brings himself into the equation, so that in each new version Baudelaire will be found transmuted, not only presented in an alien language, but alloyed with an alien sensibility, no two translations ever being alike. The reader with little or no French who would come to Baudelaire should try several routes—read several translations. As translator I have studied all other translations I have come across, while remaining faithful, I trust, to the voice (or voices) in which I myself can best replicate Baudelaire’s poetic effects. As ‘modern’, as frequently outrageous as Baudelaire is in subject and imagery, he is most often traditional in form. What I’ve tried most to capture, then, is this tension between modern or romantic subject, and classical form (I oversimplify, but the point must be made), which is for me the wonder of Baudelaire’s poetic voice. The translator must attempt in some way, in every poem, to capture this tension: to miss it is to lose Baudelaire, indeed to betray him.

Concerning Baudelaire’s formality, all of his poems rhyme, and many are written in the classic, 12-syllable alexandrine line. Here arise two major problems, and matters for decision, for translators into English. Most translators have made their choices and have stuck to them programmatically. Edna St Vincent Millay, for instance, insisted on rhyming every poem, and maintaining the 12-syllable line.