Richard Howard, on the other hand, has given over the alexandrine in favour of that standby in English, the iambic pentameter line, and he does not attempt regular rhyme, employing other technical devices to try to represent Baudelaire’s formality of sound. As for me, I have worked on a case-by-case basis, varying my practice as need be. I often translate first into a long line version, then I try reducing the line to the pentameter. If this reduction does not involve losing or distorting crucial imagery, and if (as is usually true) it produces a livelier movement in English, I use the shorter, more familiar line. I the case of some poems, though, the alexandrine does seem to work gracefully in English, and I have stayed with it (e.g. in translating ‘Landscape’, a poem of leisurely pace and sumptuous imagery). As for rhyme, I have tried hard to get it, but have not always succeeded. I try not to corrupt imagery or meaning, or even distort meaningful syntax, to force rhyme. In ‘The Death of the Poor’, for instance, the last stanza depends for its impact on strict syntactical parallelism; I could not rhyme the poem and still replicate this parallelism, so I dropped the rhyme. I had better luck with ‘Heautontimoroumenos’, where in the penultimate stanza a similar parallelism occurs; this I was able to reproduce while maintaining the rhyming pattern of the original. I have found, then, what Stephen Mitchell found in translating Rilke: ‘Translating poems into equivalent formal patterns is to some extent a matter of luck, or grace, and this is especially true of rhymed poems’. Mitchell cites Rilke, who called rhyme ‘a goddess of secret and ancient coincidences’, and said that ‘she comes as happiness comes, hands filled with an achievement that is already in flower’. One works to prepare the way for this goddess, but if rhyme does not appear one must concentrate on other dimensions of form to devise the equivalencies that will show readers at least something of what they would find in the techniques of the original.

A related problem for the translator has to do with rhythms. French is not an accented language, and its poetic lines do not move in the iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, or dactylic rhythmic patterns of English. It is well enough to use the ‘standard’ English iambic pentameter in place of the ‘standard’ French alexandrine, and I have often done so. Still, these lines differ not only in length, but in movement, and there are times in my translations when I deviate from the iambic into triple metre (as in ‘Beauty’), or into a line in which I count accents rather than syllables (e.g. ‘A Carcass’). I sometimes use an accentual line when Baudelaire’s line is shorter than the alexandrine, as in ‘Alchemy of Suffering’, simply because in some poems accentual verse seems to my ear to convey the movement of the French better than would a strict iambic metre. I am not being simply arbitrary in these decisions, but am following, in good faith, my own taste and judgement, poem by poem. Ultimately, it is true, the rhythms of all these translations are those of English rather than French, but it can not be otherwise; French and English rhythms will not turn into one another any more than will the sounds of these languages, or their vocabularies.

When I began thinking about translating Baudelaire and putting my thoughts into practice, I was encouraged by two friends who were then my colleagues at Illinois Wesleyan University, Sue Huseman and Salvador J. Fajardo. Later I received valuable help and encouragement from my colleague James Matthews. I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for sponsoring my participation in the 1983 summer seminar of Albert Sonnenfeld (then of Princeton), who encouraged my Baudelaire work. Enthusiastic support at this time was also provided by Frank Jones of the University of Washington, and Richard Berchan of the University of Utah. The sponsorship of Robert Sutherland, of The Pikestaff Forum, led to my winning an Illinois Arts Council award in 1984 for my translation of ‘The Cracked Bell’. My special thanks go to David Pichaske, whose Spoon River Poetry Press published in 1985 my 66 Translations from Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Les Fleurs Du Mal’. The reception of this book encouraged me to finish the job of translating all the Fleurs, which I accomplished thanks in large part to a sabbatical leave from Illinois Wesleyan in 1990. Laudes for my wife, Anne W. McGowan, who provided a literal rendition of the Latin of ‘Praises for My Francisca’ and spent many hours proofreading these translations in their various forms. Finally, thanks to Jonathan Culler and to Oxford University Press for their critiques both of my translations and of the notes for this volume; for infelicities that may remain after their painstaking scrutiny, the sole responsibility is mine.

J.