To all the fierce technical difficulties of translating French verse into English—the relative restrictiveness of French vocabulary, the alexandrine line (always uneasy in our language), the precise yet variable positioning of the caesura, the purity and predominance of the French vowels—Baudelaire added a further, seemingly insuperable obstacle: the subtle torque between impossibly polished form and violent, often splenetic content. To use painterly terms, which Baudelaire himself, with his keen eye, might have approved, it is as though a Bosch or a Goya chose to paint his most terrible visions in the manner of Fragonard. Oddly enough, this mélange of bitter bile and formal delicacy has proved seductive, but how to convey it in good English?
How, for example, should a translator grapple with the following stanza from Baudelaire’s notorious “Une charogne”?
Les mouches bourdonnait sur ce ventre putride,
D’où sortaient de noirs bataillons
De larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide
Le long de ces vivants haillons.
In his new translation, Walter Martin renders the lines:
Flies sizzled as the putrefying guts
Disgorged a noxious flood of fresh
Troops—a viscous, thick river of maggots
To plunder the last flesh.
This is a valiant attempt, but notice how Martin must overload his lines with adjectives both for the sake of the cadence as well as the rhymes, one of which at least clanks on the ear (“guts”/“maggots”). The “thick liquid” (épais liquide) of the original
