In presenting to the American public this collection in English of
perhaps the most influential French poet of the last seventy years, I
consider it essential to explain the conditions under which the work
has been done.
Baudelaire has written poems that will, in all likelihood, live while
poetry is used as a medium of expression, and the great influence that
he has exercised on English and continental literature is mainly due to
the particular quality of his style, his way of feeling or his method
of thought. He is a master of analytical power, and in his highest
ecstasy of emotional expression, this power can readily be recognized.
In his own quotation he gave forth his philosophy on this point:
"The more art would aim at being philosophically clear, the more will
it degrade itself and return to the childish hieroglyphic: on the other
hand, the more art detaches itself from teaching, the more will it
attain to pure disinterested beauty.... Poetry, under pain of death
or decay, cannot assimilate Herself to science or ethics. She has not
Truth for object, she has only Herself." What appears at first glance
in the preceding phrases to be a contradiction is really a confirmation
of Baudelaire's conception of the highest understanding of æsthetic
principle. Baudelaire's ideal beauty is tempered with mystery and
sadness, the real too, but never the commonplace.
No poet has brought so many new ideas in sensation into a literary
style. Intellectually he is all sensation, though he seldom degenerates
into abstract sentimentality. This sum totality of the power of
absorbing external sensation is Baudelaire. From the effect of his
objectivity his art expresses itself as if solely subjective. This
condition of mind and art makes him most difficult to translate into
another language, in particular, English.
This collection of his verse and prose is gathered from those
experiments in translation which I think will most effectively convey
to the English reader those qualities that made Baudelaire what he is.
There are numerous translations from Baudelaire in English but most of
them may be dismissed as being seldom successful. Mr. Arthur Symons'
translation of some of the prose poems is a most beautiful adventure
in psychological sensations, effective though not always accurate in
interpretation. Mr. F. P. Sturm's effort with the Flowers of Evil and
the Prose Poems is always accurate, sometimes inspired, and often a
tour de force of translation. Mr. W. J. Robertson's translations from
the Flowers of Evil is the most successful of all. He maintains with
amazing facility all the subtlety, beauty and one might also say the
perfume of Baudelaire's verse. Mr. Shipley does a most meritorious
work in his translations from the prose poems, and the reader will be
everlastingly grateful to him for his fine painstaking translation of
the _Intimate Papers_ from Baudelaire's unpublished novels.
There are few interesting or valuable essays on the mind and art of
Baudelaire in English, but the reader will find the following critical
appreciations to be of inestimable use in the study of the poet:
"The Influence of Baudelaire": G. Turquet-Milnes (Constable: 1913);
"The Baudelaire Legend": James Huneker (Egoists: Scribner's: 1909); and
Théophile Gautier's essay on Baudelaire, of which an excellent English
translation has been made by Prof. Sumichrast.
I think that this anthology will give the reader an intelligent
understanding of the mind and art of a very great French poet.
T. R. Smith.
June, 1919.