paris spleen
ALSO BY KEITH WALDROP
A Windmill Near Calvary
The Garden of Effort
Windfall Losses
The Space of Half an Hour
The Ruins of Providence
A Ceremony Somewhere Else
Hegel’s Family
The Opposite of Letting the Mind Wander
Light While There Is Light
The Locality Principle
The Silhouette of the Bridge
Analogies of Escape
Well Well Reality (with Rosmarie Waldrop)
Haunt
Semiramis If I Remember
The House Seen from Nowhere
Ceci n’est pas Keith, ceci n’est pas Rosmarie (with Rosmarie Waldrop)
Songs from the Decline of the West
The Real Subject
Transcendental Studies
Several Gravities
TRANSLATIONS
Reversal by Claude Royet-Journoud
The Notion of Obstacle by Claude Royet-Journoud
If There Were Anywhere But Desert: Selected Poems of Edmond Jabès
Etat by Anne-Marie Albiach
Ralentir Travaux by André Breton, Paul Eluard, and René Char
Boudica by Paol Keineg
Objects Contain the Infinite by Claude Royet-Journoud
Elegies by Jean Grosjean
Click-Rose by Dominique Fourcade
Sarx by Pascal Quignard
Heart Into Soil by Xue Di (with Wang Ping, et al.)
Prose Poems [1915] by Pierre Reverdy
An Ordinary Day by Xue Di (with Wang Ping, et al.)
Mental Ground by Esther Tellermann
Close Quote by Marie Borel
Another Kind of Tenderness by Xue Di (with Wang Ping, et al.)
The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart by Jacques Roubaud (with Rosmarie Waldrop)
An Earth of Time by Jean Grosjean
Zone by Xue Di (with Waverly, Wang Ping, et al.)
The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
Theory of Prepositions by Claude Royet-Journoud
Figured Image by Anne-Marie Albiach
paris spleen
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
LITTLE
POEMS
in
PROSE
TRANSLATED BY KEITH WALDROP
Wesleyan
University
Press
Middletown,
Connecticut
Published by
WESLE YAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress Translation, preface, and notes © 2009 by Keith Waldrop All rights reserved Printed in U.S.A. 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867.
[Spleen de Paris. English]
Paris spleen: little poems in prose / Charles
Baudelaire; translated by Keith Waldrop.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8195-6909-7 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Paris (France) — Poetry. 2. Prose poems, French —
Translations into English. I. Waldrop, Keith. II. Title.
PQ2191.P4E5 2009
841'.8—dc22 2008054948
Wesleyan University Press is a
member of the Green Press Initiative.
The paper used in this book meets their minimum
requirement for recycled paper.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
Baudelaire, in his last years, planned a new (“augmented”) edition of The Flowers of Evil and, as “pendant” to that work, a volume of “little poems in prose.” He did not live to see fulfilled either of these projects. The third edition of The Flowers of Evil came out the year after his death, as volume one of Complete Works; a year later (1869) volume four of this posthumous omnibus included the prose poems. For neither collection had Baudelaire left very precise instructions (in spite of various lists) and the contents for both were arranged by the editors.
In 1863 he had written the publisher Hetzel (most famous now for the big red hardbacks of Jules Verne) that Paris Spleen would contain a hundred poems — of which he was still, he said, thirty short. In his remains were found only the fifty offered here.
He had published prose poems as early as 1855 (two years before the first — condemned — edition of The Flowers of Evil), so the book was not a sudden new idea. In a rare case he had rewritten a prose poem in verse; more often (but not really often) redone a verse poem into prose. Some poets write drafts in prose, then work them into verse. This was not Baudelaire’s practice.
POETRY, PROSE, VERSE
‘Prose’ in the phrase ‘prose and poetry’ has not the same meaning as ‘prose’ when opposed to ‘verse.’ We have in English, as Eliot noted decades ago, three words: prose, poetry, and verse — where we need four. The culprit is ‘prose.’ The same problem exists in French.
To distinguish prose from verse is easy: The basic element of prose is the sentence; that of verse, the line.
Baudelaire had no reason to question that he was writing poetry, for which I am not about to hazard a definition. After all, The Flowers of Evil was known to be a book of poems (its morality was argued, never its genre), and Paris Spleen he intended not to break with, but to continue, that work. The change from earlier to later was not poetry-to-prose but specifically verse-to-prose.
THE TITLE
The title adopted for the posthumous