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 has become “a viscous, thick river.” And the allusive French word ventre, with its sexual overtones (“womb” as well as “belly”—Baudelaire is writing about a woman’s corpse on the path), has become slangy and excessively coarse in “putrefying guts.” It is precisely the restraint of the diction that gives the original its almost insupportable force, but this is sacrificed in the translation.

I say this not to disparage Martin’s versions, which are generally good, but to illustrate the hurdles he had to leap. To render Baudelaire in the dazzling high style of which he himself was so consummate an artisan demands the hand of a rare master (one can only wonder what the later Yeats might have done with such lines). The usual recourse, of which Martin understandably avails himself, is to commingle lofty terms with more colloquial locutions: “noxious” and “plunder” over against “sizzled” and “guts.” It would be unjust to belabor this; a translator should draw on all the resources of his mother tongue. But in the case of Baudelaire, such an approach risks obscuring what he himself called the “secret architecture” of Les fleurs du mal. This architecture has less to do, I am convinced, with the order or arrangement of the individual poems as with the shifting, sometimes tenuous, often harsh collocation of impeccable form with scabrous content. The architecture, in other words, subsists less in the overarching structure than in the cunning mortices of intense experience and suave articulation in line upon line.

Even so, Martin has his hard-won successes; indeed, in certain respects his translation stands as the best available rendering of the complete poems (as opposed to Les fleurs du mal alone), and comes at moments admirably close to rivaling Richard Howard’s brilliant 1981 rendition. Martin, unlike Howard, has had the audacity—or the foolhardiness—to essay a strict replication of the variegated forms of the original, stanza by stanza, rhyme by rhyme; that he succeeds even partially is no mean achievement. If it leads him astray at moments, it produces small moments of triumph as well. As one of many instances, consider his opening of the sonnet “L’idéal”:

Spiked heels, fake fingernails and frizzy curls,
The damaged goods of our degraded time,
Those high-strung, anorexic cover-girls
Could never satisfy a heart like mine.

Compare this with Howard’s superb version:

My heart is closed to belles in curlicues,
those worshipped beauties of a shopworn age
when fingers were for spinets and when feet
wore out six pairs of silver-buckled shoes.

Neither translation is particularly close to the wording of the French, but each in its own way captures the spirit of the original, and does so convincingly. To be sure, each translator owes much to the earlier, astoundingly fine Baudelaire “imitations” by Robert Lowell (how could it be otherwise, given such a precedent?). Still, it seems to me that Howard, alone among Baudelaire translators, continually achieves that precarious equipoise so characteristic of Les fleurs du mal, and which Flaubert was perhaps the first to note, in a congratulatory letter of July 13, 1857, when he wrote: “The line is utterly crammed to bursting with the idea” (La phrase est toute bourrée par l’idée, à en craquer). That the line never bursts is the effect of form; indeed, the perfection of the form in Baudelaire stands in almost exact inverse proportion to the violence of the content. And it is this repleteness of vehement emotion just held in check by the chosen form that makes so many of Baudelaire’s most powerful lines seem to seethe at, and reach beyond, their surfaces, like waves plumed by spray. (In 1887, twenty years after the poet’s ignominious decline and death, in the opening entry of his journal, Jules Renard sought to convey this quality when he commented on, “Baudelaire’s dense phrasing, as if laden with electric fluids.”) Richard Howard succeeds best at conveying this elusive aspect of the original, as in his opening stanza to “Recueillement” (“Meditation”):

Behave, my Sorrow! let’s have no more scenes.
Evening’s what you wanted—Evening’s here:
a gradual darkness overtakes the town,
bringing peace to some, to others pain.

Howard captures the aura of huddled intimacy that gives the poem so much of its charm, as if the poet in speaking to himself were addressing a fretful child. The cadences of the third line reproduce in English the effect of Baudelaire’s French with an almost eerie fidelity. By contrast, Martin never comes this close to the music of the originals (his version of the same stanza begins: “A gradual numbness spreads through streets and homes,” which omits the opening colloquy and so distorts the tone).

Nevertheless, Martin’s skill at injecting colloquialisms into his translations stands him in good stead when he comes to deal with the various poems, often burlesque or obscene, that are peripheral to Les fleurs du mal. Baudelaire isn’t usually credited with a sense of humor but some of these lesser pieces are quite funny at times, and Martin captures their flavor well, as in “Concerning a Jackass who Claimed to be a Friend of His”:

He told me he was well-to-do,
That cholera had scared him off;
Bit of a tight-wad, entre-nous,
But a die-hard Opera buff;

Crazy about the open air,
Thanks to his friend, M. Corot;
Avid to have a coach and pair
(A coach and pair is comme il faut) …

Oh, and don’t forget the 20,
000 shares he has in Le Nord,
Not to mention the mint he
Made, on the frames by Oppenord.

Or this, from Le monstre (which Martin entitles “Rara Avis, or the Nymphomaniad”):

No, no, you’re no spring chicken, dear,
You’re rather like a spring gargoyle …
High life and harlotry and beer
Have all taken their toll, old girl,
(You’re not exactly ‘new-laid,’ dar-

lingest infanta!) Nonetheless,
Your up and down and out career
Endows you with a certain gloss,
A luster things acquire from wear—
I love the well-worn none the less.

By contrast, and despite his skill in rhyming, Martin often fluffs his versions, especially at their endings. The great poem Un voyage à Cythère, in which the poet views himself as a hanged man, mutilated, castrated, and flayed by scavenger birds and ravening jackals—executed by Venus, as it were—closes with a prayer that is at once nauseated and supplicating:

Dans ton île, ô Vénus! Je n’ai trouvé debout
Qu’un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image …
—Ah! Seigneur! Donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!

Richard Howard gets this just right:

On Aphrodite’s island all I found
was a token gallows where my image hung …
Lord give me strength and courage to behold
my body and my heart without disgust!

But Martin spoils both the austerity of the phrasing and the meaning of the final lines when he writes:

Goddess of Love, your isle was nothing but
An emblem with an image, torn apart …
O God of love, grant me the strength of heart
To contemplate my corpse without disgust!

It is his heart and body, not his corpse (that would be too easy!), which the poet must view without disgust; moreover, Baudelaire is explicit: it is his own effigy that he sees, not some vague “emblem with an image.” Such an ending gauzes the shocking particularity of the poem. Weak closing lines disfigure too many of Martin’s versions. Still, he can be very fine, as in his rendering of Le voyage, perhaps Baudelaire’s greatest poem (which both he and Richard Howard, for some baffling reason, re-name “Travellers”), of which the following stanza is a small sample:

The hangman’s jest, the martyr’s final hour;
The bloody feast of St. Oblivion;
The despot enervated by his power,
And men who crave his brutal discipline.

This translation appears under the aegis of FyfieldBooks, an impressive new series in which unusually good translations of Petrarch, Victor Hugo, Michelangelo, and others have already appeared. There is a useful chronology of important dates (marred only by the misspelling of T. S. Eliot’s name!), an ebullient section of “Afterthoughts,” in which the translator proffers his own thoughts on the hazards of translation, and a brief list of sources; like all the volumes I have seen, this is a handsome book. Best of all, the French originals stand en face to the English translations.

The translations by Martin and Howard (complemented by the delightful 1997 anthology Baudelaire in English, in the Penguin Classics series, with its unexpected profusion of beautiful, and sometimes bizarre and even quirky, renderings of individual poems by scores of poets) afford the English-speaking reader almost everything he or she may need in order to appreciate the genius of Baudelaire the poet.

In a famous letter of 1871, the adolescent Arthur Rimbaud could proclaim of Baudelaire that while he was “the king of poets, a real god,” his form was “drab” (mesquine). He clinched this opinion with the dictum: “Inventions of the unknown demand new forms.” Baudelaire was no formal innovator; in fact, he exploited virtually every genre and form in the classical repertoire, though invariably with a caustic twist. In Les fleurs du mal there are lyrics worthy of Charles d’Orléans or the young Victor Hugo; fables with stinging morals reminiscent of La Fontaine; speeches and dramatic monologues equal to those of Racine or Corneille. And yet, for all Baudelaire’s formal panache and range, each poem in the book is unmistakably his. Earlier poets had been just as bitter or morbid; the grim and beautiful sonnets of Ronsard’s old age are as harrowing as anything in Les fleurs du mal. What was perhaps new in Baudelaire—and it is a novelty that confutes Rimbaud’s stricture—was that the artistic strictures did not merely contain the intensity of his subject-matter but augmented it. The effect is a bit uncanny, like overhearing a whispered disclosure in a confessional which at once repels and enthralls.

The unanticipated collision of high-glossed verbal finish with degrading and shaming themes has few parallels in the history of literature; perhaps only Swift or the later Yeats match Baudelaire’s accomplishment in this regard (“For love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement” could be a line by the French master). In the end, it is the form that conveys the shock while the content—whether it be human carcass, black bile, or Satanic litany—takes its force from the chaste and austere lineaments in which it garbs itself.