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Twenty Prose Poems
Charles Baudelaire
Translated by
Michael Hamburger
Translated from the French Petits Poèmes en Prose
Published in England
by Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1968
© 1946, 1968, 1988 by Michael Hamburger
First City Lights Books edition 1988
Designed by Patricia Fujii
Typesetting by Re/Search
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867.
Twenty prose poems.
French text and English translation of: Petits poèmes en prose.
I. Hamburger, Michael. II. Title.
PQ2191.P4E5 1988 841'.8 88-1047
ISBN 0-87286-216-X
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INTRODUCTION
Although Baudelaire was perfectly capable of writing longer prose works, like Les Paradis artificiels or the critical essays collected in L’Art romantique, the prose poem was a medium much better suited to his habits and character. Being pre-eminently a moralist, he needed a medium that enabled him to illustrate a moral insight as briefly and as vividly as possible. Being an artist and a sensualist, he needed a medium that was not epigrammatic or aphoristic, but allowed him scope for fantasy and for that element of vagueness or suggestiveness which he considered essential to beauty. As a moralist, Baudelaire can be seen as a late representative of the French classical tradition. As an artist and aesthetician, he drew on Romanticism and prepared the way for Symbolism, which has come to be regarded as a development of Romanticism. The prose poem satisified both requirements: it could make a point, without too much argument or elaboration, and it could render a poetic state of mind in images akin to those in Baudelaire’s verse. Above all, it was short — an inestimable advantage to a writer who subscribed to Poe’s theory of the short poem, who had never liked regular or sustained work and who in later years, as his letters show, became almost obsessed with le vide papier que la blancheur defend.
Unlike the Fleurs du mal, the Petits Poèmes en prose were not intended to be read as a sequence. In Baudelaire’s own words the work ‘has neither head nor tail since, on the contrary, everything in it is both head and tail at the same time, alternately and reciprocally.’* Some of the prose poems – “L’Invitation au voyage” is a striking instance — are the complement in prose of poems in Les Fleurs du mal. Others, such as “Le Joueur généreux” or “Assommons les pauvres,” develop themes barely intimated in the book of poems, though clearly stated in Baudelaire’s notebooks, Mon Cœur mis à nu and Fusées. Yet in either case the theme is less crucial than the medium. A comparison of the prose poem “Invitation to the Voyage” with the lyrical poem “Invitation au voyage” is instructive for that very reason : the title and the theme are the same, but nothing that the prose poem says can match the effect of
Mon enfant, ma sœur,
Songe à la douceur …
A great deal has been written about the probable sources of the medium used by Baudelaire; but such works as Maurice de Guerin’s Le Centaure or even Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit have little in common with Baudelaire’s prose poems. In his letter to Houssaye which usually serves as a preface to the prose poems, Baudelaire mentioned that Gaspard de la nuit had inspired him with the wish to write a book of the same type, but he also admitted that the finished work differed greatly from his models. As for the influence of Houssaye himself, of which Baudelaire also speaks, we can dismiss this as a compliment to a friend. If the literary ancestry of Baudelaire’s prose poems must be established, Edgar Allan Poe and De Quincey, rather than the initiators of the French prose poem as such, have the most substantial claim, if only because Baudelaire had familiarized himself with their work to a degree which only translation permits.
I have called the prose poem a medium because it is not a form. The special importance of the prose poem in nineteenth-century French literature has to do with the limitations of French verse. Before the establishment of vers libre as a recognized medium for poetry it was the prose poem alone that gave French poets a kind of freedom which English poets had enjoyed for centuries. In a literature that had never evolved a medium as flexible as Shakespeare’s blank verse, the only alternative to strict metre and rhyme was prose. Victor Hugo’s metrical innovations did not decisively alter this situation; and Baudelaire’s prosody in Les Fleurs du mal owed little to Victor Hugo’s reforms. In Les Fleurs du mal, therefore, Baudelaire’s modernity had to assert itself in the teeth of classical metres and a classical rhetoric. If it has become difficult for us to appreciate the originality of Baudelaire’s poetry, the conventions of French prosody, and especially its rhetoric, are to blame. Rimbaud, a more extreme reformer and innovator in that regard, was one of the earliest of Baudelaire’s readers to imply as much in the reservations added to his description of Baudelaire as ‘le premier voyant, roi des poètes.’ This is not to suggest for a moment that Baudelaire’s prose poems are superior to the verse of Les Fleurs du mal; but they are different, and they are more translatable, at least as far as Baudelaire the moralist is concerned; and it could be that Baudelaire’s moral acumen and courage have more to say to us at present than his cult of delicate and exquisite sensations.
Even in the prose poems Baudelaire indulges in a vocabulary which English readers have come to associate with the aestheticism of the eighteen nineties. No other literary convention that I can think of has become so remote and unacceptable in so short a time. It is as well to admit that the atrocities of our century have hardened us against the shock effects on which Baudelaire’s vocabulary once relied. The ‘enormities’ of his Epilogue to the Prose Poems — brothels, bandits, convict hulks, and the ‘infernal charms’ of an aged whore — are now unlikely to give us that ‘new shudder’ which Baudelaire’s comfortably bourgeois readers may well have experienced when confronted with so drastic a diagnosis of their own civilization
