Footnotes for My Translations of Baudelaire

The Albatross

This is one of Baudelaire's most famous poems.

In this poem, the word boitant is usually translated as limping; I've chosen to translate it as waddling. Why? If you look at videos, albatrosses don’t limp, they waddle. Further, the definition of boiter in 19th-century French dictionaries shows that the meaning of the word was wide enough then to encompass waddling. Why did Baudelaire use boitant rather than, say, se dandinant? Quite possibly because it goes better with the word infirme, meaning disabled (or, more coarsely, cripple). Or maybe, it was simply because se dandinant had too many syllables for the poem to scan properly.

Mist and Rain.

It’s not often that you can successfully translate a play on words, so I feel quite gratified to have managed to translate the play on words in the last line, d'endormir la douleur sur un lit hasardeux, as laying our cares to rest in an uncertain bed.

When I was translating this poem, I kept trying to assign three syllables to the phrase pale darkness, but my subconscious (or whatever part of my brain assists me in writing poetry) kept insisting on treating it as four syllables. Eventually, I gave in, and now I am willing to assign either one or two syllables to words like pale, fire, wield, depending on what makes the poem scan, or what I think sounds better.

Spleen

This is one of four poems by Baudelaire with this name.

Exotic Perfume

Baudelaire wrote several poems that reference synethesia, most notably the poem Correspondances.

Synesthesia is a condition where an input to one of the five senses has an effect on another of the senses. For example, one of the most common forms of it is assigning colors to letters: so A might be perceived as red and B as blue.

We know from his writings that Baudelaire experienced synesthesia when he was on drugs. Opinions differ as to whether he also experienced it in his daily life. However, even if he also had it in everyday life, the drug-induced episodes were much more intense.

This poem seems to reference synesthesia, both in the opening stanza where the scent of his mistress's bare skin transports the poet to a tropical island, and in the last stanza, where the scent of green tamarind commingles in his soul with the sailors' songs.

A Fantastic Engraving

I turned this poem from seven heroic couplets into a sonnet.

Baudelaire seems to be making fun of some aspects of paintings of Death in this poem (although it seems to me to suddenly become more serious in the last line).

From Baudelaire’s original title for this poem, Une gravure de Mortimer, we know that it was inspired, at least in part, by John Hamilton Mortimer’s “Death on a Pale Horse”, although there is clearly more happening in this poem than could fit into a single drawing. In Mortimer's picture, there is a tiny tendril of water vapor coming out of each of the horse's nostrils, presumably to show that the horse has been running hard (looking at 19th century pictures, very few of them seem to use this convention). Baudelaire exaggerates this to “drooling from its nostrils like an epileptic.”

Hymn to Beauty

In the last stanza, the appositive might confuse people — at least, it confused me when I first read the poem. I've translated it as proud fairy, fire, color, rhythm, perfume, my one and only queen. I take this line as meaning that these epithets all describe Beauty, i.e., that fire, color, rhythm, perfume are all aspects of Beauty. (In the original, it was rythme, parfum, lueur, but I don’t believe there are any English words that are adequate translations for lueur here, and I needed some extra syllables, so I replaced lueur with fire and color.)