To the Bottom of the Unknown to Discover the New

Ronjaunee Chatterjee speaks with Nathan Brown about his new translation of Charles Baudelaire’s “The Flowers of Evil.”

By Ronjaunee ChatterjeeApril 9, 2025

• Poetry

• Literary Criticism

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE—the 19th century’s most infamous “poète maudite”—has been a source of readerly fascination ever since the controversial publication of his book of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) in 1857. Swiftly banned for obscenity, the volume was republished in 1861 with a set of additional poems by Baudelaire that are considered some of the most significant of 19th-century modernity. The lyrics are singularly attuned to the strange mix of beauty, tawdriness, violence, and tenderness of a world in the midst of extreme social and political change.

Despite the numerous translations of Les Fleurs du mal, the volume retains an inherent mystery to which a translator must submit or flourish away. Many translations do the latter, but Nathan Brown, a scholar of poetry and philosophy at Concordia University, has recently published an English translation of the 1861 edition that foregrounds precise attention to line, punctuation, and grammatical structure while achieving rhythmic and aural cohesion through assonance, alliteration, and internal rhyme. I spoke with Brown about the book’s obscenity trial, the politics of translation, and what makes Baudelaire so modern.

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RONJAUNEE CHATTERJEE: Let’s start with the fact that English translations of Les Fleurs du mal are numerous. I am struck by the interpretative license translators have taken with this text, from efforts to maintain Baudelaire’s alexandrine rhyme scheme in English prosody to free-verse translations of the poems. Can you explain your strategy of maintaining “fidelity to the [poetic] line”? And what seems to be missing from these existing translations of the book that you sought to rectify in your edition?

NATHAN BROWN: The number of English translations over the years testifies not only to the importance of Baudelaire’s book but also to its mystique, its power to magnetize identification. One difficulty with translations of Les Fleurs du mal is that many seem to strain for identification with the author, and strive to inhabit a “Baudelairean” persona, often resulting in a cheekiness that is quite removed from Baudelaire’s sensibility. The previous translation of Baudelaire I most admire is reserved in this respect: Geoffrey Wagner’s 1946 versions of selected poems from Les Fleurs du mal (now out of print) are precise and intelligent, and that precision conveys the mood of the work. The criterion of “accuracy” in translation is hard to determine or agree upon, but I avoid translations that seem arbitrary in their choices or that seek originality through willful deviation, so as to exhibit the creativity of the translator. True creativity in translation inheres in subtle layers of sound, rhythm, and meaning rather than in conspicuous displays of originality.

Around eight years ago, I got serious about writing a critical study of Baudelaire, and thus about interpreting the poems, grappling with their ambiguities, their interrelationships, their conceptual challenges, and the singularity of their diction. Even if one quotes the poems in French, one needs reliable translations in order to work back and forth between original texts and one’s own critical prose. I couldn’t find English versions of the poems that I could work with at this level. When I started translating them myself, my first criterion was: Can I quote this passage and write about it in a way that makes sense? Does my version hold up to scrutiny at the level of interpretive rigor? That’s not entirely possible, but it gave me a standard to which I could hold myself: I wanted versions that were accountable to interpretive issues I would be writing about in English.

As you note, one of my priorities was fidelity to the poetic line. Attempting to preserve rhyme in translation can be unsatisfying because the words that rhyme are different: associations motivating the construction of rhyme are lost, and this is why rhyme in translation often feels more formally arbitrary than unrhymed lines. The bond between form and content, which makes the poem, is broken. But the line is a unit of sense that can be more genuinely preserved in translation, especially when one also preserves the punctuation of the original. The tension between line and sentence is crucial in Baudelaire, often working through intricate subordinate clauses that defer semantic and thematic resolution. Here’s an example from one of his earliest and apparently simplest poems, followed by my translation:

Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville,
Notre blanche maison, petite mais tranquille;
Sa Pomone de plâtre et sa vieille Vénus
Dans un bosquet chétif cachant leurs membres nus,
Et le soleil, le soir, ruisselant et superbe,
Qui, derrière la vitre où se brisait sa gerbe,
Semblait, grand œil ouvert dans le ciel curieux,
Contempler nos dîners longs et silencieux,
Répandant largement ses beaux reflets de cierge
Sur la nappe frugale et les rideaux de serge.

I have not forgotten, next to the city,
Our white house, little but tranquil;
Its plaster Pomona and its elderly Venus
In a meager copse hiding their naked members,
And the sun, in the evening, streaming down and superb,
Which, behind the pane where its sheaf would shatter,
Seemed, great open eye in the curious sky,
To contemplate our long and silent dinners,
Spreading widely its beautiful candle reflections
Upon the frugal cloth and the serge curtains.

Even if you have no French, you can see that the grammatical structure of the poem and its intricate relationship to the lines has been retained. The poem is a single sentence, and this matters, because the internal complications of that sentence through subordinate clauses and across lines create the time of the “not forgotten” that the poem returns to through the contemplative refractions of memory.

I appreciate that your adherence to line and punctuation preserves each poem’s architecture, such that a reader with no French can still orient themselves to the original. There is something, too, about that sense of precise arrangement that speaks to the relationship between the poems—which, in the words of Baudelaire’s contemporary Barbey d’Aurevilly, held a “secret architecture.” How do you see the relationship between the sections of Les Fleurs du mal? I ask this with the book’s publication history in mind, with several poems being censored after an obscenity trial, and others written and added later.

This remark of Barbey d’Aurevilly concerning a secret architecture—which he made at the obscenity trial in defense of the cohesive integrity of Baudelaire’s book—has been a crux of the critical reception, and even if Baudelaire’s friend may be overstating the case, it’s important to think through the implications of this claim.

The first edition of Les Fleurs du mal, published in 1857, had 100 poems, plus an unnumbered prefatory poem entitled “To the Reader,” organized in five sections of uneven length: “Spleen and Ideal,” “Flowers of Evil,” “Revolt,” “Wine,” and “Death.” “Spleen and Ideal” constitutes the bulk of the volume. Within that section, there are important structural determinations to which Barbey d’Aurevilly may be referring. The 20th poem is “The Jewels,” which initiates a section of poems addressed to a lover in tones shifting between eroticism, idealization, de-idealization, misogynist vituperation, and tender affection. After the 10th poem in that section, “Lethe,” the addressee seems to shift and the thematic material becomes more discrepant. One can’t cleanly divide these poems into three groups referring to three mistresses, as some suggest; referential frameworks shift more fluidly, and while Baudelaire’s biography is relevant, I think it’s a mistake to ground lyric apostrophe too directly in empirical facts. But it is the case that “The Jewels” and “Lethe” mark important shifts in the opening section, and when these poems were removed by censorship, part of the “architecture” of the volume was compromised.

Another of the banned poems in the opening section, “To She Who Is Too Gay,” is of great thematic and structural importance. It may be the most notoriously violent poem in the book, describing the fantasy of creeping into a room at night and carving a wound in the side of the woman addressed, into which the speaker would “infuse my venom.” Two poems later, in “Confession,” we find the same feminine figure in a different role, interrupting the easy mood of an evening stroll with a “piercing note.” She tells the male speaker “what hard work it is to be a beautiful woman,” “how stupid it is to take things to heart,” and “how banal [is] the labor” of the dancer who “swoons / In her machinic smile.” This poem, in which a woman answers masculine fantasies with feminist realism, is separated from “To She Who Is Too Gay” by a piece titled “Reversibility.” So, the removal of the earlier poem’s fantasy of masculine violence would have compromised its reversal by a proximate poem announcing the stupidity of male fantasies and the banal labor of fulfilling them.

Several poems in the section titled “Flowers of Evil” were also banned after the publication of the first edition: “Lesbos,” “Damned Women,” and “Metamorphoses of the Vampire.” “Lesbos” is a self-consciously idealizing poem about the classical sapphic cult of the Greek island of Lesbos; “Damned Women” is a poem of erotic entanglement in which two women “descend the path of eternal hell.” Again, these are “reversible” poems, which may also have a reversible relation to the poems of masculine/heterosexual obsession, exoticism, idealization, and damnation—as if the volume includes discrepant forms of erotic desire, only to draw them into the same “mal.”

Though it may have been a succès de scandale, Baudelaire viewed the censorship of his book as a public humiliation and a catastrophe for his project. It is remarkable that, in the wake of this event, Baudelaire responds by raising the level of his poetic achievement in poems like “The Swan,” “The Seven Old Men,” “The Little Old Ladies,” “Danse Macabre,” and “The Voyage.” These masterpieces are then included in the second edition of 1861, along with many other new poems, and this was the last edition whose organization he oversaw before he died in 1867. The addition of “The Voyage” as the final poem of the volume is important for two main reasons. First, it contains a searing de-idealization of colonial “exploration”:

Bitter knowledge, that one draws from the voyage!
The world, monotonous and small, today,
Yesterday, tomorrow, always, makes us see our own image:
An oasis of horror in a desert of ennui!

Second, the poem ends with another reversal of the taedium vitae it expresses: an imperative to plunge “to the bottom of the Unknown to discover the new!” This is the clarion call of modernism, and the line marks a fascinating projection toward that future at the end of a volume that also remains a signal work of French Romanticism. In Les Fleurs du mal, Romanticism and modernism are uncanny doubles, semblables. This is one of the things I love most about the book—how it does not differentiate these two “periods” or “movements” while nevertheless demarcating a shift from one to the other.

It’s interesting to connect this image of the colonial appetite in “The Voyage” with what has become a key shorthand for modernism—the fetishizing of “the new.” Can you say more about how Baudelaire’s poetry negotiates the 19th-century colonial project? Baudelaire was shipped off to India in 1841 by his stepfather, but the vessel never made it, and he spent time in French Mauritius and the island of Réunion, where slavery was active until 1848. There’s a change from his earlier poems written around that time, such as “To a Creole Lady,” and a work like “Invitation to the Voyage,” in which colonial landscapes are tightly linked with a racialized woman and “all is order and beauty / Pleasure, calm, and luxury.” How does a translation account for this imagery—which is often racist and Orientalist—without reasserting it?

That’s an important question, because a translator should never bowdlerize the language of a literary work. Discussing his recent translation of Les Fleurs du mal, Aaron Poochigian notes that “Baudelaire’s representations of black people” confronted him with a challenge, since “Baudelaire is anything but politically correct.” Poochigian notes that, in “The Swan,” Baudelaire “uses the word ‘negress’ (négresse)” and he wonders, “How does one translate it in the 21st century?” Here’s the stanza in question:

Je pense à la négresse, amaigrie et phtisique,
Piétinant dans la boue, et cherchant, l’œil hagard,
Les cocotiers absents de la superbe Afrique
Derrière la muraille immense du brouillard.

Poochigian translates this as follows:

I think of a black girl, tubercular,
searching with tired eyes, as she slogs through mud,
for palms she knew in Africa somewhere
behind a massive barrier of cloud.

Poochigian wants to be politically correct, but why does he refer to this figure as a “black girl” rather than a “black woman”? Why does he use the indefinite article “a” rather than the definite article “the,” as in the French (“la”)? The definite article suggests the poem’s recollection of a particular person whom the speaker has seen on the streets of Paris, and Poochigian erases the implied particularity of that recollection. How do we arrive at “for palms she knew in Africa somewhere” from “Les cocotier absent de la superbe Afrique”? I wonder if the carelessness of “in Africa somewhere” for “de la superbe Afrique” isn’t more offensive than reproducing the historically specific term “la négresse.” Abiding by a superficial conception of what is politically correct rather than taking responsibility for translating the language of the poem may just reproduce paternalistic approaches to the “representation of black people.” The violent colonial history Baudelaire’s poem registers was, and still is, sheltered by the veneer of politesse; redoubling that ideology does no one any favors.

This is how I translate the stanza:

I think of the negress, gaunt and consumptive,
Trudging in sludge, and seeking, eyes haggard,
The absent palms of splendid Africa
Behind the immense barrier of fog.

Here, Baudelaire’s diction is rendered in English; the word is, after all, a cognate. We also have “The absent palms of splendid Africa,” which directly renders the sense of the third line and conveys the combination of social realism and idealizing exoticism this stanza involves. This doubling of registers is essential to the poem, which allegorizes its historically situated depiction of Paris during Haussmannization by identifying it with the fall of Troy. The famous opening clause of the poem—“Andromaque, je pense à vous!”—is doubled by the phrase “Je pense à la négresse”: Andromache was taken as a slave after the death of her husband, Hector, and the fall of her city. The complex allegorical operation of Baudelaire’s stanza has to be situated in the context of transatlantic slavery, which continued in some French colonies until the mid-19th century. Africans sold into slavery, and their descendants, arrived in the metropole through circuitous paths: as refugees, as “servants,” as concubines, sometimes as freed men and women. Baudelaire’s lover, Jeanne Duval, was Haitian. He was intensely cathected, on many levels, to the exoticist imaginary of French colonialism, not least insofar as he was in love with a Haitian woman of mixed race, whom he also deployed as a token of exotic fascination in his poems.

It would be parochial to see colonial exoticism as peculiar to Baudelaire’s poetry, since exoticism and Orientalism were major features of 19th-century French literature, but certain poems in Les Fleurs du mal have become representative of this aspect of French Romanticism. The poem “Hair” is something like a psychedelic colonial fantasy, which gathers up and saturates itself with a synesthetic catalog of Orientalist, colonial, and racializing tropes. In some poems, these tropes are marked as highly self-conscious. In “Invitation to the Voyage,” the addressee is invited to

                See on these canals
                These ships asleep
        Whose humor is to wander;
                It’s to satisfy
                Your least desire
        That they come from the ends of the earth.

“It’s to satisfy / Your least desire” that these ships travel so far afield, gathering up colonial cargo. This seems critically self-conscious, yet the poem is an idealizing dream of “oriental splendor.” There is something important in this tension for grappling with the specificity and originality of Baudelaire’s work, which is often so intensely ironic that the duplicity of poetic consciousness, its implicit self-questioning, becomes the singular texture of the poetry. But sometimes the work is merely a banal instance of colonial ideology, as in the poem you mention, “To a Creole Lady.” This is a cloyingly honorific tribute to an aristocratic woman Baudelaire met at an estate in Réunion, which he sends to her slaveholding husband upon his return to France. The poem concludes as follows, along with my translation:

Vous feriez, à l’abri des ombreuses retraites,
Germer mille sonnets dans le cœur des poètes,
Que vos grands yeux rendraient plus soumis que vos noirs.

You would, within an arbor of reclusive shadows,
Germinate a thousand sonnets in the heart of the poets,
Whom your wide eyes would make more submissive than your blacks. 

“Your blacks”—that is how Baudelaire refers to slaves in the last line, so translators often render this as “your slaves,” but that is not what it says. Translating what it says matters, because what is at issue is the imputed identity of Blackness with slavery, and the mobilization of that identity as a figure of submission. The brutality and historical specificity of that imputed identity is converted into a romantic analogy: your beauty will render the poets even more submissive than your slaves. The violence of the poem resides in the triteness of this metaphor, wherein the slave serves as nothing but a rhetorical tool of romantic idealization. Crucially, referring to enslaved people as “vos noirs” conveys the history of racialization with which Baudelaire’s poem is bound up, indexing and reproducing an ideological alignment of Blackness with submission that is constituted, in modernity, through the history of transatlantic slavery. If we displace that signifier by explaining the recessed metaphor (blacks = slaves), then we fail to take responsibility for accurately presenting the history of racialization and racism of which the poem is a part. That history is not only a matter of concrete physical violence; it is also a history of tropes.

The confusion of definite and indefinite articles on display in “The Swan” happens a lot in Les Fleurs du mal—we see it in “To a Passerby” as well as in “Correspondences.” It is potentially just a feature of French grammar, but I see it as a toggling between the particular and the general that has important consequences for Baudelaire’s theories of art and beauty, poetics, and capitalist modernity. Can you say a bit more about the book’s place in the history of lyric poetry? I am thinking, in particular, about your earlier comment about Romanticism and modernism serving as “uncanny doubles” for Baudelaire.

We have come to know Baudelaire as the poet of the modern city through the influence of Walter Benjamin’s essays on his work, and in part due to the accessibility of Baudelaire’s 1863 essay on Constantin Guys, “The Painter of Modern Life.” This is an important aspect of Les Fleurs du mal, but to think of the book primarily in those terms is a reduction of its thematic range and incongruous sensibilities. In “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire doesn’t necessarily use the term “modernity” to specify a historical epoch structured by the capitalist mode of production. He says (in P. E. Charvet’s translation) that “modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable. There was a form of modernity for every painter of the past.” Constantin Guys is a painter of modern life insofar as he paints carriages and clothes in streets of 19th-century Paris, but according to Baudelaire’s usage, when Bruegel the Elder painted peasants at a wedding in 1567, he was also being modern.

Complicating the terminological difficulty is a typical understanding of “modernism” as what comes after, and displaces, “Romanticism.” But for Baudelaire, it was Romanticism that was modern. In his Salon of 1846, he writes: “Romanticism and colour lead me straight to Eugène Delacroix. I have no idea whether he is proud of being a romantic; but his place is there because the majority of the public have long since, indeed from his very first work, dubbed him leader of the modern school.” Here modern is opposed to classical, and this offers a foothold: Romanticism might be considered the first modernist avant-garde insofar as it breaks with classicism by affirming the new, and thus inaugurates a succession of movements: Romanticism, realism, impressionism, fauvism, futurism, cubism, etc. Baudelaire affirmed the ruptural energies of romanticism, the radicality of its claim upon the present; it is this that makes him a modernist.

In his book Aesthetic Theory (1970), Theodor Adorno argues that “what adopts a satanic bearing in Baudelaire is the negative self-reflection of identification with the real negativity of the social situation.” Adorno sees such negativity as constitutive of modern art, but in Baudelaire it might also be considered anti-modernist insofar as it is an expression of Baudelaire’s hatred of “Industry and Progress,” “those despotic enemies of all poetry.” Formally, Baudelaire is likewise a paradoxical figure. In an essay on Théophile Gautier, he tells us (again in Charvet’s translation),

It is moreover the character of true poetry to have a regular flow, like the great rivers as they approach the sea, at once their death and their extension into the infinite, to avoid hurry and jolting. Lyrical poetry takes wing, but always with a supple and rhythmical movement. Everything that is brusque and broken displeases it, and it consigns such things to the drama or to the novel of manners.

Everything that is brusque and broken: if modernism involves the advent of dissonance in the arts, Baudelaire is a defender of the supple and rhythmical movement of the metrical line as the criterion of “true poetry.” By the standards of Whitman, Rimbaud, or Mallarmé, he is a formally conservative poet.

Perhaps we should consider Baudelaire representative of the contradictory character of modernism and of the complexity of its relation to Romanticism. Whenever one might be tempted to deploy “Romantic” or “Romanticism” as terms of opprobrium, it’s useful to bear in mind that Baudelaire’s affirmation of the modern is inextricable from his affirmation of Romanticism, and that both are at issue in his 19th-century reinvention of lyric poetry through the representation of urban life.

You’ve said that you started translating Baudelaire in service of a scholarly work. How has producing these translations changed or affected that study? And what do you hope readers might take from your edition? I am thinking especially of the line you quoted, “Everything that is brusque and broken,” which really describes much of the current moment for me.

By translating these poems, I came to grapple with what I call “poetic determination” at a much deeper level than I had before. What I mean by this is the play between determining and being determined that is constantly at issue in the making of poetry. Poetry involves certain forms of obedience: even if one is writing “free verse,” the movement of the rhythm, the sound of the syllables, and the feeling of the tension between line and sentence impose themselves in a manner that saturates the experience of thinking and feeling, the coming-into-being of the poem. If one is writing in established meters and rhyme schemes, these become the medium in which one thinks, hears, breathes—“form” forever shadows the relay between sensation, cognition, and language. Yet in order to obey, and in order to bring to our obedience something new, one must have or construct a power of determining equal to that experience of being determined.

These are incredibly intricate poems. The narrative and emotional movements of “The Little Old Ladies” or “A Voyage to Cythera” are intimately bound up with form and figuration, and while translating these poems, one undergoes that codetermination. I learned a great deal from this. I came to understand that Baudelaire’s Luciferian orientation is not only thematic or political but is also involved in the mood that weaves together grammar and syntax. I also came to grasp the tenderness and generosity of these poems in a way I hadn’t before, the depth of kindness traversing them and the openness to experience they require and from which they were made. Until every single word, phrase, and punctuation mark of these poems had been attended to and reproduced, held in memory as I made my way through the volume, I did not really know the underlying textures of determination that inhabit them. All this profoundly influenced my interpretation of Les Fleurs du mal in my book Baudelaire’s Shadow: An Essay on Poetic Determination (2021).

What do I hope readers might draw from Baudelaire, or my translation of his work, today? I find in the Les Fleurs du mal something touching and indispensable: a total commitment to the singularity of experience. You have written about this yourself in the chapter on Baudelaire in your book Feminine Singularity: The Poetics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2022). When Baudelaire asks of Beauty, “[Do] you come from Heaven or Hell[?]” and then answers, “who cares[?],” he does not mean that he is indifferent to morality, or that his poetry is indifferent to morality. He means that beauty requires an immersion in the singularity of experience. Already living among the ruins of modernity, attuned to the destitution of its ideals, Baudelaire nevertheless rendered the perpetual advent of the singularity of what we are and what surrounds us.

Such a commitment is politically indeterminate—in Baudelaire’s case, it could swing from nihilism to militant socialist engagement to aristocratic hauteur to a kind of sincere and hopeless love for the downtrodden and destitute. But through all that, he never wavered from the rigor of his psychological investigations, the attentiveness of his poetic craftsmanship, the revelatory seeing of his art criticism and his flânerie, the experimental courage of his defamiliarizations of what counts as beauty, or love, or goodness. There are surely no answers in Baudelaire for anything with which our paltry century confronts us. But there is this will, this spiritual courage.

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Nathan Brown is a professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Poetics at Concordia University, where he is founding director of the Centre for Expanded Poetics. He is the author of Baudelaire’s Shadow: An Essay on Poetic Determination (2021), Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (2021), and The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (2017).

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Featured image: Photo of Nathan Brown courtesy of the author.