Traduire l’Ekphrasis. Le cas des Fleurs du mal de Baudelaire en Iran

Cultural exchanges between Iran and France started over three centuries ago. In spite of the strong relationship between the two countries, some books such as Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) went unnoticed in Iranian society. In addition to the literary value of the book, we propose to study ekphrasis in Baudelaire’s poems and its translation into Persian. Its meaning being that of a general description an artwork (imaginary or real), the term ekphrasis belongs to an interdisciplinary field of literature and art where the textual challenges we face may vary from one to another. To narrow down our study, we will focus on four chosen poems that have a minimum of two published translations in Persian, thus allowing the opportunity for a comparative study. These chosen poems, “La Beauté”, “L’Invitation au voyage”, “Les Plaintes d’un Icare” and “Femmes damnées” (“Delphine et Hippolyte”) as well as our corpus translation in Persian, are being studied and analysed through Descriptive Translation Studies. The analysis focuses on the ekphrastic aspect of these poems, their translations into Persian through syntactic and semantic levels and the influence of culture and society on the translation.

‘Ordre et beauté’

The British composer Jonathan Harvey is generally associated with Eastern sacred texts rather than the secular Western literary canon. However, evidence from works composed over several decades suggests that Charles Baudelaire was a significant if subterranean influence upon his music. This article considers these works in detail. ‘L’Horloge’ [‘The Clock’] (1963) is a remarkable interpretation of Baudelaire’s text which reveals in it parallels with Harvey’s own contemporary preoccupations with the nature of musical time. Correspondances (1975) is a sequence of settings from Les Fleurs du mal and interludes and ‘fragments’ for piano which may be arranged in numerous orders at the discretion of the performers. Finally, the instrumental works Hidden Voice (1996) and Hidden Voice II (1999) demonstrate that the poet’s ideas remained an inspiration to Harvey well into his compositional maturity. Particularly striking is the variety and originality of these musical responses. Baudelaire’s real significance for Harvey was perhaps as an exemplar of aesthetic ideals - of ‘order and beauty’ - rather than merely as a source of musically suggestive images and phrases.

Prose Poetry

This chapter treats the prose poem as the decadent genre par excellence by focusing on Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen, 1869). The prose poem is well suited to the expression of decadent culture because of its formal subversion of conventional poetry, especially as adapted by Baudelaire to articulate “the bump and lurch” of urban experience. J. K. Huysmans certified the decadent credentials of the genre when he described it in À rebours (Against Nature, 1884) as “the osmazome of literature, the essential oil of art,” a literary distillation that makes it “an aesthetic treat to none but the most discerning.” The article analyzes “Any Where Out of the World” and other prose poems in relation to certain poems in Le Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), observing no loss of metaphorical power in the more “prosaic” medium despite Baudelaire’s secular and subversive treatment of many of the same poetic material given more elevated, spiritual treatment in the earlier collection.

Baudelaire's Creole Gothic : A Postcolonial Afterlife for Les Fleurs du mal

Baudelaire’s verse poetry is informed by a pervasive Creole Gothic resonance. Two separate but related topoi, the Undead and the Living Dead, lie at the heart of the collection’s necrological imaginary of slave and zombie labour. It is this Gothic double-trope of death-in-life/life-in-death that activates the Gothic Creole strain running through Les Fleurs du mal. Ironically, those poems that seem to evoke most directly the Creole world that Baudelaire encountered in 1841, firstly in Mauritius and then in Réunion, avoid all evocation of plantation slavery. Conversely, the city poems associate modern metropolitan life with the idea of slavery, representing it as a living death and death as a merely temporary and reversible escape. The collection’s representation of this ‘living death’ foreshadows the construction (by Orlando Patterson, most notably) of transatlantic chattel slavery as ‘social death’. As for the poetic representation of the ‘Undead’, this centres on the figure of the zombie. The zombie is essentially a slave for whom death has proved no guarantee against an endless ‘living death’ of hard labour. If the Creole inflection of Baudelaire’s imagery relates primarily to the realities of industrialized plantation labour and to the chattel slavery on which it was based, it is further reinforced by indices of tropical localisation and of racial difference, more specifically pigmentation. However subliminal its resonance, this Creole Gothic strain guarantees for Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal a vivid postcolonial afterlife.

Baudelairean Empathy and the Limits of Transcendence

Inscriptions of empathy for other human beings, in Baudelaire's poetry, communicate an affective experience that has long outlived both the poet and its originator. His poems, which often give thematic prominence to the idea of an afterlife, tend therefore to have their own afterlife, even as they gesture towards both the possibility and the impossibility of the transcendence of physical limitations. The article, which begins with a brief discussion of both the history and meaning of empathy, will suggest that Baudelaire can be understood not only as an early theorist of empathy, but also as a very early theorist of an ethical, because unsettling, form of empathy. The poet anticipated the thinking of the first empathy theorists insofar as, like them, he conceived of an at least partial imaginary merging of self and object. However, he also went beyond these thinkers to the extent that at least some of his poetry describes a disquieting recognition of kinship with other human beings that anticipates far more recent thinking about empathy. The article considers the inscription of empathy in a number of poems that focus on non-human objects before giving more sustained attention to how empathy expresses itself in poems that foreground virtual, real, or imagined human beings. It is argued that Baudelaire's most dramatic evocations of empathy with other human beings foreground the idea of human mortality and the limits of human knowledge even as they hint at the possibility of the magical removal of limitations. While the notion of an ideal communication of souls is certainly present in Les Fleurs du mal, representations of interpersonal empathy in the verse poems tend to involve a recognition of both the possibility and the impossibility of human transcendence of physical limitations.