Baudelaire's A Carcass: Thoughts On Translating the Poem
As I discussed last week, I’m working on publishing an illustrated Zine version of Baudelaire’s infamous poem, A Carcass. I ran into my first major stumbling block almost immediately after I conceived of this idea.
Intellectual property law.
The issue is this: while I’m certain that Baudelaire’s works in the original French are public domain, I was not able to confirm that any of the widely available English translations could be safely used without infringing on the copyright of the translator.
This concern stymied my progress for a while. I almost abandoned the project. And then, one night, after a few sips of whiskey, it became obvious to me that I’d been thinking about the whole thing backwards.
It’s not a stumbling block.
It’s an opportunity.
Because Baudelaire’s works are in the public domain I can safely to produce my own translation — my own reimagining — of Baudelaire’s infamous poem. So I decided to take a bit of time and adapt the piece into my own voice, make it something personal, and enhance the connection between Baudelaire’s art and my own.
So for the last few weeks I’ve worked to produce an entirely new adaptation of A Carcass, based off the original French. Although I do speak French as a second language (I lived in Montreal for years), I didn’t feel comfortable taking on this task all alone. So I decided to enlist the help of a professional translator to ensure that my adaptation is up to par.
My goal was to produce a text that preserves (my understanding of) Baudelaire’s original intentions while, at the same time, making some stylistic changes to lend a touch of my own voice to Baudelaire’s classic words. You can think of this as being less of a translation than it is an adaptation. This is why I’ve opted to call the work “Baudelaire’s A Carcass by Neal Auch,” rather than simply “A Carcass, by Charles Baudelaire, illustrated by Neal Auch.” The distinction here is subtle, but I do think it’s important.
In creating my adaptation I have chosen to abandon Baudelaire’s meter and rhyming structure entirely. Instead, I used a looser free verse approach, which feels more contemporary to me and is also the kind of verse structure I prefer in my own writing. I have also subtly adapted the arrangement and meaning of a few stanzas in service of producing a text that resonates with my images as deeply as possible. As a concrete example of my approach, consider the following stanza in the original French:
Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride,
D'où sortaient de noirs bataillons
De larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide
Le long de ces vivants haillons.
James McGowan’s translation of this stanza — fairly recent and generally very well-regarded — reads as follows:
The flies buzzed and droned on these bowels of filth
Where an army of maggots arose,
Which flowed with a liquid and thickening stream
On the animate rags of her clothes.
For my own version I went with this:
Flies buzzed about the putrid belly
where maggots poured forth, like a viscous fluid,
like some black battalion,
stationed along the rags of flesh.
To my ear this sounds more like contemporary poetry but, at the same time, I think it preserves the tone and lyrical character of Baudelaire’s original work. (At least that’s my opinion. I suspect that the world contains some Baudelaire scholars who might take issue with what I’m doing here. No matter: I’m approaching this project from the perspective of an artist creating a new piece of poetry — this is not meant to be an academic endeavour or an exercise in rigorous French/English translation.)
One thing I struggled with in preparing my manuscript was how I would handle those overwrought terms of endearment that Baudelaire seemed to love, but that I simply cannot bring myself to say without rolling my eyes. For example: I honestly cannot conceive of a situation where I would refer to a lover using language like “my queen of grace,” or “star of my eyes,” or “my angel.” That’s just not how I talk to the people I’m fucking. No judgement if that kind of thing is your kind of thing; it’s just not my kind of thing. After some thought I finally decided to keep these expressions intact. It seems to me that this ornate language was important to Baudelaire; I think it lends the poem a certain sense of grandiosity. So, in the end, I made the compromise and included those passages where Baudelaire refers to his lover saying things like “o my beauty!” and so on. To me, this seems like the correct approach, even if it does kind of make me roll my eyes at times.
Another phrase that gave me some pause was the second stanza in the poem. In the original French:
Les jambes en l'air, comme une femme lubrique,
Brûlante et suant les poisons,
Ouvrait d'une façon nonchalante et cynique
Son ventre plein d'exhalaisons.
McGowan’s translation goes as follows:
Her legs were spread out like a lecherous whore,
Sweating out poisonous fumes,
Who opened in slick invitational style
Her stinking and festering womb.
A naive translation of “femme lubrique” would be “lustful woman.” McGowan opts for “lecherous whore,” which suits the tone of the poem and, I think, matches Baudelaire’s intentions. But the language gave me pause because it seems slut-shaming and misogynistic to my ear and, again, this is not the kind of language I see myself using in day-to-day life. So my first instinct was to replace this stanza with something a bit milder, referring to the animal as adopting a “seductive posture”. But… The more I thought about it this just didn’t seem right. Baudelaire was a product of his time and he clearly had vulgar intentions with that stanza; replacing his misogynistic slut-shaming language with something less offensive would be watering down the poem. So, in the end, I opted for this:
Her legs were spread wide, like a lecherous whore,
shamelessly inviting us to gaze on her festering cunt,
her bloated belly,
sweating out poison fumes.
Here I not only followed McGowan’s usage of the phrase “lecherous whore,” but I actually went a little further and replaced “festering womb” with “festering cunt” because, again, it seems pretty clear to me that this kind of vulgarity is what Baudelaire had in mind here. Also there’s the issue that McGowan’s language makes very little sense when read literally: the womb is an internal organ… You obviously cannot see an animal’s womb without cutting it open first, and it’s fairly clear that the carcass isn’t quite so ravaged as that. Baudelaire’s French refers to this body part as “ventre,” which is naively “belly” in English, but I very strongly suspect that what the narrator was actually looking in that moment at was either the mons or the vulva. I mean… What else could he possibly be talking about here?
So, as with the terms of endearment, I tried to find a middle ground between preserving Baudelaire’s intentions while also lending my voice to the poem.
For subscribers to my mailing list I’m going to make a physical version available at a reduced cost, and a digital version available for free download. The idea here is to offer a gift to say thank you to those who’ve already subscribed, and to try to entice new subscribers to join my list. If this sounds interesting to you you can sign up here.
I’m very excited about this project! My timeline for completion is still up in the air, but I’m hoping to have something ready in 2-3 weeks. If this goes well then I’m planning to make this the first in a series of narrowly-focused magazine projects.
Stay tuned!