Baudelaire's A Carcass: Anatomy of an Art Project
Charles Baudelaire
Baudelaire’s infamous poetry collection, The Flowers of Evil, shocked and appalled 19th-century French readers with its vulgar themes and association of death with sexuality. Both Baudelaire and his publisher were prosecuted for offence to public decency, and six poems in the collection remained banned for almost a century.
In time, the cultural significance and poetic genius of Baudelaire’s works would become widely recognized. Indeed, no less a poet than T.S. Eliot cited Flowers of Evil as the greatest example of modern poetry in any language.
Perhaps the most infamous poem in Baudelaire’s infamous catalogue is A Carcass, a lovingly detailed description of a dead animal that the author encountered while on a romantic stroll with his lover. Beneath the vulgar fixation on rotting flesh, the poem presents a hopeful mediation on possibility for new beauty to emerge from death and ruin.
My Own Beautiful Carcass
Baudelaire’s poem, A Carcass, has a very special meaning for me. Not so long ago, I stumbled across a dead raccoon and, like the poem’s narrator, I was struck by the unlikely beauty of the thing. For some time I visited the carcass, checking in to see what new beauty the process of decomposition had created. Eventually, I scavenged the mummified head of the creature and brought it home. This desiccated husk has now found a new life as the centrepiece of a sequence of baroque still life compositions.
My magazine project Baudelaire’s A Carcass represents the marriage of Baudelaire’s words with my own artistic vision. The work presents a bold new translation of Baudelaire’s masterpiece alongside my own still life imagery.
The magazine is now (finally!) completed and will be available to subscriber for free as a digital download. This is my way of saying thank you for your support and for entrusting me with your email address.
A print version of the magazine will also be available for purchase, for you collectors who want something beautiful and tangible that you can take down from the shelf and admire from time-to-time.
Lost in Translation
Although there are many English-language translations of A Carcass available, for this project I wanted to produce my own interpretation — my own reimagining — of Baudelaire’s masterpiece. My goal was to adapt the piece into my own voice, to make it something personal and deepen the connection between Baudelaire’s art an my own.
I speak French and, indeed, I lived in Montreal for many years. Nevertheless, to ensure that my translation would be up to par, I hired a professional translator to assist me in my work. My goal was to produce a text that preserves 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. In some sense this work is more an an adaptation than a translation — this is why I’ve opted for the title “Baudelaire’s A Carcass, by Neal Auch,” rather than simply “A Carcass, by Charles Baudelaire, illustrated by Neal Auch.” The distinction is, perhaps, subtle, but I do think it’s important.
In creating my adaptation I opted to abandon Baudelaire’s sense of meter and rhyming structure in favour of a looser free-verse structure which, to me at least, feels more contemporary and cleaves closer to my own literary voice.
One thing I struggled with in my translation work was how to handle some of the outdated misogynistic and slut-shaming language that Baudelaire employs. Expressions like “lecherous whore” and “festering cunt” definitely rub me the wrong way and certainly aren’t things I’m inclined to say in my own day-to-day life. For I while I contemplated replacing this kind of language with something a bit less cringe. In the end, though, I opted to keep these expressions intact because I do believe that this is consistent with Baudelaire’s original intentions and because I didn’t want to water down the poem. In the final product I like to believe that I have found a balance between lending my voice to the poem, and preserving some of Baudelaire’s original vulgarity.
Composition and Visual Metaphors
The sequence of baroque still life arrangements at the core of Baudelaire’s A Carcass draw considerable influence from the iconography and philosophy of 17th-century Dutch still life paintings.
Like the poem itself, the images that accompany Baudelaire’s A Carcass are intended as a reminder of mortality and a meditation on the possibility for beauty to emerge from death and ruin. In composing these works I appropriated a number of visual metaphors that are common to baroque still life. The most obvious example of this is my repeated use of the raccoon skull and human teeth. Both of these are (obviously) intended as symbols of mortality; they serve the same metaphorical role that would have been played by human skulls and femurs in the works of the 17th-century Dutch masters. The extinguished candles that feature throughout my work serve a very similar purpose — these are a reminder that all things are transient and all life will, in time, become extinguished.
The motif of dead flowers that repeats throughout Baudelaire’s A Carcass is intended as a reminder that beauty of life — like the beauty of the flower — will soon fade. The pairing of flowers with dead grass in one particular image is a rather direct reference to 1 Peter 1:24. “All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall.”
The tipped cups and precariously placed silverware items that feature heavily throughout these arrangements are intended to convey a sense of instability. They are reminders of the fragility of life.
Finally, there is the dead cicada which features in several compositions. Because of that insect’s unusual life cycle — cicadas remain dormant underground for many years before emerging in their fully-developed adult form — they are frequently employed as a metaphor for personal growth and for the realization of potential. My usage of this prop is more-or-less in line with that metaphor and, indeed, during the peak of the COVID lockdown this abstract concept felt particularly relevant for me on a personal level.
The Layout of the Magazine
The text and images in Baudelaire’s A Carcass have been arranged to convey a sense of descent and decay.
Across each 2-page spread the placement of the text is intended to guide the reader’s eye downwards; this graphic design choice is meant to convey a sense of descent, of collapse, of flesh being reclaimed by soil.
At the same time, the sequencing of images has been carefully chosen to capture some sense of the deterioration of my beloved raccoon skull that has taken place over the course of the months it took to complete this project. This deterioration is, after all, the natural continuation of the decomposition process that attracted me to the raccoon carcass in the first place.
The Physical Product
For a while I was colloquially using the word “Zine” to describe this project. I regret this choice of language; it gave some readers the impression that I was going to produce a cheaply-made photocopied document with poor image quality. This is not at all what the finished product is going to be like.
Baudelaire’s A Carcass is an 8.5”x11” professional-quality magazine with a heavy semi-gloss cover and sturdy binding. The print version is 24 pages long, consisting of the poem, 15 high-fidelity images, and several pages of supplemental text intended to deepen the relationship between Baudelaire’s words and my imagery.
