Paris Spleen. Charles Baudelaire

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       paris spleen

       ALSO BY KEITH WALDROP

       A Windmill Near Calvary

       The Garden of Effort

       Windfall Losses

       The Space of Half an Hour

       The Ruins of Providence

       A Ceremony Somewhere Else

       Hegel’s Family

       The Opposite of Letting the Mind Wander

       Light While There Is Light

       The Locality Principle

       The Silhouette of the Bridge

       Analogies of Escape

      Well Well Reality (with Rosmarie Waldrop)

       Haunt

       Semiramis If I Remember

       The House Seen from Nowhere

      Ceci n’est pas Keith, ceci n’est pas Rosmarie (with Rosmarie Waldrop)

       Songs from the Decline of the West

       The Real Subject

       Transcendental Studies

       Several Gravities

      TRANSLATIONS

      Reversal by Claude Royet-Journoud

      The Notion of Obstacle by Claude Royet-Journoud

       If There Were Anywhere But Desert: Selected Poems of Edmond Jabès

      Etat by Anne-Marie Albiach

      Ralentir Travaux by André Breton, Paul Eluard, and René Char

      Boudica by Paol Keineg

      Objects Contain the Infinite by Claude Royet-Journoud

      Elegies by Jean Grosjean

      Click-Rose by Dominique Fourcade

      Sarx by Pascal Quignard

      Heart Into Soil by Xue Di (with Wang Ping, et al.)

      Prose Poems [1915] by Pierre Reverdy

      An Ordinary Day by Xue Di (with Wang Ping, et al.)

      Mental Ground by Esther Tellermann

      Close Quote by Marie Borel

      Another Kind of Tenderness by Xue Di (with Wang Ping, et al.)

      The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart by Jacques Roubaud (with Rosmarie Waldrop)

      An Earth of Time by Jean Grosjean

      Zone by Xue Di (with Waverly, Wang Ping, et al.)

      The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire

      Theory of Prepositions by Claude Royet-Journoud

      Figured Image by Anne-Marie Albiach

       paris spleen

      CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

      LITTLE

      POEMS

       in

      PROSE

      TRANSLATED BY KEITH WALDROP

       Wesleyan

       University

       Press

       Middletown,

       Connecticut

      Published by

      WESLE YAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

      Middletown, CT 06459

      www.wesleyan.edu/wespress Translation, preface, and notes © 2009 by Keith Waldrop All rights reserved Printed in U.S.A. 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress

      Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867.

      [Spleen de Paris. English]

      Paris spleen: little poems in prose / Charles

      Baudelaire; translated by Keith Waldrop.

      p. cm.

      ISBN 978-0-8195-6909-7 (cloth: alk. paper)

      1. Paris (France) — Poetry. 2. Prose poems, French —

      Translations into English. I. Waldrop, Keith. II. Title.

      PQ2191.P4E5 2009

      841'.8—dc22 2008054948

      Wesleyan University Press is a

      member of the Green Press Initiative.

      The paper used in this book meets their minimum

      requirement for recycled paper.

      This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

      TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

      Baudelaire, in his last years, planned a new (“augmented”) edition of The Flowers of Evil and, as “pendant” to that work, a volume of “little poems in prose.” He did not live to see fulfilled either of these projects. The third edition of The Flowers of Evil came out the year after his death, as volume one of Complete Works; a year later (1869) volume four of this posthumous omnibus included the prose poems. For neither collection had Baudelaire left very precise instructions (in spite of various lists) and the contents for both were arranged by the editors.

      In 1863 he had written the publisher Hetzel (most famous now for the big red hardbacks of Jules Verne) that Paris Spleen would contain a hundred poems — of which he was still, he said, thirty short. In his remains were found only the fifty offered here.

      He had published prose poems as early as 1855 (two years before the first — condemned — edition of The Flowers of Evil), so the book was not a sudden new idea. In a rare case he had rewritten a prose poem in verse; more often (but not really often) redone a verse poem into prose. Some poets write drafts in prose, then work them into verse. This was not Baudelaire’s practice.

      POETRY, PROSE, VERSE

      ‘Prose’ in the phrase ‘prose and poetry’ has not the same meaning as ‘prose’ when opposed to ‘verse.’ We have in English, as Eliot noted decades ago, three words: prose, poetry, and verse — where we need four. The culprit is ‘prose.’ The same problem exists in French.

      To distinguish prose from verse is easy: The basic element of prose is the sentence; that of verse, the line.

      Baudelaire had no reason to question that he was writing poetry, for which I am not about to hazard a definition. After all, The Flowers of Evil was known to be a book of poems (its morality was argued, never its genre), and Paris Spleen he intended not to break with, but to continue, that work. The change from earlier to later was not poetry-to-prose but specifically verse-to-prose.

      THE TITLE

      The title adopted for the posthumous