Translations of Translations that are neither Clear nor Intoxicating
- meculpepper
- Jan 16, 2024
- 13 min read
Updated: Jan 25, 2024
Charles Baudelaire’s essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne describes the work of Constantin Guys, referred to in the text simply as M.G., the title’s painter of modern life who is uniquely endowed with the ability to capture modernity and to render it eternal. One might understand the text as outlining Baudelaire’s theory of art as well as a description of his own goals and methodology couched, in typical Baudelairian fashion, in layers of allegory.
The essay is divided into thirteen sections. The first five present themselves as theoretical, while the last eight focus on various figures that appear in Constantin Guys’ artwork (the dandy, the soldier, the woman)—although, as Cynthia Chase points out in her essay “The Memory of Modern Life,” these “objects of aesthetic representation,” are just as integral to the essay’s theoretical framework, and, perhaps, an attempt to illustrate its efficacy (199). After making the claim in the fifth section, entitled “L’art mnémonique” that the “spectateur” of M.G.’s art “est ici le traducteur d’une traduction toujours claire et enivrante” (Baudelaire 21), the writer goes on to “translate” M.G.’s drawings into writing, an illustration and translation of his own methodology for attempting to “dégager de la mode ce qu’elle peut contenir de poétique dans l’historique, de tirer l’éternel du transitoire” (Baudelaire 17). “La mode” and and the “transitoire” are what Baudelaire attempts to pin down as “modernity,” as he goes on to define it: “la modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable” (ibid.). As Walter Benjamin translates it, modernity is that which is “marquée au coin de la fatalité d’être un jour l’antiquité,” a mark of fate which it (“elle” in French) reveals to him who is witness at her birth (Benjamin “Paris” 72). Both Baudelaire and Benjamin are certain to establish that, despite its (her) fleeting, fugitive nature, modernity is an object that can be extracted, marked, and perceived.
The dual nature of art described here—divided between that which is transitive, fugitive, contingent (modern) and that which is poetic, historic, eternal, immutable—is central both to Le Peintre de la vie moderne and to interpretations (translations) of the text, including Benjamin’s “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and Chase’s essay (cited above) “The Memory of Modern Life.” Appearing as it does in many guises, it is perhaps not surprising that this duality has a shifting quality. Baudelaire first introduces it in the opening section of the Le Peintre de la vie moderne, entitled “Le beau, la mode et le bonheur,” in which he describes a theory of beauty’s “composition double,” contending that although the beautiful produces an impression of unity, it is in fact composed of two elements: an eternal and invariable element, and a relative and circumstantial element (modernity).
The tension that makes up this dual composition is already present before it is given a name. It is introduced in the opening paragraph, which describes a group of visitors at the museum quickly passing by a “une foule de tableaux très intéressants, quoique de second ordre” (this is the category to which Constantin Guys’ works belong) in order to plant themselves dreamily in front of a Titian or a Raphaël (5). In the second paragraph, Raphaël becomes Racine, and here the tension is established between poetae minores who have “du bon, du solide et du délicieux” but whose work is viewed as less interesting because its subject is “la beauté particulière, la beauté de circonstance et le trait de mœurs” and great poets whose subject is “la beauté générale” (ibid.).
This tension is then translated into allegory: the minor artwork, which the text has declared useful not only for its beauty but for its historical content, is represented as a series of historical fashion plates (“une série de gravures de mode”). These illustrations of costumes contain “la morale et l’esthétique du temps” of their creation and, perhaps most importantly, are translatable “en beau et en laid; en laid, elles deviennent des caricatures; en beau, des statues antiques” (6). In addition to being translatable, they are “resurrectable”: the writer describes them appearing in a theater, enable the past to become present. Finally, they are manageable. Returning the costumes from the stage to the page, Baudelaire describes “un homme impartial” leafing through a book of French fashions from the origin of France to the present and finding “rien de choquant ni même de surprenant. Les transitions y seraient aussi abondamment ménagées que dans l’échelle du monde animal. Point de lacune, donc point de surprise” (ibid.). In the perfect evolution of these costumes, this man would see what a “profonde harmonie régit tous les membres de l’histoire” (ibid.). The (feminized) “modes” as “limbs” of history are “régies”—commanded, governed—by harmony.
It is here that Baudelaire introduces his theory of beauty’s dual composition, stating that it is made up on the one hand, “d’un élément éternel, invariable, dont la quantité est excessivement difficile à determiner” and on the other hand, “d’un élément relatif, circonstanciel, qui sera, si l’on veut, tour à tour ou tout ensemble, l’époque, la mode, la morale, la passion” (8). He then metaphorizes this eternal element as a “divin gâteau” and the relative element as its “enveloppe amusante, titillante, apéritive” without which the gâteau would be “indigestible, inappreciable, non adapté et non approprié à la nature humaine” (ibid.).
Most of the text to this point has been laid out in an approachable, digestible fashion. The tone is matter of fact; the images of people going to the museum, reading poetry, leafing through pictures of fashion plates, are ordinary enough. There are no sudden leaps or surprises—until there are (and the reader is simultaneously told that there are not). What are these clothes doing strutting about on stage? How can fashion plates be said to close the gaps in history? What is this divine cake doing here?
Interestingly, both Benjamin and Chase light upon the figure of the “outmoded fashions,” as Chase calls it, although Benjamin redeploys it for his own purposes, while Chase breaks down its functions both in Baudelaire and Benjamin. She writes that these modes are the “exemplary object of the kind of representation [Baudelaire] argues for,” both beautiful and historical (199). She describes the assertion that these modes can constitute a fully continuous, intelligible historical whole as “mnemonic magic” and writes an act of translation into Baudelaire’s passive allegory of leafing through pages: “Leaf through all the modes, add up all the costumes, and you will come up with the very garments of history, having been translated from the dim regions of enumeration and reference into the region of figure and symbol: ‘clothing’ will turn back into a metaphor, and be the garment of the history of man” (ibid.). In this way, she points to the sleight of hand at work here. The outmoded fashions are being deployed in a reversal of the contingent and the eternal, what she translates here as “the dim regions of enumeration and reference” and “the region of figure and symbol” (the region of correspondances). Chase also casts doubt on the efficacy of this move, stating somewhat dismissively “That is quite an assertion, and the text through its rhetorical flamboyance flags it as such” (ibid.). She points out the discontinuity. The reader does not have to submit to the grandiosity of these claims, to allow these images to dictate meanings.
Although only Chase attempts to dismantle Baudelaire’s figure of outmoded fashions, both she and Benjamin engage in an analysis of his next translation of the figure of the dual composition: the duel of composition. This figure appears in the fifth section of the text, “L’art mnémonique,” the final section before Baudelaire launches into the enumeration of Guys’ tableaux. (This apparent entry into the regions of enumeration and reference might not be genuine, however, if Chase is right in asserting that the objects of representation here have been metaphorized.) It depicts M. G. at work, who
…traduisant fidèlement ses propres impressions, marque avec une énergie instinctive les points culminants ou lumineux d’un objet (ils peuvent être culminants ou lumineux au point de vue dramatique), ou ses principales caractéristiques, quelquefois même avec une exagération utile pour la mémoire humaine. (21)
This process of representation, which is described as an act of translation, involves an act of synthesis and suppression in which the memory plays an important role: M. G. is not producing an exact copy of what is before him, but a translation of his impressions, and his memory is the site of this synthesis, suppression, and translation; like all great artists, we are told, he draws from the image written in his mind, and not from nature.
Nature, that region of enumeration and reference, resists, and this establishes a duel between “la volonté de tout voir, de ne rien oublier” and “la faculté de mémoire qui a pris l’habitude d’absorber vivement la couleur générale et la silhouette, l’arabesque du contour” (22). The image of the duel, however, is insufficient, because nature is not singular, but multiple; the artist is “assailli par une émeute de détails, qui tous demandent justice avec la furie d’une foule amoureuse d’égalité absolue” (ibid.). The artist who succeeds in vanquishing nature and its rebellious details, however, is capable of something more: not merely controlling what goes into the work, but what comes out of it, and how that is ingested:
…l’imagination du spectateur, subissant à son tour cette mnémonique si despotique, voit avec netteté l’impression produite par les choses sur l’esprit de M. G. Le spectateur est ici le traducteur d’une traduction toujours claire et enivrante. (21)
This despotic mnemonic is more mnemonic magic, an attempt at another sleight of hand. Once again, Cynthia Chase calls it into question, ultimately marking it as a failure. For her, the statement’s eagerness doesn’t do enough to enough to mask its incredibility. The final claim, that the spectator is the translator of a translation which is always clear and intoxicating, is too obviously programmatic or allegorical. Rather than seeing in this a figure of representation without loss, she chooses to see what is hiding behind it: in the work’s creation, “the always to be feared concomitants of translating—error, inadequacy, loss of cognitive power and aesthetic appeal” and in its reception, “a familiarly dreary situation, that of translating back, or on, from a translation, a process likely to produce dead-end words and uninterpretable sentences” (Chase 196). Rather than endless continuity, a miraculous dissolution of lacunae, she sees here a “stutter betraying a would-be denegation” (197). Chase uses this to mark not just the allegory, but Baudelaire’s text as a failure by pinpointing the claims Baudelaire makes for Guys’ paintings as a “translation” as a reference to his own text (displacing the text from the realm of the figure to the realm of reference).
The figure may well be a translation of a translation in a translation of a translation, but that hasn’t prevented it from being retranslated into other texts. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin sets out to interpret the figure of the duel, and although Chase’s reading of it is ultimately somewhat dismissive, she also gives it a good deal of consideration. And it is possible that despite the chimeric quality of Baudelaire’s enthusiastic claim, there are some correspondences between its translations. In order to make the transcription of these translations more clear (if not more intoxicating), let’s start with a model of Baudelaire’s figure:
Although it is a duel, there are at least three forces involved: the referential world, or nature, the artist-translator, and the spectator translator. In Baudelaire’s conception, there is no interaction between the referential world and the spectator-translator, but (at least in this figure) both submit to the artist-translator’s despotic mnemonic.
Benjamin uses Freud to interpret the figure of the duel, writing:
In Freud's view, consciousness as such receives no memory traces whatever, but has another important function: protection against stimuli. “For a living organism, protection against stimuli is almost more important than the reception of stimuli. The protective shield is equipped with its own store of energy and must above all strive to preserve the special forms of conversion of energy operating in it against the effects of the excessive energies at work in the external world—effects that tend toward an equalization of potential and hence toward destruction.” The threat posed by these energies is the threat of shocks. The more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely they are to have a traumatic effect. Psychoanalytic theory strives to understand the nature of these traumatic shocks “in terms of how they break through the shield that protects against stimuli.” (Benjamin “Motifs” 317)
If we read this translation as an image of the duel between the artist’s consciousness and the stimuli of the émeute de détails, there is a strange disconnect. The image does not quite impose itself neatly over Baudelaire’s image, mostly because Freud begins by saying memory traces and consciousness are incompatible, and Benjamin has apparently replaced Baudelaire’s artist’s memory with consciousness. However, there is a third figure that Benjamin does not mention (perhaps deliberately): that of the spectator-translator, who, in Baudelaire’s configuration, is the passive receiver of the memory traces. In Benjamin’s configuration, the conflict has shifted: it is no longer a conflict between the external, referential world and the artist-translator, but between the artist-translator and the conscious spectator-translator, both equipped with consciousnesses. The “excessive energies” at work in each (external to each other) threaten to equalize the potential of referents and thus to destroy the stability of representation.
A traumatic shock cushioned and parried by consciousness, becomes an incident that can be converted into an isolated experience [Erlebnis], an experience that has been experienced explicitly and consciously. On the other hand, a shock can be incorporated directly into conscious memory, not consciousness itself; in this case, the incident is “sterilized” into poetic experience [Erfahrung]. Benjamin does not describe the distinction between consciousness and conscious memory, nor does he elaborate on the meaning of the incident being “sterilized.” He does, however, cite Paul Desjardins saying that Baudelaire was “more concerned with implanting the image in memory than with adorning and elaborating it” (Benjamin “Motifs” 322). This figure of the poet (or indeed the poem, for Benjamin seems to want to endow the text itself with consciousness) bypassing the consciousness to incorporate a shock directly into conscious memory renders Baudelaire’s image of the reader encountering “rien de choquant ni même de surprenant” in leafing through his book menacing. Benjamin’s addition of consciousness to the figure of the duel shifts its focus and equips the perspicacious but intoxicated reader with a shield to wield against the assaults of writing. But his description of the coming into being of poetic experience attempts to make Baudelaire into a secret agent, a figure concealed dealing blows “designed to open a path for him through the crowd” (Benjamin “Motifs” 321).
Benjamin brings two other elements into the duel: spleen and idéal. This adds to the conflict the element of time, implicit in the “toujours” of the “traduction toujours claire et enivrante” and recalling Baudelaire’s resolution to render the modern eternal. Elsewhere, Benjamin defines these as opposites: the idéal is the sense of radiant and triumphant spirituality, transcendence (the “crisis-proof correspondances”); spleen is the “intended effect,” “that “fatally foundering, doomed flight toward the ideal, which ultimately—with the despairing cry of Icarus—comes crashing down into the ocean of its own melancholy” (Benjamin “Baudelaire” 29). Crucially, however, Benjamin endows Baudelaire with the ability to reverse perception, rendering fair foul and foul fair (in this he is not doing anything Baudelaire himself did not more or less explicitly seek or claim to do). Thus, Baudelaire is not stuck on a doomed flight toward the ideal, marked by fate to become antiquity, precisely recognized in spleen the latest transfiguration of the idéal, and in the idéal the first expression of spleen.
Within the figure of the duel, the “idéal supplies the power of recollection; spleen rallies the multitude of the seconds against it. It is their commander, just as the devil is the lord of the flies (Benjamin “Motifs” 335). Idéal might be a translation of the artist-translator’s memory, while spleen stands in for the émeute de détails. But the problem of reference has been replaced by the problem of time, and because Benjamin empowers Baudelaire to perform every sleight of hand he sets out to, this too is conquered by Baudelaire’s coopting of both spleen and idéal, and his reversal of them.
Benjamin sees in the duel an assault on consciousness, and a way around it, through sterilized poetic experience. Chase sees in it the violent process of representation, and the rule of law that both enacts and suppresses that violence. Her interpretation remains much closer to the text; the words she superimposes onto Baudelaire’s tend to correspond much more neatly with those he employs. In Chase’s translation of Baudelaire’s allegory, the artist-translator’s mémoire is “that which has to maintain the connection between the details and the whole,” “the power that presides over the conflict between language as reference and language as grammar” (as Benjamin called on Freud, Chase calls on De Man) (194). The anarchical nature of language as reference (corresponding to the painter’s will to show everything) is subdued by the deployment of grammar (corresponding to the painter’s synthesizing, abbreviating power). The details are not eliminated—they are represented “by others” (195).
Chase also reads “memory” as being linked to the production of the image in Baudelaire. It is able to resolve the uprising of details in order to do this by “putting into play…a set of representational conventions that can impose themselves as enforceable, that can perform the role of law” (ibid.). For Chase, however, this image is not automatically received passively by the reader. There is a conflict of force, not just in the writing, but in the reading: the “struggle for the enforcement, the interpreting and applying, the referring to specific instances, of the legal text.” (ibid.).
Chase notes a reversal (or an attempt at a reversal) in Baudelaire, between organic life and inorganic life, which she locates in the figure of the outmoded clothing. She reads this as skewing and raveling the opposition between life and death “by invoking figures of ‘life’ precisely in evoking its absence” (201). By replacing a living body with an “embodied promise or deception, [feminized] ‘living matter,’” a conscious subject with a printed object, an empty figure, Chase reads Baudelaire, with Benjamin’s assistance, as subordinating “the concept of organic life to that of ‘life’ in what Benjamin deems a more fundamental context…the ‘life’ of works—not their life, indeed, but their afterliving, living over” (ibid.). This is the image of the subordination, the silencing the reader’s present in favor of the eternal present of the text.
In this introduction to The Writer of Modern Life, Michael Jennings quotes Benjamin on the dangers of the allegorical mode of representation: “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility a destructive but just verdict is passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance” (Jennings 18). Baudelaire attempts to stabilize this unstable mode through a series of translations, but a reader who sees the gaps in what he claims is a seamless continuum with no openings, who recognizes the symbolic structure as delusive, can impose her subjectivity on the work and thus blast open the continuum of history.
Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. Le Peintre de la vie moderne. Fayard, 2010, Kindle Edition.
Benjamin, Walter. “Baudelaire.” The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Ed.
Michael W. Jennings. Tr. Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingston, Harry John, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 27-29.
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940,
Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 313-355.
Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, Capitale du XIXème siècle.” Das Passagen-Werk. Suhrkamp, 1982.
Chase, Cynthia. “The Memory of Modern Life (Baudelaire).” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical
Humanities, Volume 5, Issue 1, pp. 193-204, DOI: 10.1080/09697250050134180.
Jennings, Michael W. Introduction. The Writer of Modern Life. Essays on Charles Baudelaire.
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.
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