Charles Baudelaire: 'The Flowers of Evil' by James McGowan Review by: C. E. J. Dolamore The Modern Language Review, Vol.

90, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 452-453 Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3734605 . Accessed: 05/10/2012 20:47
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Reviews

needed for books which staff and students actually borrowed. Yet, how can anyone reach an adequate understanding of the Romantic sensibility without studying the Meditations and assessing the significance of that collection's reception? The edition under review goes a long way to answering this question. David Hillery gives the text of the poems, together with a fifty-six-page introduction. He wisely lets the poems speak for themselves and accompanies them with a relatively small number of notes. Very few students now come to university with any knowledge of nineteenth-century French verse and Hillery has sensibly taken this into account, organizing his introduction with the current undergraduate population in mind. He places the poetry securely in its political and religious context. He rejects the image of Lamartine the poet of personal outpourings. The introduction raises important issues concerning sincerity and originality. How much of the verse reflects a rather self-seeking pose of conservative political correctness? Students coming to Lamartine for the first time will find Hillery particularly useful in explaining how the poems are embedded in literary conventions, cliches, and commonplaces. In such circumstances how did the poet manage to express complexities of feeling which spoke to the condition of a generation? The introduction invites students to reflect upon the relation between tradition and individual talent, and on the anxiety of influence. Moreover, Hillery helpfully draws attention to the came to function as moment of origination within extent to which the Meditations Lamartine's own personal myth: in later years the poet seemed in thrall to the literary self-image which he had constructed in the collection of I820. It is to be hoped that the availability of this edition will encourage a new generation of undergraduates to explore the riches of Lamartine.
UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM CERI CROSSLEY

Oxford University Press. 1993. lvii + 399 pp. ?6.99. 'L'ephemere ebloui vole vers toi, chandelle, I Crepite, flambe et dit: Benissons ce flambeau!' Thus is the luckless translator drawn to the notorious challenge of Baudelaire's poetry. In this new translation, printed with the French poems en regard, James McGowan survives with no less credit than his predecessors, but he does not achieve more than the partial success to which all seem condemned. Somehow Baudelaire's heady mixture of voluptuous imagery and rich artifice always resists the concreteness of English. McGowan mostly uses the pentameter to render the French alexandrine, but occasionally, too, with some success, the twelve-syllable line ('Le Balcon', 'Le Cygne'). He is especially good with the shorter lines, which provide some of his best versions. Objectively, his decision to abandon rhyme whenever it impedes sense seems a wise one, yet its absence from some poems is sadly missed, either as counterpoint to the macabre ('Une Charogne') or as a vital rhythmic ingredient ('La Chevelure', 'Harmonie du soir'). McGowan's greatest achievement lies in the natural fluency of his English, avoiding for the most part the contorted syntax and forced vocabulary of some other translations, so that his poems nearly always read well on their own account, their modern idiom preserving Baudelaire's general accessibility: 'You'd entertain the universe in bed, Foul woman' (p. 53); 'How bittersweet it is on winter nights To hear old recollections raise themselves I Around the flickering fire's wisps of light And through the mist, in voices of the bells' (p. 145). In particular, his translation of the celebrated refrain from 'L'Invitation au voyage' could scarcely be bettered: 'There, all is order and leisure, | Luxury, beauty, and pleasure' (p. Io9).

Charles Baudelaire: 'The Flowers of Evil'. Trans. by JAMES MCGOWAN, with an introduction byJONATHAN CULLER. (World's Classics) Oxford and New York:

MLR, 90.2, 1995

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Given the difficulty of his task, the translator may be excused occasional prosaicness, but not the inaccuracies which unfortunately mar a number of McGowan's versions. For instance, while Baudelaire inverts the cliche in 'ma tete amoureuse d'ivresse', McGowan reduces it to: 'my drunkenhead, dizzy with love' (p. 5 ); 'revis' in 'Le Balcon' means 'relive', not 'seeing again' (p. 75); 'nos cceursmaudits' is misread as 'your damned hearts' (p. 151) and 'le but, de mystique nature' as 'the target, nature's mystic self' (p. 279); 'plante' inexplicably changes tense to 'fixed [his black flag]' (p. 151), leaving the line a syllable short; 'Evil aware of itself' (p. 161) is a misleading rendering of the crucial phrase, 'La conscience dans le Mal', while 'swept to the Orient' (p. 347) is quite meaningless for 'trainant a l'Orient'. Nevertheless, accompanied by Jonathan Culler's perceptive introduction and McGowan's own explanatory notes, this very readable translation will be a useful if not flawless guide for the English reader who lacks the confidence to tackle Baudelaire's text unaided.
UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

C. E.J.

DOLAMORE

TheScriptof Decadence: andthePoetics EssaysontheFictions ofFlaubert ofRomanticism. By

DONATO. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. EUGENIO I993.

208pp. ?27.50. These nine collected essays by the late Eugenio Donato constitute an elegant and refined statement of the impasse into which post-structuralismhas put language and critical theory. The Romantic artist (Flaubert in particular, for he is the major subject of five essays and returns in each of the others) is seen as the quintessential embodiment of the failure of writing: its absurd quest to include its own ontology in a totalizing vision, its reminder that the link between words and things is irrevocably
severed, its nostalgic separation from its own origins, its epistemological nihilism,

and its proliferation into infinite autoreferentiality. Not surprisingly, Donato's preference is for those texts in the Flaubertian corpus which concentrate upon the issue of writing rather than facilitate the myth of realism. The Tentation is discussed in depth in two essays, and is mentioned in several others. Major discussion is also and to Bouvard etPecuchet. In these three texts Donato locates the devoted to Salammbo essential problematics of the Flaubertian ceuvre. The Tentation is regarded as a statement of the false referentiality of language and of the uselessness of all fiction, as a staging of Flaubert's own act of writing and of his own (typically Salammbo et Pecuchet as an opening nineteenth-century) construction of history, and Bouvard into that labyrinthine space in which language cannot present anything more than the impossibility of reconstructing truth. It has to be said that such a view of Flaubert is by now a very familiar one. That Flaubert's writing was partly, even predominantly, about writing itself, about writing's loss of signifying power, about the incongruity of all forms of representation, seems entirely acceptable. Yet to maintain that Flaubert's writing is exclusively that is as partial as are the texts chosen to support Donato's point of view. For clearly, Flaubert was alsothe realist writer, and he did alsobelieve in some residue of representational power in language, and he did also believe that it was possible to make statements (philosophical, aesthetic, epistemological, political) about the world we live in. Donato's essays provide a brilliant and exemplary insight into the nihilism of the post-structuralist approach, and perhaps into the impossibility of criticism itself in such circumstances. For as has so often been asked, how is it feasible to make any authoritative statement about a writer when there is no belief-system, other than a belief in infinite linguistic regression, to support it? In brief, this book says nothing. But it says it charmingly.
UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

TIMOTHY UNWIN