The limits of translation

Apart from a few notes in the paratexts in his translations and some passing comments in Un Mangeur d opium, Baudelaire never writes directly about his translation approach or a theory of translation. There are, however, important elements to be found in his literary and art criticism, where, as will be seen shortly, the recurrence of the term traduction and its cognates (to refer to the interaction between the verbal and the visual) points to the importance of the 

Within the corpus of Baudelaire s non-translation works, criticism is the genre with which translation is the most immediately comparable. At the most superficial level, a first hint of the link between the two may be found in the fact that Baudelaire s activity as critic, just like his activity as translator, ran in parallel to his poetic activity, and span his creative life. The very simultaneity of both activities, although in itself not enough to justify any theory of a common approach, indicates on Baudelaire s part considerable time and effort devoted to derivative writings, and suggests, therefore, a commitment to this form of writing. As Sherry Simon reminds us, the link between translation and criticism is rooted in the origins of the two activities, which were once seen as one  

2 Roland Barthes, Critique et verite (Paris Seuil, 1966), pp. 13 and 14. 

4 Antoine Berman reminds us of this fundamental characteristic of translation when he writes tout texte a traduire presente une systematicite propre que le mou-vement de la traduction rencontre, affronte et revele. En ce sens, Pound pouvait dire que la traduction etait une forme sui generis de critique, dans la mesure ou elle rend manifestes les structures cachees d un texte. (L Epreuve de Tetranger, p. 20). 

6 in The Nature of Translation, Essays on the Theory and Practice of Literary Translation, ed. by James S. Holmes (The Hague, Paris Mouton, 1970), pp. 91-105. 

---