Translation and creation

1 Victor Hugo, 19 July 1860, in Lettres Baudelaire, ed. by Claude Pichois, Etudes Baudelairiennes 1V-V (Neuchatel La Baconniere, 1973), pp. 192-93 (p. 192). 

Void les Paradis auxquels j ai la faiblesse d attribuer quelqu importance. La premiere partie est entierement de moi. La seconde est l analyse du livre de 

7 Alan Astro, Allegory of Translation in Baudelaire s Un Mangeur d opium , p. 171. 

De Quincey, auquel j ai ajoute par-ci par-la quelques idees qui me sont per-sonnelles, mais avec une grande modestie,10 

Baudelaire s ambivalence towards his work and the corresponding critical uncertainty regarding the nature of Un Mangeur d opium, together with its hybrid structure, make this text a highly problematic one. Compared to the far more straightforward Poe translations, Baudelaire s work on De Quincey s autobiography raises central questions about the relationship between creativity and translation, the ownership of discourse and the status of so-called derivative works in the corpus of a creative, canonical writer. 

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Despite these points, however, it is undoubtedly in Baudelaire s own poems which are loosely based on English and American texts but depart from them and so become free-standing poems that the link between translation and creation becomes particularly visible. In such poems, Baudelaire uses a translation of the foreign text as a starting point for his own work, but adapts the translation to his own poetic purpose and in that way transforms it into a very distinct hypertext. 

As has already been suggested, this interaction is nowhere more complex and varied than in Un Mangeur d opium. This text is emblematic of both the range of translation approaches chosen by Baudelaire and of the context in which his translations were produced. In addition, because of the unique blend of translation and creation it displays, Un Mangeur d opium provides a key to the relationship between the two in Baudelaire s writing technique and a bridge between the translation corpus studied so far and the creative corpus. This text will, therefore, be looked at in detail in the next chapter, as illustrating central issues to be explored in the rest of this study. 

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