'The Tongue of an Archangel': Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin

Author(s): Elizabeth Duquette

Source: Translation and Literature , Spring, 2003, Vol. 12, No. 1, Modernism and
Translation (Spring, 2003), pp. 18-40
Published by: Edinburgh University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40340166

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 The Tongue of an Archangel':
Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin
Elizabeth Duquette

In the 1836 'Letter to B - ' Edgar Allan Poe bemoans the fact that a
transatlantic passage is necessary for an author to earn a reputation in
America:

You are aware of the great barrier in the path of an American writer. He
is read, if at all, in preference to the combined and established wit of the
world. I say established: for it is with literature as with law or empire - an
established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession. Besides,
one might suppose that books, like their authors, improve by travel - their
having crossed the sea is, with us, so great a distinction.1

Like Emerson the following year, Poe mocks the American preference
for foreign writing. Yet the irony in this instance is that Poe's own
writing might well have been consigned to oblivion had he himself
not 'crossed the sea'. Although members of the nineteenth-century
American literary elite acknowledged, grudgingly, what James called his
occasional 'phrase of happy insight imbedded in a patch of the most
fatuous pedantry',2 Poe established his most important literary empire
in France, where his impact on such major figures as Baudelaire,
Mallarme, and Valery was immense.
Given this marked prejudice, it is little surprise that much com-
mentary on the author has emphasized his role in French, rather than
American, literary history. Recent scholarship, however, has shifted the
focus back to Poe's position in his native land, detailing his relations
to antebellum literary and cultural trends. Of particular interest to
contemporary critics has been Poe's influence on popular writers of the
nineteenth century.3 For authors like Sarah Helen Whitman and Lizzie

1 Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, edited by G. R. Thompson (New York, 1984),
p. 6.
1 Henry James, 'Hawthorne', in Essays: American and English Writers, edited by Leon
Edel (New York, 1984), pp. 315-457 (p. 367).
6 See especially Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and

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Translation and Literature 12 (2003)

Doten, Poe was not only an icon of literary achievement based on

sensational sentimentality, but also a source of inspiration - frequently
from beyond the grave. As Eliza Richards has shown, Poe was often
represented by popular female writers as a figure of romantic genius,
inspirational in a multitude of ways, not only in his life and work but
after it, through the direct support he was called upon by mediums to
provide as subject, muse, and narrator.4 In a very specific sense, then,
Toe's literary legacy [was] ... constituted not only by the preservation
of texts but by Poe's reproduction by other writers, in a process of
doubling.'5 Since Poe's tales have been productively read by authors
and critics alike as enacting and authorizing various extraordinary
kinds of identification, it might be fair to say that the author's literary
afterlife has been even more colourful than his natural existence was.
Defending themselves against a range of charges including both
plagiarism and foolishness, American women mediums claimed that
their spiritual contact with Poe, as well as with other dead artists,
produced works that were best described as 'translations' or 'tran-
scriptions'.6 Their texts, they maintained, should be understood as
collaborative endeavours. Poe was the figure to which these writers were
repeatedly drawn, because of the multiple ways in which life after death
figured in his writings. Loving and living beyond the grave, characters
in Poe stories consistently fail to relinquish their attachments, literal
and metaphorical, to other individuals.7 Thanks to the 'strange
sympathy' she felt with the living and dead Poe, the American poet
Sarah Helen Whitman repeatedly maintained that she had found in the
author not only a lover, but a lost relation. In a letter to John Ingraham,
she explained:
One evening [Poe] had been speaking of the strange sympathies and
correspondence in our tastes, feelings and habits of thought, when I said
suddenly, 'Do you know, I think we must be related and that your name,

Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford, 1995); Shawn Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret
Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet (Baltimore, 1997); and The American Face of Edgar Allan
Poe, edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore, 1995).
4 Eliza Richards, 'Lyric Telegraphy: Women Poets, Spiritualist Poetics, and the
"Phantom Voice" of Poe', Yah Journal of Criticism, 12 (1999), 269-94. See also Joan Dayan,
'Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies and Slaves', American Literature, 66 (1994), 239-73;
Mary Loeffelholz, 'Who Killed Lucretia Davidson or, Poetry in the Domestic-Tutelary
Complex', Yale Journal of Criticism, 10 (1997), 271-93; and Rosenheim, Cryptographic
Imagination, Ch. 5.
5 Rosenheim, Cryptographic Imagination,?). 117.
6 Richards, p. 280.
7 See, among the most famous of Poe's tales, 'Ligeia', 'The House of Usher',
'Morella', 'The Imp of the Perverse', 'Berenice', and 'William Wilson'.

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 Elizabeth Duquette/Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin

like my own, was once spelled Le Poer.' He looked up with a surprised

and radiant look, and said, 'Helen, you startle me! I know that certain
members of my grandfather's family do so spell their name.'8

It is unsurprising that Poe shared 'tastes, feelings and habits of thought'

with a poet who was also his fiancee. What is odd is that this 'strange
sympathy' was not limited to American women caught up in the
spiritualist movement.
Baudelaire's first translation of a Poe tale, 'Mesmeric Revelation',
appeared in La Liberte depenser, 15 July 1848. He was actively involved in
translation for many years, during which time he worked diligently
on his own poetry. By the time the complete Fleurs du Mai was issued,
in 1857, Baudelaire had already published two of his three collections
of Poe translations, Histoires extraordinaires and Nouvelles Histoires
extraordinaires. Baudelaire elaborated the startling depths of his
own sympathetic connection to Poe in terms reminiscent of Sarah
Whitman's:

En 1846 ou 47, j'eus connaissance de quelques fragments d'Edgar

Poe; j'eprouvai une commotion singuliere, ses oeuvres completes n'ayant ete
rassemblees qu'apres sa mort en une edition unique, j'eus la patience
de me Her avec des Americains vivant a Paris pour leur emprunter des
collections de journaux qui avaient ete diriges par Poe. Et alors je trouvai,
croyez-moi, si vous voulez, des poemes et des nouvelles dont j'avais eu
la pensee, mais vague et confuse, mal ordonnee, et que Poe avait
su combiner et mener a la perfection. Telle fut l'origine de mon
enthousiasme et de ma longue patience.9

Vous doutez que de si etonnants parallelismes geometriques puissent

se presenter dans la nature. Eh bien! on m'accuse, moi, d'imiter Edgar
Poe! Savez-vous pourquoi j'ai si patiemment traduit Poe? Parce qu'il me
ressemblait. La premiere fois que j'ai ouvert un livre de lui, j'ai vu, avec
epouvante et ravissement, non seulement des sujets reves par moi, mais des
phrases pensees par moi, et ecrites par lui vingt ans auparavant.10

For Baudelaire, the encounter with Poe is a singularly emotional one,

as he finds in Poe's writings not only shared 'tastes, feelings and habits
of thought' but actual 'phrases' from his imagination written by the
other man. Suddenly exposed as belated and redundant, his response
of terror and ecstasy is almost a necessary one. Given this fundamental

8 Helen Whitman, Poe's Helen Remembers, edited by John Carl Miller (Charlottesville,
1979), p. 182.
9 Letter to Armand Fraisse, 18 February 1860; Baudelaire, Correspondance, edited by
Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Paris, 1973), I, 676.
10 Letter to Theophile Thore, 20 June 1864; Correspondance, II, 386 (my emphases).

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Translation and Literature 12 (2003)

and troubling resemblance, how are we to understand Baudelaire's

decision to translate Poe's tales?11 Should it be seen as an expression of
this resemblance? Of mastery or submission? A reflection of financial
necessity? Although Baudelaire's translations can be read in all of these
ways, I contend that Baudelaire argues, in the translations themselves,
for a new way of thinking about originality, exposing the contingency
of creative exchange and shifting the power dynamics of resemblance
in his favour. Poe, he felt, could render Baudelaire's own Vague and
confused' ideas 'to perfection'; translation provides Baudelaire with the
means and opportunity to resolve successfully the resultant problems of
origin and originality.
Baudelaire establishes the necessity of his intervention by claiming
that Poe was previously under-appreciated because he had been in the
wrong place at the wrong time. In the essay that opens his first collection
of translated tales, Histoires extraordinaires (Paris, 1856), Baudelaire
explains that Poe's overlooked genius was a function of a displacement
that his translation will repair: 'pour moi la persuasion s'est faite
qu'Edgar Poe et sa patrie n'etaient pas de niveau. Les Etats-Unis
sont un pays gigantesque et enfant, naturellement jaloux du vieux
continent' (p. 23). Unsophisticated and shallow, the adolescent United
States was constitutionally incapable of nurturing an author of Poe's
complexity. In hinting that Poe would be at home in Paris, Baudelaire
not only voices his desires and anxieties, he also reflects Poe's own
francophilia, demonstrated by the prevalence of French language
and culture in the English 'originals'. In one example, Poe transfers
the Marie Rogers case from New York (where it had been a media cause
celebre) to Paris in writing The Mystery of Marie Roget', a change Poe
justifies as important to the 'truth' of the narrative: 'under pretence of
relating the fate of a Parisian grisette, the author has followed, in minute
detail, the essential, while merely paralleling the inessential, facts of
the real murder of Mary Rogers. Thus all argument founded upon the
fiction is applicable to the truth: and the investigation of the truth was
the object' 12 It is difficult to ascertain, from Poe's justification, what are
the 'essential' facts in the case and what the 'inessential', what pertains

11 Among the more compelling readings are Jonathan Culler, 'Baudelaire and Poe',
Zeitschrifi fur Franzosische Sprache und Literatur, 100 (1990), 61-73; Fritz Gutbrodt,
'Poedelaire: Translation and the Volatility of the Letter', Diacritics, 22.iii- iv (1992),
49-68; Louis Harap, 'The "Pre-Established Affinities" of Poe and Baudelaire', Praxis, 1
(1976), 119-28; Andreas Wetzel, 'Poe/ Baudelaire: Poetics in Translation', Cincinnati
Romance Review, 6 (1987), pp. 59-72; Dominique Rabate, 'Quelques raisons d'etre bref
(de Baudelaire et Valery a aujourd'hui)', La licorne, 21 (1991), 273-9.
12 Poe, Poetry and Tales, edited by Patrick F. Quinn (New York, 1984), p. 506.

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 Elizabeth Duquette /Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin

to the 'fiction' and what to the 'truth', but the slippery rhetoric aims to
detach 'the truth' from contingencies such as language and location.
Thus Baudelaire, as a translator, can claim to be addressing the essential
truths in Poe's texts, as well as capitalizing on the affinity already
existing at various levels between Poe and his own location, France.
Poe's interest in the distinction between truth and fiction is only one
dimension of the epistemological enquiry running through his creative
endeavours; his concern for how and what we know is everywhere
evident in his tales. In 'The Purloined Letter' the infamous Monsieur
Dupin, upon 'inquiring of the boy by what means he effected the
thorough identification in which his success [against his opponents]
consisted',
received answer as follows: 'When I wish to find out how wise, or how
stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what his thoughts at the
moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in
accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts
or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with
the expression.'
(Poetry and Tales, pp. 689-90)

What Baudelaire presents in Histoires extraordinaires is not only a

collection of Poe's tales in French, but his own 'thorough identification'
with Poe. This sympathetic connection makes possible the originality
of Baudelaire's compositions, which nonetheless correspond 'as
accurately as possible' to Poe's original narratives. In Baudelaire's
volume, Poe's scattered ideas about language productively disrupt
the possibility of systematic communication and literal translation,
providing the raw material for the theory and practice of Baudelaire's
poetic translation. Carefully reorganizing Poe's ideas, Baudelaire
assigns them a meaning and structure of his own, one which they had
superficially lacked but profoundly contained. Hence, with the gesture
of mastery which his ordering presupposes, Baudelaire asserts con-
trol, inverting the relationship that had initially overpowered him.
Eventually, as Susan Blood writes, 'the encounter with Poe transforms
Baudelaire into himself, as each poet 'becomes himself through
contact with another subject'.13
The task of the translator, Baudelaire would later state explicitly, is
to shape the text under consideration, providing through the appre-
ciation and invention of intentions a type of theoretical coherence:

13 Susan Blood, Baudelaire and the Aesthetics of Bad Faith (Stanford, 1997), p. 43.

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Translation and Literature 12 (2003)

D'ailleurs, meme a l'esprit d'un artiste philosophe, les accessoires

s'offrent, non pas avec un caractere litteral et precis, mais avec un
caractere poetique, vague et confus, et souvent c'est le traducteur qui
invente les intentions.1*

For Baudelaire, the invention of intentions, or, put differently, the

imposition of order, was of material value to the success of Histoires
extraordinaires on many levels - personal, theoretical, critical, and
financial. In an 1855 note to his prospective publisher Armand Dutacq,
Baudelaire announces that the meticulous arrangement of the tales
should be instantly evident. 'Voici la table des matieres', he writes; 'il
vous suffira de la lire pour en comprendre l'ordre et la generation'
(Correspondance, I, 310). The following year, he writes to Sainte-Beuve:

II y aura un second volume, et une seconde preface.

Le premier volume est fait pour amorcer le public: jongleries, con-
jecturisme, canards, etc. 'Ligeid est le seul morceau important qui se
rattache moralement au deuxieme volume.
Le deuxieme volume est d'un fantastique plus releve . . .
On fera semblant de ne vouloir considerer Poe que comme jongleur,
mais je reviendrai a outrance sur le caractere surnaturel de sa poesie et
de ses contes. II n'est Americain qu'en tant que Jongleur. Quant au reste,
c'est presque une pensee anti-americaine. D'ailleurs, il s'est moque de ses
compatriotes le plus qu'il a pu.
{Correspondance, I, 344-5)

Taking the 'anti-americaine' aspects of the works as central, in Histoires

extraordinaires Baudelaire offers the reader a prolonged reflection on
language, on translation, on types of thinking, and on originality.
To entice the French public, Baudelaire selects thirteen tales: The
Murders in the Rue Morgue', The Purloined Letter', The Gold-Bug',
The Balloon-Hoax', The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall',
'MS. Found in a Bottle', 'A Descent into the Maelstrom', The Facts
in the Case of M. Valdemar', 'Mesmeric Revelation', 'A Tale of the
Ragged Mountains', 'Morella', 'Ligeia', and 'Metzengerstein'. Given
Baudelaire's evident concern for order, I read the volume of Histoires
extraordinaires as embodying a central unity, such that each individual
narrative functions as part of the overarching design. Beginning
with detective stories and tales of scientific exploration, the narrative
considers the role of analytic reasoning as the best possible way
of comprehending human behaviour. Explaining, but ultimately
dismissing, rationality through the crime and adventure narratives,

14 Baudelaire, Ecrits sur VArt, edited by Francis Moulinat (Paris, 1992), p. 424.

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 Elizabeth Duquette/Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin

Baudelaire eventually leads the reader to the suggestion that truths

are properly the stuff of revelation and 'thorough identification'. The
mesmeric tales, 'La Verite sur le cas de M. Valdemar' and 'Revelation
magnetique', in which the dead speak with strange tongues, suggest
(sometimes not all that subtly) that it is only in thinking about the
material implications of language and translation that we can escape
the solipsism of the purely analytical, transporting ourselves, and those
who resemble us, safely into the future. In foregrounding the mesmeric
narratives from Poe's other-worldly repertoire, Baudelaire crafts a
narrative in which poetic language is the key to successful translation as
extended life.

Nevertheless, since the volume opens with the detective stories, it is

reasonable to read them as providing the key to both Baudelaire's order
and Poe's genius. This is the position adopted by Fritz Gutbrodt, who
claims that the emphasis placed on the detective story indicates that for
Baudelaire's translations, the detective is a crucial figure. The detective
is a flaneur,' he argues, 'and so, one might add, is the translator ... the
detective's task of unravelling the mysterious murder encounters a
"foreignness of languages" that quite literally sets Dupin the difficult
task of a translator.'15 Gutbrodt concludes that 'Baudelaire's translation
of Poe's detective stories performs a displacement of the concept of
the original that renders it both possible and necessary to read the
Dupin trilogy as a sustained reflection on translation'; 'what Poe's
and Baudelaire's texts deliver is the message that they are both trans-
lations'.16 Yet Gutbrodt errs in a way uncannily similar to the Prefect
of the Parisian police, Monsieur G - , from the Dupin tales. It is all too
often the case, Dupin laments, that individuals like Monsieur G -
'ne voient que leurs propres idees ingenieuses; et, quand ils cherchent
quelque chose de cache, ils ne pensent qu'aux moyens dont ils se
seraient servis pour le cacher' (Histoires extraordinaires, p. 104). But
Dupin does turn soon after this point to the problem of translation:
Par exemple, [les mathematiciens] nous ont, avec un art digne d'une
meilleure cause, accoutumes a appliquer le term analyse aux operations
algebriques. Les Francais sont les premiers coupables de cette tricherie
scientifique; mais, si Ton reconnait que les termes de la langue ont une
reelle importance, - si les mots tirent leur valeur de leur application, - oh!
alors, je concede qu' analyse traduit algebre, a peu pres comme en latin
ambitus signifie ambition; religio, religion; ou homines honesti, la classe des
gens honorables.
(p. 106)
15 Gutbrodt (n. 11), p. 50.
16 Gutbrodt, pp. 66-7.

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Translation and Literature 12 (2003)

Mathematics wrongly conceived, then, is directly analogous to trans-

lation wrongly conceived; the meanings of words and numbers arise
not only from their systematic operations but also from their particular
context and specific applications. Anticipating Benjamin's distinction
between brot and pain, Poe/ Baudelaire here contends that although
'homines honestV might narrowly signify 'la classe des gens honorables',
the associations the words conjure in context diverge dramatically.
Relations between things and words, as well as between people, should
be assessed, Dupin argues, by taking their particularities into con-
sideration. Given the evidence uncovered by Baudelaire, Poe, and
Dupin, it is clear that no mere detective could undertake the practice
of translation, a practice which they explain requires a flexibility of
principle that makes going by the book impossible. In other words, and
in contrast to Gutbrodt's claim, the Dupin tales lead to the conclusion
that the authentic detective is seldom a police functionary and almost
certainly not an accurate translator, if accuracy depends on a crowd-
pleasing logic of fidelity.
In short, Dupin is not a detective, even if he does solve mysteries;
rather, Dupin is a poet gifted with the powers of imagination and
identification that make it possible for him to solve mysteries. If, as
Gutbrodt has argued, Baudelaire arranges these narratives to celebrate
the figure of the detective, one would further need to explain why he
would choose 'Le scarabee d'or' as the conclusion of the detective
trilogy in Histoires extraordinaires. Although thematically linked to the
other stories, the successful conclusion of the mystery in this case
depends on precisely the sort of narrative necessity and commonplace
ingenuity Dupin so thoroughly deplores in the preceding tales
Although the cryptogram is decoded, the narrative ends with an
abundance of skeletons for which it cannot, or will not, account.
Announcing the inherent limitations of the analytic model with 'Le
scarabee d'or', I maintain that Baudelaire prepares the reader for a
new figuration of translation, one based on the supernatural and the
obscure. In the mesmeric tales, 'Les verites dans le cas de M. Valdemar'
and 'Revelation magnetique', material and metaphysical truths are
shown to require gifted poets to translate their paradoxes into the world
of the everyday; even under the proper conditions, living and conscious
tongues are only partially adequate for the expression of what is
experienced in these tales. According to the mesmeric narratives, the
best that can be achieved is a slanted translation of affect, a position
effectively highlighted through Baudelaire's intervention and organ-
ization of Poe's otherwise 'vague' and 'confused' notions.
In the opening sentence of 'Double assassinat dans la rue Morgue'

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 Elizabeth Duquette/Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin

the italicized word is Baudelaire's innovation:

Les facultes de 1' esprit qu'on definit par le terme analytiques sont en elles-
memes fort peu susceptibles d' analyse. Nous ne les apprecions que par
leur resultats. Ce que nous en savons, entre autre choses, c'est qu'elles
sont pour celui qui les possede a un degre extraordinaire une source de
jouissances des plus vives.
(Histoires, p. 47)

While we tend, fallaciously, to value the analytic faculty for the returns
it can make us, its possessor can experience something far more
visceral, 'une source de jouissances des plus vives', if he or she reads
the term according to Poe's slant. In its spiritual aspect the analytic
faculty remains relatively opaque to analysis, assuming 'dans 1' opinion
vulgaire' 'une puissance de perspicacite qui prend un caractere sur-
naturel' (p. 47) . Yet, to reach the peaks of intellectual power, the analyst
must combine analytic reason with creativity, with imagination:

La faculte d'analyse ne doit pas etre confondue avec la simple ingenoisite;

car, pendant que l'analyste est necessairement ingenieux, il arrive souvent
que l'homme ingeniuex est absolument incapable d'analyse. ... Entre
l'ingenoisite et l'aptitude analytique, il y a une difference beaucoup plus
grande qu'entre l'imaginative et 1' imagination, mais d'un charactere
rigoureusement analogue.
(pp. 50-1)

When pressed for a concrete example of this distinction, Monsieur

Dupin looks towards the stars to demonstrate his difference from mere
deductive reasoners. To understand what it means to employ one's
imagination, he explains, one must learn to look at things on a slant.
'Jetez sur une etoile un rapide coup d'oeil', Dupin posits,
regardez-la obliquement, en tournant vers elle la partie laterale de la
retine (beaucoup plus sensible a une lumiere faible que la partie
centrale), et vous verrez l'etoile distinctement; vous aurez l'appreciation
la plus juste de son eclat, eclat qui s'obsurcit a proportion que vous dirigez
votre vue en plein sur elle. Dans le dernier cas, il tombe sur l'ceil un plus
grand nombre de rayons; mais, dans le premier, il y a une receptibilite
plus complete, une susceptibilite beaucoup plus vive. Une profondeur
outree affaiblit la pensee et la rend perplexe.
(p. 66)

In other words, we see more when we attempt to see less. Intellectual

scrutiny that takes as its method 'une attention trop soutenue, trop
concentree, trop directe' loses the sense of imaginative play and
creative combination that for Poe and Baudelaire is central to what it
means to see fully; such a practice will only lead to the solution of a

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 Translation and Literature 12 (2003)

problem, the unravelling of a mystery, when the puzzle in question

obeys the narrow rules of mathematics (p. 66) . Even though math-
ematical reasoning is popularly conceived as the most rigorous of
the abstract sciences, Dupin objects to its dominion in both 'Double
assassinat dans la rue Morgue' and 'La lettre volee', explicitly sub-
ordinating its efficacy to the poetic faculty.17
In 'La lettre volee' the difference between genuine and spurious
analytic thought is demonstrated through the characters of the Prefect
and the Minister, as well as articulated by Monsieur Dupin. Because he
has written a learned treatise on differential calculus, the narrator
contends that the Minister is *le mathematicien, et non pas le poete'
(p. 105). Dupin, however, disagrees: 'Comme poete ^mathematicien,
il a du raisonner juste; comme simple mathematicien, il n'aurait pas
raisonne tout, et se serait ainsi mis a la merci du prefet' (p. 105). If the
Minister were simply a mathematician, Dupin's involvement, we learn,
would have been unnecessary, for the Prefect would have recovered
the stolen document himself. As a poet, however, the Minister's deeds
are opaque to the Prefect, necessitating the creative intervention of
Monsieur Dupin. The Prefect - thorough, comprehensive, and entirely
predictable - is analytic enough for most criminals, but his limited
powers are incapable of besting someone gifted with both analytic
capacities, the poetic as well as the mathematical.
In other words, only a poet has the requisite analytic powers to
understand the words and deeds of a poet fully enough to discover his
or her hidden mysteries, and interpret them for others. This position,
which Poe suggests repeatedly in the Dupin stories, and which
Baudelaire places at the beginning of Histoires extraordinaires, also
accounts for a singular change at the beginning of Baudelaire's
rendering of 'Double assassinat dans la rue Morgue'. Doubling the
figure of Dupin, Baudelaire replicates the identificatory structure
that had unnerved him when first encountering the American's work,
making space for a second poet in the text. To underscore the import-
ance of Baudelaire's subtle shift, I will cite both versions. First Poe:

At such times I could not help remarking and admiring (although from
his rich ideality I had been prepared to expect it) a peculiar analytic ability

17 At times, however, Dupin's words do not require translation; in both The

Purloined Letter' and 'La lettre volee', Dupin responds to his friend's assertion that
mathematical reasoning had 'long been regarded as the reason par excellence' by quoting
from Chamfort: 'II y a a parier que toute idee publique, toute convention rec.ue, est une
sottise, car elle a convenue au plus grand nombre' (Poetry and Tales, pp. 691, 105-6). To
differentiate this French from the French of his prose, Baudelaire sets the Chamfort
citation in italics.

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 Elizabeth Duquette/Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin

in Dupin ... Observing him in these moods, I often dwelt meditatively

upon the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul, and amused myself with the
fancy of a double Dupin - the creative and the resolvent.
{Poetry and Tales, pp. 401-2)

The 'fancy', which had merely 'amused' Poe's narrator, is actualized as

Baudelaire overtly names the two Dupins:
Dans ces circonstances, je ne pouvais m'empecher de remarquer et
d'admirer, - quoique la riche idealite dont il etait doue eut du m'y
prepare r, - une aptitude analytique particuliere chez Dupin. ... Je
l'observais dans ces allures, et je revais souvent a la vieille philosophic de
Ydme double, - je m'amusais de l'idee d'un Dupin double, - un Dupin
createur et un Dupin analyste.
(p. 53)

Baudelaire's innovation materializes the relationship Dupin maintains

is crucial to true imaginative work, conjoins the analytic with the poetic,
and allows Baudelaire to demarcate space for himself in the text. If
poetic genius is a function not only of creativity but also of organization
and coherence, then the previously troubling belatedness is neutralized
by Baudelaire's intervening translation. Not only do the two Dupins
ensure the successful conclusion of the tale; the Dupin createur also
figures Poe, who was able to discover the truth and execute the ideas
which Baudelaire had initially found disordered. On the slim chance,
finally, that the reader has missed Poe's dependence on the translator,
or is inclined to view the 'strange sympathy' of the relationship
sceptically, Baudelaire adds a coy aside, flagging the necessity of his
presence for narrative order: 'Ai-je besoin d'avertir a propos de la rue
Morgue, du passage Lamartine, etc., qu'Edgar Poe n'est jamais venu a
Paris? - C.B.' (p. 56).
These conjoined figures - createur and analyste- are present in all the
stories of detection, and they reappear importantly in the mesmeric
narratives. This division of Dupin into separate but equal parts is
instrumental to the method of the Histoires extraordinaires and the

coherence Baudelaire's organization provides. Recalling Dupin's

'original' interest in identification, it is evident that Baudelaire's
innovation is actually authorized by Poe himself. Laura Saltz posits that
'Dupin himself has no visible body, only a protean intelligence that
expands and contracts to fit the minds of his subjects.'18 Deploying
his changeable imagination in a variety of ways, 'Dupin's form of

18 Laura Saltz, '"(Horrible to Relate!)": Recovering the Body of Marie Roget', in The
American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman
(Baltimore, 1995), pp. 237-67 (p. 253).

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Translation and Literature 12 (2003)

ratiocination necessitates [an] invasion of privacy, [a] colonizing of

other bodies.'19 This colonization of other characters by Dupin, or
other authors by Poe, is inverted in Baudelaire's translation, when his
identification with Poe allows him to double himself into the text. The

analytic practice celebrated in Poe's tale, as well as the mode used in

Baudelaire's translation, presents the imaginative uniting of identities
as critical to creation and translation.
As noted earlier, however, Baudelaire's scheme for Histoires extra-
ordinaires separates Poe's trio of Dupin stories when he includes 'Le
scarabee d'or' as the third detective tale rather than The Mystery of
Marie Roget'. What is particularly interesting about this choice is
the explicit connection in 'Le scarabee d'or' between types of analytic
thought, translation, and money. Even reconfigured as poetic process,
the detective story model is shown to be insufficient as an explanation
of the dynamic of translation, or of Histoires extraordinaires. The collapse
(or sell-out) of the detective model enacted in the third story prepares
the reader for the overt prioritization of translation represented in the
mesmeric narratives at the centre of Histoires extraordinaires.
In 'Le scarabee d'or', the creative genius, Legrand, resides in an
isolated section of South Carolina, but his analytic double identifies
him immediately by the oddities of his personality generally, and his
'facultes spirituelles peu commune' more particularly (p. 116). The
American South, sadly, is not a felicitous place for Legrand, who is
restrained by the constant intervention of his companion and former
slave, Jupiter. Not only does Jupiter threaten to beat his master, his
speech introduces a form of linguistic violence into the text. As
Baudelaire is forced to explain, Jupiter speaks in 'Calembour[s]
intraduisible[s]':

Le negre parlera toujours dans une espece de patois anglais, que le patois
negre frangais n'imiterait pas mieux que le bas-normand ou le breton ne
traduirait l'irlandais. En se rappelant les orthographes figuratives de
Balzac, on se fera une idee de ce que ce moyen un peu physique peut
ajouter de pittoresque et de comique, maisj'ai du renoncer a m'en servir,
faute d'equivalent. - C.B.
(p. 118)

Baudelaire admits he cannot fully translate Jupiter's dialect. The mode

of writing in which the physicality of the written word conveys its sense
adds to the picturesque elements of the work, he explains, but fails as a
mode of writing because it mistakes such details for real engagement

19 Saltz, p. 253.

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 Elizabeth Duquette/Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin

with unfamiliar speech. In equating substance with sentiment and using

lexicographic butchery to achieve meaning, Jupiter's dialect embodies
a form of literary bullying that Baudelaire specifically renounces in his
note.

And this is not the only element of the narrative Baudelaire f

untranslatable. The very premise of Poe's tale depends on English
its successful conclusion. So, while the rest of the story proc
French, the specifics of the central mystery - decoding the direct
Captain Kidd's treasure - requires English. 'Le rebus sur le mot K
Legrand explains,
n'est possible que dans la langue anglaise. Sans cette circonstancej'aura
commence mes essais par l'espagnol et le frangais, comme etant
langues dans lesquelles un pirate des mers espagnoles avait du le
naturellement enfermer un secret de cette nature. Mais, dans le cas
actuel, je presumai que le cryptogramme etait anglais.
(p. 150)

In French, the solution must be rigged. Walking his companion

methodically through the procedure, Legrand's resolution of the riddle
resembles an algebraic equation, in which letters and numbers are
rigidly conjoined in relations of strict equivalence. Whereas previously
the creative figure had expanded upon the limitations of such
reasoning, both his style and interest have materially changed in this
tale. Dupin revelled in the 'lustre' of stars, but the only stars in this
mystery are cheap imitations forced to stand in for the letter 'n':
'*8+83(88)5*+;46(;88*96*?...' (p. 149). More tedious than challeng-
ing, Legrand arrives as the solution 'tres aisement', for, as he reminds
his friend,

j'en ai resolu d'autres dix mille fois plus compliques. Les circonstances
et une certaine inclination d'esprit m'ont amene a prendre interet a ces
sortes d'enigmes, et il est vraiment douteux que l'ingeniosite humaine
puisse creer une enigme de ce genre dont l'ingeniosite humaine ne
vienne a bout par une application suffisante.
(p. 149)

The conclusion that must be drawn from this tale is that rigid and
uncreative analytic processes (like tediously literal translations) can
produce results, especially if money is involved, but fail to engage our
creative energies. As with the Parisian cases, Legrand profits financially
from his ability to unravel the mystery, unearthing a buried chest filled
with 'un amas confus d'or et de bijoux des eclairs et des splendeurs qui
nous eclaboussaient positivement les yeux' (p. 138). Overwhelmed by
the confusion of gold, rather than intellectual brilliance, the solution

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Translation and Literature 12 (2003)

of this cryptogram alerts the reader that in America analytic processes

are corrupted, apparently inevitably, by the overarching national
preoccupation with the bottom line.
So, although the story ends happily enough (if one ignores the
lingering threats of violence represented by the skeletons), its failure to
negotiate the process of translation, as well as its reliance on a direct
system of signification, suggests that the model provided by the trio
of detective stories is too easily perverted by American 'manie[s]
nationale[s]': 'Le temps etl'argent ... [l]'activite materielle, exageree
jusqu'aux proportions d'une manie nationale' (p. 23). Even Poe,
Baudelaire suggests, 's'il avait voulu regulariser son genie et appliquer
ses facultes creatrices d'une maniere plus appropriee au sol americain,
aurait pu devenir un auteur a argent, a money making author' (p. 21).
Locked into English, Poe could have successfully manipulated 'la langue
du chiffre' to become rich and famous, but in so doing he would have
had to renounce any hopes of creative sovereignty and 'regulariser
son genie'. Despite the American intrusion into the French prose,
Poe is saved from the posthumous necessity of such a fate, translated
by Baudelaire off the tainting 'sol americain' and out of the rigid
limitations exacted by American culture and algebraic translation.
Leaving behind the figure of the detective, Baudelaire escorts his
reader on four fantastic voyages - two up and two down - flirting with
the possibility that science might offer a potential way of conceiving
the practice of signification. Any such hypothesis is quickly rejected by
the stories, however, as the vertigo that keeps the reader linked to
the narratives ('Le lecteur, lie par le vertige, est constraint de suivre',
p. 43) also prevents the scientist's managing to 'mean'.20 The balloon
expeditions are identified as blatant hoaxes, making it impossible to
accept the proliferation of data in the narrative of 'Hans Pfall' as even
momentarily accurate. In the subsequent sea journeys, sailors are
repeatedly sucked into versions of the apocalyptic abyss. Identifying
them as 'tales of collapse', Jonathan Elmer has recently examined the
ways in which these narratives participate in Poe's exploration of the
'equivocation of address' attendant upon the 'irreparable breach at
the heart of the psychosocial world'.21 Building upon this structure
of 'collapse', Baudelaire's selection of these particular narratives
continues to suggest the inability of purely rational thought to narrate

20 For a different interpretation of the relationship between ratiocination and the

adventure stories, especially 'A Descent into a Maelstrom', see Nancy Harrowitz, 'The
Body of the Detective Model', in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Pierce, edited by
Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok (Bloomington, 1988), pp. 179-97.
21 Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit (n. 3), p. 21.

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 Elizabeth Duquette/Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin

thoroughly the mysteries of nature. Repeatedly, actual experience

outpaces the limits of human intellect, demonstrating that it cannot be
comprehended by the narrow laws of science or logic. Although he was
not to translate Poe's prose poem 'Eureka: An Essay on the Material and
Spiritual Universe' until later, the argument of Baudelaire's Histoires
extraordinaires closely echoes Poe's ideas in this pseudo-scientific text.
To treat the universe as a poem, Poe proposes, 'humankind must first
recognize the inability of our language to convey truths about the
natural world':

I have stated that Neptune, the planet farthest from the Sun, revolves
about him at a distance of 28 hundred million miles. So far good: - 1 have
stated a mathematical fact; and, without comprehending it in the least,
we may put it to use - mathematically. But in mentioning, even, that
the Moon revolves about the Earth at the comparatively trifling distance
of 237,000 miles, I entertained no expectation of giving any one
to understand - to know - to feel - how far from the Earth the Moon

actually is.
(Poetry and Tales, p. 1333)

Being able to apply a numerical designation to a distance or magnitude

is a radically different activity, in Poe's formulation, from generating
meaning: The thought of such a phenomenon cannot well be said
to startle the mind: - it palsies and appalls it' (p. 1335). The mind
can neither feel nor know distances of this magnitude, and, for Poe,
the impact of this superfluity of information is the separation of
the individual from his world. 'Felt experience,' Jonathan Auerbach
observes, 'becomes transmuted into a series of unconnected facts
whose value depends solely on their capacity to be promptly used up by
the reader's sensations.'22 To circumvent this way of engaging with the
world, Poe explains, 'we should need the tongue of an archangel' that
might be capable of conveying a sense of the experience more fully
(p. 1335). A language which, like the archangel's, temporarily tran-
scends the limits of space and time is the artist's particular gift. 'What
I here propound is true,' Poe claims, and therefore 'it cannot die: - or
if by any means it be now trodden down that it die, it will "rise again
to the Life Everlasting"' (p. 1335). Once an artist has found his
transcendent tongue, his writings have the potential to resist death. For
Poe, communicating meaningfully about our world requires the full
recognition of the poetic facts of the universe and the deceiving fictions
of science. Having revealed the possibilities and limitations of analytic

22 Jonathan Auerbach, 'Poe's Other Double: The Reader in the Fiction', Criticism, 24
(1982), 341-61 (p. 348).

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Translation and Literature 12 (2003)

reasoning in the preceding narratives, Baudelaire concludes his reflec-

tions on epistemology, and its implications for translation, by returning
to the 'strange sympathy' that had originally animated him. The truth,
for him and for his notion of translation, appears to be dependent on
spiritual resemblance and a unique artistic connection.
It is truth of this sort that 'La verite dans le cas de M. Valdemar'
speaks: some artists live and speak productively (albeit problematically)
beyond the grave. This was a basic belief of American women spiritualist
poets, and is the definitive principle in Baudelaire's relationship to
Poe. 'In presenting himself as a mesmeric figure with otherworldly
knowledge' to these poets, Poe provided the ideal 'surface' for creative
repetition.23 Structuring his narrative around the mesmeric tales -
'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar' and 'Mesmeric Revelation' -
Baudelaire enacts his own connection with Poe at the same time as he
relies on the tales to authorize that connection. In retitling 'The Facts
in the Case of M. Valdemar' as 'La verite', Baudelaire underscores the
point that, in terms of translation, these facts are the truth, as Baudelaire
reanimates Poe; even before the case is presented to the reader, the
translation is marked as an interpretive endeavour, one that has the
poetic power to supplant facts.
Thanks to 'son temperament ... singulierement nerveux', the
narrator, identified only as 'P', promises the reader that his comrade
Valdemar is an excellent subject for experiences of imaginative
identification and readerly resemblance (p. 272). In addition to his
temperamental suitability, Valdemar's qualifications are enhanced by
the fact that he is already familiar with speaking under an assumed
name and in a foreign tongue, for he is 'le compilateur bien connu de
la Bibliotheca forensica, et auteur (sous le pseudonyme d'Issachar Marx)
des traductions polonaises de Wallenstein et de Gargantud (p. 272).
Finally, Valdemar fits contemporary criteria for the mesmeric subject.
According to the Marquis de Peysegur, a nineteenth-century disciple of
France Anton Mesmer, the chances of successfully placing an individual
in a trance were materially enhanced if 'the magnetizer and the mag-
netized presented analogous temperaments, characters, climates and
countries'.24 While it is unclear whether Baudelaire was himself familiar
with Peysegur 's theories, he did note in an 1854 letter to his mother
in which he included a volume of Poe's poetry, 'Ce qu'il y a d'assez

23 Richards (n. 4), p. 275.

24 Quoted from Richard Rene Williams, The Fourth Point: Representations of
Nineteenth-Century Electromagnetic Phenomena from Edgar Allan Poe to Stephane
Mallarme' (unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1992), p. 139.

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 Elizabeth Duquette/Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin

singulier, et ce qu'il m'est impossible de ne pas remarquer, c'est

la ressemblance intime, quoique non positivement accentuee, entre
mes poesies propres et celles de cet homme, deduction faite du
temperament et du climat.'25
Intervening at the moment of death, P. plans to forestall his friend's
natural translation into oblivion by artificially suspending him (the
subject) in a mesmeric trance. In addition to the inherent assistance
provided by his subject, P. is also aided by Monsieur L., who kindly
agrees to record the proceedings and guarantee their 'verite';
unfortunately, when the action heats up, Monsieur L. swoons, over-
whelmed by the horror of the 'truth' in this case. Commenting upon
the technique he adopts for capturing Valdemar's communication,
P. assures the reader that 'c'est d'apres son proces-verbal que je
decalque pour ainsi dire mon recit. Quand je n'ai pas condense, j'ai
copie mot pour mot' (p. 275). In other words, the translation is literal,
where it has not been changed or fabricated. What should be evident
by this point in the Histoires extraordinaires, however, is that the presence
of the transcriber was wholly unnecessary either to the subject relations
being established in the texts themselves or in the connection between
Baudelaire and Poe.

The absence of the transcriber proves to be absolutely incon-

sequential. Valdemar speaks in short declarative sentences. What
presents a challenge, however, is their interpretation - the explanati
of the origin and quality of the speaking voice. Having given every sig
of expiring, 'des machoires distendues et immobiles [du corps d
Valdemar] jaillit une voix, - une voix telle que ce serai t folle d'essaye
de la decrire' (p. 279). Despite the impossibility of such an attemp
P. tries to describe the events verbally:

je puis dire que le son etait apre, dechire, caverneux; mais le hideux total
n'est pas definissable, par la raison que les pareils sons n'ont jamais hurle
dans l'oreille de l'humanite. II y avait cependant deux particularites qui,
-je le pensai alors, et je le pense encore, - peuvent etre justement prises
comme caracteristiques de l'intonation, et qui sont propres a donner
quelque idee de son etrangete extra ter res tre.
(p. 279)

Defying possibility and the laws of science, the narrative strives to

reduplicate the eerie aural sensation, hypothesizing that it came
from 'une tres lointaine distance ou de quelque abime souterrain',
impressing P. 'de la meme maniere que les matieres glutineuses ou

25 Correstondance. I, 269.

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Translation and Literature 12 (2003)

gelatineuses affectent le sens du toucher' (p. 279). When the passage

of time and tongue fail to provide any more exacting classification, P.
fears that the truth in this case is beyond him: 'en verite, qu'il me soit
impossible de me faire comprendre' (p. 279). A reasonable concern,
given the fact that Valdemar's jaws remain motionless when the dis-
turbing, indeed impossible, phrase 'Oui, - non, - j'ai dormi; - et
maintenant, - maintenance suis morf is uttered (p. 279).
To everyone's horror, the undead corpse is soon discovered to be in
motion; when questions are posed to Valdemar, his tongue responds:
'La seule indication reelle de l'influence magnetique se manifestait
maintenant dans le mouvement vibratoire de la langue' (p. 280). As
long as there is 'la langue' through which his words can be spoken,
Valdemar occupies a problematically indeterminate space. To bring
one's predecessor to life through translation so that he can announce,
albeit equivocally, that he is dead is certainly one way to guarantee that
this is indeed the case; it is, in part, the need to exorcize Poe, to be sure
that he is literally dead, that makes this story central in the scheme of
the collection. Although Valdemar can be maintained in this liminal
position, it is impossible for him to move out of or beyond this state of
un-dead death, no matter how violently his language strives to resolve
the indeterminacy: 'Pour l'amour de Dieu! - vite! - vite! - faites-moi
dormir, - ou bien, vite! eveillez-moi! - vite -Je vous dis queje suis mort?
(p. 281). It is in this moment that Baudelaire locates the possibilities
and limitations of translation as such. The mesmerizing (and mesmer-
ized) translator attempts to return his long-suffering patient (seven
months having purportedly elapsed since Valdemar first entered this
state) back to his original form. What P. learns, however, is that such an
attempt makes a terrible mess of everything:

Comme je faisais rapidement les passes magnetiques a travers les cris de:
- Mort! mort! qui faisaient litteralement explosion sur la langue et non
sur les levres du sujet, - tout son corps, - d'un seul coup, - dans l'espace
d'une minute, et meme moins, - se deroba, - s'emietta, - se pourrit
absolument sous mes mains. Sur le lit, devant tous les temoins, gisait une
masse degoutante et quasi liquide, - une abominable putrefaction.
(p. 282)

While it is possible within certain parameters to reduplicate the

experience of hearing Valdemar's unliving voice, actually re-animating
the person of Valdemar, giving him the chance to embody his words
in a more physical manner than tongue/langue/language, exposes
the natural horror that leads us to bury the dead in the first place. In
terms of translation, Baudelaire helps us to recognize the now familiar

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 Elizabeth Duquette/Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin

position that it is often not the words which cause the problem in
switching tongues; rather it is the sense of what has been said, sounds
and other possibly physical characteristics, that present the greatest
challenge to the individual passing back and forth, vertically and
horizontally, across a text. In the case of M. Valdemar, allowing oneself
to be mesmerized by the allure of originality functions as a rejection of
the extraordinary aspects of the everyday. When seduced by both the
promise of the profound and his own powers, the translator again fails
to conceive of 'thorough identification' properly. An accomplished
translator must recognize, as Baudelaire's organization makes clear,
that certain things simply will not be possible, such as recalling a rotting
corpse. Some of nature's mysteries can only be seen on a slant.
In Baudelaire's scheme, however, P. gets a second chance to record
his subject's translation, even if 'Mesmeric Revelation' was 'originally'
first - the first tale Baudelaire translated and the first of Poe's stories
treating this theme. Yet, as the 'facts' in Histoires extraordinaires have
been established in the previous tales, 'Revelation magnetique' can
begin where the last story left off:

Ce serait absolument perdre son temps aujourd'hui que de s'amuser

a prouver que rhomme, par un pur exercice de sa volonte, peut
impressionner suffisamment son semblable pour le jeter dans une
condition anormale, dont les phenomenes ressemblent litteralement
a ceux de la mort, ou du moins leur ressemblent plus qu'aucun des
phenomenes produits dans une condition normale connue.
(p. 283)

To Baudelaire's way of thinking, the fellow upon whom the passes

of mesmerism are exercised is no ordinary man of the crowd but 'son
semblable'. In the light of the famous final line of 'Au Lecteur'
('Hypocrite lecteur, - mon semblable, - mon frere!'), a line critics
have fancifully imagined as addressed to Poe, one might wonder if
Baudelaire's hypocritical reader can only be a poet. Thanks to their
similarities of temperament and ideas, the narrator is once again
able to aid his 'frere' through a radical change in his surroundings.
This time, however, the experiment ends happily as P. translates his
'semblable', who, in turn, translates some of the truths he has learned
before (and in) expiring. The corpse does not dissolve into something
foul but radiates 'un brillant sourire qui illuminait tous ses traits', and
P. cannot help but wonder if 'Le somnambule, pendant la derniere
partie de son discours, m'avait-il done parle du fond de la region des
ombres?' (p. 295).
The creative and analytic dimensions of Dupin's 'Bi-Part Soul',

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Translation and Literature 12 (2003)

reanimated as P. and V. in the mesmeric tales, provide a model for

elucidating the 'Life Everlasting' that Poe had hoped his writings would
achieve. A change of state is necessary (and recognizing this reality
can spare an awful lot of mess), but the circumstances must differ
fundamentally and creatively from the original. Oppositions are not
rigid and fixed, these poets argue in commingled voices, and creation
can come from imitation, imitation from creation. We must open
ourselves up to 'thorough identification' - as, for example, of language
and truth - to undo our faith, rigidly frozen in rigor mortis, in linear
signification, analytic reasoning, and narrowly defined poetic origin-
ality. According to this way of conceptualizing translation, it is no longer
merely with the author being copied that an original is to be found.
What Baudelaire demonstrates in the scheme of Histoires extraordinaires

are the possibilities for creativity and originality inherent in faithful

translation.

WWW

The theory of translation that cap

was one that Walter Benjamin woul
in his reading of Baudelaire.26 B
notably to a mistranslation of th
Benjamin makes little of Baudelair
the parallels between the two pa
Benjamin, it is worth asking about
(or Poe-post-Baudelaire) in theorizi
Benjamin's The Task of the Tran
Introduction to the Translation of
that task as consisting 'in finding t
the language into which he is tran
of the original' (Benjamin, p. 76)
fundamentally from that of the po
as a whole, taking an individual w
of departure . . . The intention o
graphic; that of the translator is d
76-7) . Uncovering what is hidden

26 See especially Charles Baudelaire: Un Poete

by Jean Lacoste (Paris, 1982; hereafter 'B
27 For the flaneur see 'On Some Motif
translated by Harry Zohn (London, 19
portions of this essay is marked; at times, h
at others, he haunts the margins and fri
'mystical' 'Colloquy of Monos and Una').

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 Elizabeth Duquette/Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin

provides access to 'pure language', allowing it 'as though reinforced by

its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully' (p. 79).
In this regard, Benjamin stresses that neither fidelity nor communi-
cation should be given too much emphasis as it is not the sense of the
original but its sensation that matters. For,

as regards the meaning, the language of a translation can - in fact, must

- let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original not as
reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement to the language in which
it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio.
(p. 79)

Translation, then, assigns the inaccessible pure language a tongue.

Mesmerized by his non-creative act of transcendent repetition, the task
Benjamin apportions his translator also involves passing over the text,
back and forth, and, if the subject is susceptible to the technique, it will
speak beyond its material. Distinct from both author and translator, the
text itself will achieve an afterlife, rising to a 'higher and purer linguistic
air' (p. 75).
As had been the case with Baudelaire's Poe, the aim of translation
for Benjamin has little to do with the signifying dimension that has
come to be affixed to human language, and everything to do with an
otherwise unreachable core of mysterious experience. Language can
transcend the specific limitations of civilized or economic intercourse,
providing insight into ideas that resist paradigms of linguistic exchange;
it is the job of the translator to encounter the vast disparities between
the particular and the ideal - to confront the monstrous failure of
language to mean.

In the individual, unsupplemented languages, meaning is never found in

relative independence, as in individual words or sentences; rather, it is in
a constant state of flux - until it is able to emerge as pure language from
the harmony of all the various modes of intention. Until then, it remains
hidden in the languages. If, however, these languages continue to grow in
this manner until the end of their time, it is translation which catches fire
on the eternal life of the works and the perpetual renewal of language.
Translation keeps putting the hallowed growth of languages to the test:
How far removed is their hidden meaning from revelation, how close can
it be brought by the knowledge of this remoteness?
(pp. 74-5)

The revelation that translation brings, for both theories, is that which is
excluded in and by language. Although translation necessarily involves
on a practical level an activity of exchange, the selection of one word
for another, the nature of language is such that this activity must bypass

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Translation and Literature 12 (2003)

economic structures of commerce to succeed, mining instead the

spiritual dimension of both language and experience. What Benjamin
has to teach us, in case we had not already learned it from Poe-post-
Baudelaire, is that signification, although comprehensible, is only
linear in its rudiments, for language entails far more than easily
accomplished transfers of one word for another.
For Poe-post-Baudelaire, translation, speaking the ineffable, requires
a change of state that is often represented in the narratives by death.
While this may be an obvious choice, death being precisely that
about which we cannot know, Poe himself, in the preface to 'Eureka',
conceptualizes this altered state in terms of a textual afterlife. While
Poe's work does not necessarily clarify Benjamin's Uberleben, its vivid
images illuminate the vaguer sections of 'The Task of the Translator'.
Valdemar's quivering tongue speaking life and death simultaneously,
'Oui, toujours; - je dors, - je meurs', might thus provide a graphic
representation of Benjamin's theoretical formulation, as explained by
Paul de Man: 'The process of translation, if we can call it a process,
is one of change and of motion that has the appearance of life, but
of life as an after life, because translation also reveals the death of the
original.'28
As if reassuring the reader (Baudelaire's works are about to receive
their apotheosis into linguistic afterlife) that the image of death is
entirely appropriate when discussing translation, Benjamin writes:
'The idea of life and after life in works of art should be regarded with
an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity. Even in times of narrowly
prejudiced thought there was an inkling that life was not limited to
organic corporeality' (p. 71). To conceive properly of life after death, it
is imperative that we bypass outmoded notions of 'matter extending its
dominion under the feeble scepter of the soul', because 'the range of
life must be determined by history rather than by nature, least of all by
such tenuous factors as sensation and soul' (p. 71). Benjamin ends 'The
Task of the Translator' with Holy Writ, 'in which meaning has ceased to
be the watershed for the flow of language and the flow of revelation.
Where a text is identical with truth or dogma, where it is supposed to
be "the true language" in all its literalness and without the mediation of
meaning, this text is unconditionally translatable' (Benjamin, p. 82) . In
matters of faith, meaning ceases to be of primary importance, for God's
power must be inexplicable and mysterious. This insight has been
secularized in the work of Poe-Baudelaire, but their theory leads one to
the same sort of conclusion: texts that approach the inexplicable and

28 Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, 1986), p. 85.

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 Elizabeth Duquette/Poe, Baudelaire, Benjamin

mysterious open themselves more fully to a process of translation which

eschews concerns for unslanted meaning. When what is being depicted
exceeds the normal ability of language to convey, or the ability of the
intellect to comprehend, then translation must orient itself outside
convention. In this way translation succeeds, even originally.

University of Illinois

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