The universe is equal to his vast appetite.Īh! how the world is large in the light of lamps! Pour l'enfant, amoureux de cartes et d'estampes,Īh! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes!Īux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit!įor the child, enamored by his maps and etchings, By locating desire in the gaze, the first stanza posits the dialectics of the voyage: In my analysis of “Le Voyage” and “Plavanie,” translation registers the separation that, for Baudelaire and Tsvetaeva, constitutes an essential condition of poetry.īaudelaire’s “Le Voyage” begins at the origin of desire, the world in the eyes of a child. In comparing these two texts, my intention is not to provide context for evaluating Tsvetaeva’s translation of Baudelaire’s poem or for discussing the problems of translation practice 2 rather, my method of close reading draws out specificities of each poet’s idiom and imaginary to develop intertextual connections between their poetics. This translation departs from the original text in ways that reveal a continuity between the poetics of Baudelaire and Tsvetaeva: the concept of exile as a source of poetic identity and authority. By moving between the “frames” of Baudelaire’s poetics and her own, Marina Tsvetaeva reenacts the movement of the voyage in “Plavanie,” her 1940 translation of “Le Voyage” into Russian (2: 396-401). Not only is every translation a reading, as Harold Bloom famously argues, but every reading is a translation, a deferred voyage. “Le Voyage” suggests another departure, not only in the ambiguous ending of the poem, but also in a meta-textual gesture to fellow readers, an invitation to reprise the voyage in the “cadres d’horizons” ‘frames of horizons’ of their own experience. In “Le Voyage,” Baudelaire’s final voyage extends into the afterlife ― beyond the watery depths of death in the poem itself, and into the “afterlife” of translation, as Walter Benjamin calls it. The Baudelarian voyage provides a thematic structure for thinking about the relationship between poetry and translation: the movement between source and other in a state of non-arrival. 1 This movement, which Baudelaire apprehends in the notes to his translations of Edgar Allan Poe, is repeated in variations on the itinerary of desire in Baudelaire's own poems ― a voyage without end, leading “beyond the tomb” in “Le Voyage” (122-24), the closing poem of Les Fleurs du mal ( The Flowers of Evil). For the French poet (and translator) Charles Baudelaire, translation is metaphysical, a movement across the separation between the real and the ideal, the worldly and the heavenly it is the movement of poetry itself: “C’est à la fois par la poésie et à travers la poésie que l’âme entrevoit les splendeurs situées derrière le tombeau” ‘It is at once by poetry and through poetry that the soul discerns the splendors situated beyond the tomb’ (352). Translation is somewhere in-between, not only between languages or cultures, but even between worlds. Indeed, whether it should arrive at all is a complicated question: translation is a potentially rich encounter of difference, but not if it easily assimilates meaning, “domesticating” the original text (to borrow the terms developed by Lawrence Venuti) by effectively erasing all “foreignizing” traces of context. Translation gets meaning across, but it does not necessarily arrive. Yet translation is nonetheless a process it is meaning in process, in transit, as it is conveyed across the separation of national languages, cultural discourses, geographical and temporal locations, and even idiosyncratic worldviews. Translation is a conceptual structure of global literary relations, a critical perspective on the future of the discipline ― or the “zone” of “A New Comparative Literature,” as it is announced in the subtitle of Emily Apter’s 2011 book, The Translation Zone. Translation is no longer merely a practice or a problem in Comparative Literature it is a paradigm of scholarly work in the field.
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