Thursday, December 09, 2021

Not least its incantatory sound …

… The Challenge of Baudelaire at 200 - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… The whole raison d’être of my translation is the recreation in English of his “trance music.” Because this music is made of words, it simultaneously calls up lush, extravagant, and even disturbing images. In “Autumn Song,” for example, the sound of men chopping wood at the end of summer evokes not just images of autumn but of siege-machines, gallows, and coffins:

The translations quoted are wonderful. I just got the Kindle edition. 

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