Why I Transcreate Baudelaire Instead of Simply Translating Him

Dante Remy
1 day ago
10 min read

Dante Remy |

The Question That Started Everything

Every generation discovers Charles Baudelaire anew.

Some discover him as the father of modern poetry. Others encounter him as the scandalous author of Les Fleurs du mal, whose work was prosecuted by the French courts in 1857 for offending public morality. Some know him through the Symbolists, others through T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or the Surrealists. For many, he is simply one of those writers everyone seems to quote but few actually read in depth.

My own journey with Baudelaire began, as I suspect many do, with admiration. That admiration eventually became fascination. Over the years, I found myself returning to many of the finest English translations ever produced of Baudelaire's French. Each translator brought intelligence, sensitivity, and remarkable craftsmanship to the work. I read them not as competitors, but as teachers.

Yet as I moved back and forth between the French text and these translations, I found myself asking a question that gradually refused to leave me.

Was I reading Baudelaire?

Or was I reading an exceptionally faithful English representation of Baudelaire? The distinction may seem subtle, but for me it became profound.

Translation is one of humanity's greatest literary achievements. Without translators, most of us would never encounter Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Rilke, or Baudelaire. Every serious translation is an act of scholarship, artistry, and humility. This essay is not an argument against translation, nor is it a claim that previous translators somehow failed. On the contrary, I owe them an enormous intellectual debt.

But as I read Baudelaire in French, I began to suspect that there was another question worth asking. Most translations begin by asking:

What did Baudelaire write?

It is an essential question, and every translator must answer it. The question that began to occupy me, however, was different:

What did Baudelaire make his readers experience?

Those two questions often lead to the same place. Sometimes they do not. That realization became the beginning of this project.

I do not claim to know exactly what a Parisian reader felt in 1857. No one can. Time has changed language, culture, morality, religion, and the emotional weight carried by certain words and images. The world that first encountered Les Fleurs du mal no longer exists. But the challenge fascinated me.

If language changes...if symbols change...if taboos change...if even beauty changes...

What does it mean to remain faithful to a poem?

Is fidelity measured only by preserving its words?

Or might fidelity also involve preserving its power?

Those questions eventually led me to a different approach, one I came to call transcreation.

Before I explain what I mean by that term, I want to explore why those questions matter, and why I believe Baudelaire remains one of the most urgently modern poets we can still read.

What Changes in One Hundred and Seventy Years?

The world into which Les Fleurs du mal was born no longer exists. That may sound obvious, but it has profound implications for anyone who reads, or translates, Baudelaire today.

When the first edition appeared in Paris in 1857, France was a society deeply shaped by Catholic morality, strict social conventions, and a legal system willing to prosecute literature for offending public decency. Baudelaire's poems did not merely challenge literary taste; they challenged assumptions about beauty, desire, religion, women, death, and the boundaries of respectable art. Six poems were censored, Baudelaire was fined, and the judgment against those poems remained in force for nearly a century.

Modern readers often encounter those same poems with a different reaction.

"That's what caused the scandal?"

The answer is both yes—and no. The poems themselves have not changed. We have. The words remain on the page exactly as Baudelaire wrote them. What has changed is the cultural landscape through which we read them.

Language evolves. Words gain new meanings and lose old ones. Metaphors that once carried unmistakable erotic or religious implications can become muted through familiarity. Expressions that shocked nineteenth-century readers may sound restrained to twenty-first-century ears. Even our assumptions about love, sexuality, faith, death, gender, beauty, and the body have shifted dramatically since Baudelaire's lifetime.

This is not unique to Baudelaire.

We encounter Shakespeare differently than Elizabethan audiences. Dante's readers no longer inhabit the theological universe that shaped every canto of The Divine Comedy. The satire of Juvenal, the eroticism of Sappho, and the mythology of Ovid all require us to cross historical and cultural distances before we can fully appreciate their power.

Translation bridges one distance: language. Time creates another.

That second distance is often less obvious, but no less real.

"Baudelaire created a new kind of poetry."— T. S. Eliot. He believed Baudelaire fundamentally altered the possibilities of modern poetry. Every translator inherits that challenge.

A translator may faithfully preserve every image and every metaphor, yet contemporary readers can still experience those images differently simply because the symbolic world surrounding them has changed.

Consider how we respond to religious imagery today. For many of Baudelaire's first readers, blasphemous language was not merely provocative: it threatened a moral and spiritual order that structured everyday life. Likewise, certain erotic suggestions, carefully veiled in nineteenth-century poetic language, possessed a potency that modern readers may scarcely notice. The symbolism has survived. The emotional voltage has not always traveled with it.

This realization does not diminish the value of faithful translation. On the contrary, it reminds us how extraordinary those translations are. They preserve the original architecture of the poem with remarkable care.

But it also raises another question.

If the emotional force of certain words, symbols, and images inevitably changes over time, what does it mean to preserve not only the poem's structure, but its effect?

That question became impossible for me to ignore.

It did not lead me away from Baudelaire.

It led me deeper into him.

When Translation and Transcreation Meet

Theory is easy. Poetry is where the real work begins.

It is one thing to argue that language changes over time, that symbols evolve, and that the emotional force of certain words can diminish across cultures and centuries. It is quite another to sit before a single stanza of Baudelaire and decide whether to preserve the words exactly as they appear or to depart from them in pursuit of something deeper.

That is the moment every translator eventually faces.

To illustrate what I mean by transcreation, I'd like to share one example from my rendering of Lesbos, which I have retitled Sapphotica.

Before you read my version, I invite you to do something I hope readers will do throughout this project. Read Baudelaire first. Then read a respected English translation. Only then read my transcreation. Resist the temptation to ask immediately, "Which version is most literal?" Instead, ask a different question.

What does each version make you feel?

Does one preserve the architecture of the poem more faithfully?

Does another capture its emotional temperature more vividly?

Does one allow the psychological tension to emerge more clearly for a contemporary reader?

Why? Because translation is never simply the movement of words from one language into another. Every translator makes hundreds of decisions involving rhythm, tone, ambiguity, symbolism, cultural context, emotional emphasis, and poetic voice. Some choices are obvious. Many are invisible.

Transcreation simply makes one additional choice. It asks whether there are moments when preserving the deepest intention of the poem may require departing from its most literal expression. That does not give the transcreator permission to invent freely. Quite the opposite. Every departure carries a burden of proof. Every change must answer a simple question:

What has been gained?

If a change merely makes the poem louder, darker, or more explicit, it has probably failed. If it recovers a psychological current, restores an erotic implication that has faded with time, preserves a symbolic tension, or allows a modern reader to experience something closer to the poem's original emotional force, then perhaps the departure has earned its place.

Ultimately, that judgment belongs not to me, but to you.

So let us begin where every conversation about Baudelaire should begin—with the poem itself.

Lesbos: A Conversation with One Stanza

Rather than asking you to accept my philosophy of transcreation in the abstract, I'd rather invite you into the workshop.

The opening stanza of Baudelaire's Lesbos offers a remarkable opportunity to explore what every translator, and every transcreator, must eventually confront. How do we remain faithful not only to a poet's words, but also to the experience those words once created?

What follows is not an argument that one version is "correct" and another is not. Rather, it is an invitation to read one stanza three different ways: first in Baudelaire's original French, then in a traditional English translation, and finally in my own transcreation. My hope is that, by placing them side by side, you'll begin to see that each version answers a different question.

The traditional translation asks, What did Baudelaire write?

My transcreation asks an additional question: What did Baudelaire make his readers experience?

Read each version slowly before continuing. Then ask yourself not only which is the most faithful to the French, but which most vividly recreates the emotional, sensual, and psychological atmosphere Baudelaire was striving to evoke.

Lesbos: Baudelaire's Original French

Mère des jeux latins et des voluptés grecques, Lesbos, où les baisers, languissants ou joyeux, Chauds comme les soleils, frais comme les pastèques, Font l'ornement des nuits et des jours glorieux; Mère des jeux latins et des voluptés grecques.

A Traditional Translation

Mother of Latin games and Greek pleasures, Lesbos, where kisses, languid or joyful, hot as suns, cool as watermelons, adorn the nights and glorious days; mother of Latin games and Greek pleasures.

My Transcreation

Sapphotica, mother of ancient pleasures, where kisses linger, deepen, ignite— warm as sunlight across trembling skin, cool as water over a body fevered by desire. Sapphotica, mother of ancient pleasures.

Reading the Three Versions Together

At first glance, my transcreation appears to depart from Baudelaire more dramatically than it actually does. Yet if we read the three versions carefully, we discover that the greatest differences are not in what the poem means, but in how it seeks to make the reader feel.

The first and most obvious change is the title. Baudelaire names the island: Lesbos. I chose Sapphotica.

This was not an attempt to modernize Baudelaire or distance the poem from its source. Rather, it reflects what I believe the poem is fundamentally about. "Lesbos" is both a geographical place and a literary symbol, inseparable from the legacy of Sappho and the world of feminine beauty, longing, intimacy, and desire that grew around her name. Over time, however, the word Lesbos has acquired modern associations that can distract contemporary readers from the imaginative landscape Baudelaire was entering. My title shifts the emphasis from geography to poetic imagination. It invites the reader into an emotional and symbolic world rather than onto a map.

The next decision concerns Baudelaire's description of the kisses themselves. In the French they are languissants ou joyeux—languid or joyful. The traditional translation preserves those adjectives faithfully, and there is genuine beauty in that restraint. I asked a different question. Instead of describing what the kisses are, could I express what they become as desire unfolds? Thus the kisses in my transcreation linger, deepen, and ignite.

The progression is intentional. Desire is not static. It moves. It grows. It transforms those who experience it. Rather than replacing Baudelaire's adjectives, I sought to recover the movement I felt pulsing beneath them.

Perhaps the most striking difference lies in Baudelaire's famous comparison:

Chauds comme les soleils, frais comme les pastèques.

Literally translated, the kisses are "hot as suns, cool as watermelons." It is one of the poem's most memorable images, and for Baudelaire's original audience it was almost certainly immediate and sensuous. Today, however, I imagined many English readers pause, not because they are overwhelmed by the sensuality, but because they are surprised by the watermelon. The image has become culturally distant. The object itself now draws more attention than the sensation Baudelaire was trying to evoke.

This is precisely the kind of moment that interests me as a transcreator. Rather than preserving the object, I attempted to preserve the experience. My version reads:

warm as sunlight across trembling skin, cool as water over a body fevered by desire.

Notice what I did not do. I did not attempt simply to make Baudelaire more explicit. I did not intensify the eroticism merely because modern readers are more difficult to shock. Instead, I asked what emotional work Baudelaire's comparison performs. It juxtaposes warmth and coolness, fire and relief, passion and repose. My substitution seeks to recover those bodily sensations using imagery that speaks more immediately to contemporary readers while remaining faithful to the poem's sensual atmosphere.

The goal of transcreation is never change for its own sake. Every departure from the French must earn its place. If a change merely makes the language louder, darker, or more provocative, it has probably failed. But if it restores an emotional current that has weakened over time, preserves a symbolic tension that risks being overlooked, or allows a modern reader to experience something closer to the poem's original imaginative force, then perhaps the departure has earned its place.

Whether I have succeeded is not for me to decide. That judgment belongs to you.

My hope is simply that by placing Baudelaire's French, a traditional translation, and my transcreation side by side, the conversation becomes visible. Translation and transcreation are not rivals. They are different acts of literary faithfulness, each asking a different question, each illuminating the poem in its own way.

If this comparison encourages you to return to Baudelaire with fresh eyes, then it has already fulfilled its purpose.

End of Part One of Six in the Baudelaire Series

Continue the Journey

This essay is Part One of a six-part series exploring the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, the philosophy of transcreation, and the creation of my forthcoming illustrated bilingual edition, Baudelaire's Banned Poetry: The Censored, Erotic & Vampiric.

Throughout this series we'll explore how poetry changes across languages and centuries, why Baudelaire remains one of literature's most provocative voices, and how transcreation seeks to recover the emotional, psychological, and symbolic force of his work for contemporary readers.