collected till after his death, I had the patience to make friends with some Americans living in Paris so as to borrow from them collections of Journals that had been edited by Poe. And then I found—believe me or not, as you will—poems and tales of which I had already a vague, confused, and ill-ordered idea and which Poe had known how to arrange and bring to perfection." Six years later he writes: "I am accused of imitating Edgar Poe. Do you know why I translated Poe with such patience? Because he was like me. The first time that I opened a book of his, I saw with terror and delight not only subjects I had dreamed of, but sentences that I had thought of and that he had written twenty years before."
Baudelaire's first volume of translations from Poe, Histoires extraordinaires, appeared in 1856. Others followed till two years before his death in 1867. Many competitors have entered the lists against him but he has had no rivals. Baudelaire has, in fact, elevated and standardized the art of putting the prose of one language into the prose of another. One curious minor mistake may be mentioned. Jupiter, the negro in The Gold-Bug, says that his master was "as white as a gose [ghost]." Baudelaire makes him "as white as a goose," "pâle comme une oie." Also in The Raven, almost the only poem of Poe's that Baudelaire translated, "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven" is rendered, awkwardly, "Bien que ta tête soit sans huppe et sans cimier."
What Baudelaire did for Poe's prose, Stéphane Mallarmé and Gabriel Mourey did, though not with equal finality, for his verse.[1] In a letter written to
- ↑ Mourey's Poésies complètes d'Edgar Poe, 1889, re-
