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Charles Baudelaire Complete Poems, translated by Walter Martin. Routledge, 4-63 pages, $14.95
To all the fierce technical difficulties of translating French verse into English--the relative restrictiveness of French vocabulary, the alexandrine line (always uneasy in our language), the precise yet variable positioning of the caesura, the purity and predominance of the French vowels--Baudelaire added a further, seemingly insuperable obstacle: the subtle torque between impossibly polished form and violent, often splenetic content. To use painterly terms, which Baudelaire himself, with his keen eye, might have approved, it is as though a Bosch or a Goya chose to ...