Wallaert, Ineke. Baudelaires rewriting of Poes fancy and imagination dans dAmelio Nadia (dir.).

). Les traductions extraordinaires dEdgar Poe. Mons, Belgique : Editions CIPA collection Langage et Socit, 2010. p 81-99

Baudelaires rewriting of Poes fancy and imagination

Colloque International: Les Traductions extraordinaires dEdgar Allan Poe 27-28 novembre 2009 Ineke WALLAERT Universit de Strasbourg

Introduction: the translation of Poe

In this article several closely linked topics lead to a detailed examination of how Baudelaire, Poes tuteur and translator in France, translated the two concepts of imagination and fancy as they occurred in Poes tales. Before entering the discussion, two things need to be recalled about our current perspective on the Poe-Baudelaire relationship. As many authors have pointed out, Baudelaire can be said to have given Poe a French face, i.e. of painting Poes picture in his own image by accentuating aspects of Poes persona which coincided with his own and which he had found in Griswolds calumniating posthumous accounts on Poe. Then there are those (e.g. Meschonnic 1999: 54-55, Berman 1995: 2) who, in spite of this knowledge, insist that Baudelaire was a great translator, and the term is adopted precisely because of the success of the entire process of translatio, which includes the prefaces in which Baudelaire created Poes French image, rather than being limited to the intrinsic quality of the translations. Both positions are tenable and useful, and the insights which they give rise to have led me to use the term rewriting rather than simply translation for Baudelaires work on Poe, since besides its original meaning of refraction, 1 this term implies the understanding that every act of translation is intertextually linked with its para-texts (prefaces, footnotes, etc.) and that in the end, our evaluation of historical translations such as Baudelaires should definitely take into account the whole of these rewritings. The aim of the present article, then, is not to give a value judgement on the quality of the translations, but to describe some of the translators choices, to understand against the background of what is now known about
Refractions are to be found in the obvious form of translation, or in the less obvious form of criticism , commentary , teaching, the collection of works in anthologies, the production of plays. (Lefevere 1982: 4)
1

the entire translation process, how these may have come about, and to evaluate the effect they may have on the French reading of Poes texts. I write about the effect they have in the present tense, because the Baudelaire translations, which are now slightly over 150 years old, have never been retranslated. The article begins with a discussion on Poes own use of the concepts of imagination and fancy, two mental faculties which he discusses in some of his literary criticism and essays, and whose distinctive meanings he also exploits in his tales. Since Poe explicitly mentions S.T. Coleridge as the source of this distinction, I then turn to Coleridges profound and abstruse theory on the mental faculties, which I try to explain as concisely as possible. The common ground and the differences between the authors respective views are then examined in a comparative passage, before turning to how Baudelaire treated the distinction between fancy and imagination in his own work as critique dart. All these preliminary steps lead to an informed and detailed discussion on the ways in which Baudelaire translated the terms as they featured in Poes tales. The conclusions drawn from that discussion are reinforced by what is known about Baudelaires stance and project as translator of Poe.

Sublimity or strangeness?
I will begin by looking at how Poe uses the terms fancy and imagination in his tales on the one hand, and in his essays and marginalia on the other. The selection of tales from which the occurrences of fancy and imagination are extracted is limited to those which I consider to be entirely or partly classifiable as fantastic. As I explain in Wallaert 2009, I refer with the term fantastic to those tales where Poe introduces a layer of meaning which echoes his own description of works of the imagination in which there are undercurrents of meaning appertaining to that class of compositions in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one (Thompson 1984 [1840]: 341). Applying this multi-layered perspective to distinguish the fantastic mode in Poes tales, I have therefore chosen tales where Poe uses the technique of introducing lhsitation prouve par un tre qui ne connat que les lois naturelles, (Todorov 1970: 29), a hesitation which is transferred from the narrator and/or other characters to the reader, and which makes the latter oscillate between the possibility and the impossibility of attributing a realistic explanation to the events in the tale, leaving her/him in a state of uncertainty as to how to posit these (see Wallaert 2009: 51). The selection of occurrences which are presented throughout this article is not exhaustive (for reasons of brevity), and is taken from the following tales: Morella, Berenice, Ligeia, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Oval Portrait, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Premature Burial, The Black Cat, and The Tale of the Ragged Mountains. I will begin the discussion by looking at descriptions and occurrences of each faculty separately, first as given in Poes literary criticism and secondly in the aforementioned tales. A first extract from Poes essay on Thomas Hood may serve to introduce the gist of Poes ideas on the topic:
The fact seems to be that Imagination, Fancy, Fantasy, and Humor, have in common the elements, Combination, and Novelty. The Imagination is the artist of the four. From novel arrangements of old forms which present themselves to it, it selects only such as are harmonious the result, of course, is beauty itself using the term in its most extended sense, and as inclusive of the sublime. (Thompson 1984 [1845]: 278)

Furthermore, on the imagination, we also find, in a series of Suggestions:

That the imagination has not been unjustly ranked as supreme among the mental faculties, appears, from the intense consciousness, on the part of the imaginative man, that the faculty in question brings his soul often to a glimpse of things supernal and eternal to the very verge of the great secrets. (Thompson 1984 [1845]: 1293)

For Poe the imagination is clearly the supreme and most positive mental capacity of the pair. He describes it as a creative force in the largest sense, a faculty which allows the subject to perceive(s) the faint perfumes, and hear(s) the melodies of a happier world, (Thompson 1984 [1845]: 1293), a mental power which allows the subject to reach towards the sublime or the ideal, and one which Poe links to what he terms the mystic (Thompson 1984 [1840]: 337). This last term Poe claims to employ in the sense of Augustus Wilhelm Schlegel, and of most other German critics, as referring to that layer of a work of art (poem, prose, painting, etc.) which, again, lifts it into the ideal (ibid). Such a conception of the imagination can also be deduced from the way Poe uses the term in his tales. In The Fall of the House of Usher, for instance, we find confirmation of the sublimating capacity of the imagination in the following passage:
There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. (Mabbott 1978: 397-398)

Here Poe uses the imagination as a faculty which the subject can consciously control and put to work, and which normally leads one to find in the object of contemplation an element or echo of the sublime. That the imagination is, in comparison with fancy, the superior faculty, also becomes clear from the adjectives which accompany the term in the tales: all of these can be considered as positive post- or pre-modifications. Thus we find in Ligeia a vivid imagination (Mabbott 1978: 325), in The Premature Burial a daring imagination (Mabbott 1978: 961), an imagination that is singularly vigorous and creative in The Tale of the Ragged Mountains (Mabbott 1978: 942). or, at worst, an excited imagination in Berenice (Mabbott 1978: 214). For Poes use of fancy we have already seen that Poe ranks this mental capacity right behind or rather below the imagination, and on every occasion where the terms feature in a tandem Poe indeed describes the fancy as inferior to the imagination. As, for instance, in Fifty Suggestions:
What we feel to be Fancy will be found fanciful still, whatever the theme which engages it. No subject exalts it into Imagination. (Thompson 1984 [1849]: 1306).

We also find far less positive adjectival accompaniment for fancy throughout the tales: a strange fancy a fancy so ridiculous and shadowy fancies grow in the mind of the narrator of The Fall of the House of Usher (Mabbott 1978: 399, 397-398), while in Ligeia, Lady Rowena hears strange sounds in the distemper of her fancy (Mabbott 1978: 323) and the narrator is visited by a crowd of unutterable fancies (Mabbott 1978: 329) at the end of the tale. Yet more significant are the descriptions of the emotional and psychological states which the fancy is seen to induce: the fancy is always outside of the control of the subject, and is held responsible for periods of doubt, instability, morbidity, and, of course fear and terror. Thus fancies are felt, by the narrator of Ligeia, to be rushing hurriedly through my brain, having paralyzed and chilled me into stone (Mabbott 1978: 329), they

grew in my mind uncontrollably and crowded upon the narrator of The Fall of the House of Usher (Mabott 1978: 399 and 398 respectively) and in the same tale his elaborate fancy makes Roderick Usher brood over his artwork which grows into a vagueness that leaves the narrator shuddering with unease (Mabbott 1978: 405), while it grew charnal and possessed the narrator of A Premature Burial (Mabbott 1978: 963). These occurrences are most pertinent for our examination of how Baudelaire translates the term fancy, since Poe often uses the term as a signpost to stipulate the fantastic character of his tale, as it is the term fancy which frequently serves to introduce and maintain the element of doubt and hesitation. The fancy is thus found to have conjured up images for the narrator of The Fall of the House of Usher, whom it is also said to have deceived (Mabbott 1978: 414).

Poes red herring

When we look at Poes understanding of imagination and fancy in comparative terms, we find that Poe introduces a sizeable red herring in some of his discussions on the subject. There are two passages where Poe both agrees and disagrees with Coleridges theory on fancy and imagination, which feature in his essays on Thomas Hood (Thompson 1989 [1845]: 274-288) and on Thomas Moore (Thompson 1989 [1840]: 333341). In both passages Poe dismisses Coleridges views and then goes on to put forward a conclusion which contradicts his refutation:
The fancy, says the author of the Ancient Mariner, in his Biographia Literaria, the fancy combines, the imagination creates. And this was intended, and has been received, as a distinction. If so at all, it is one without a difference; without even a difference of degree. [...] We might make a distinction, of degree, between the fancy and the imagination, in saying that the latter is the former loftily employed. But experience proves this distinction to be unsatisfactory. What we feel and know to be fancy, will be found still only fanciful, whatever be the theme which engages it. It retains its idiosyncracy under all circumstances. No subject exalts it into the ideal. (Thompson 1984 [1840]: 334)

The issue raised by this passage is the following: Poe begins by saying that where Coleridge and others have seen a difference, there is none, not even one of degree. Poes refusal to see a distinction is based on the idea that The Fancy as nearly creates as the imagination, and neither at all. Novel conceptions are merely unusual combinations. (Thompson 1984 [1845]: 277). Still, this refutation of Coleridges distinction is followed by a statement that What we feel and know to be fancy, will be found still only fanciful. Considering his statement that the imagination is supreme among the mental faculties, and brings our soul to the very verge of the great secrets, (Thompson 1984 [1845]: 1293), Poe is clearly mixing two things: the imagination and fancy as mental faculties, and the objects or, more specifically, the kind of poetry, which they are likely to produce. In the sentence What we feel and know to be fancy ... Poe should therefore be taken as using fancy to refer to a product of fancy, which, as he states above, retains its idiosyncracy under all circumstances (Thompson 1984 [1840]: 334), i.e. which is clearly distinct from all other things. So if something is fancy or fanciful, it is a product of fancy only, and it is different from products of the imagination, since No subject exalts it into the ideal, the ideal being the realm of the imagination. What Poe thus seems to wish to put forward is that the products of the mental faculties are different, but that the faculties are the same in the way they operate. However, Poe never explicitly states his distinction between product and process - where the products would be different but the processes the same. Moreover, it doesnt help that

in his tales he does make a very obvious difference between fancy and imagination as mental processes. And Poe further undermines his refusal to confirm Coleridges distinction in other statements on the mental faculties. The herring reappears, for instance, in the following passage:
[...] in general, the richness or force of the matters combined, the facility of discovering combinable novelties worth combining [i.e. the process] - and the absolute chemical combination and proportion of the completed mass [i.e. the product] are the particulars to be regarded in our estimate of Imagination. It is this thorough harmony of an imaginative work which so often causes it to be under-valued by the undiscriminating, through the character of obviousness which is super-induced. We are apt to find ourselves asking why is it that these combinations have never been imagined before? (Thompson 1984 [1845]: 278)

Here Poe again mixes the process and the product, though the product is clearly his main focus. He continues this discussion by claiming that a new combination of existing particulars can also be a product of fancy, with the difference that, in the case of fancy, the element of novelty or innovation is not necessarily predominant, and is strengthened not by its obviousness, but by the unexpectedness or strangeness of the new combination; i.e. the product:
... when in addition to the element of novelty, there is introduced the sub-element of unexpectedness when, for example, matters are brought into combination which not only have never been combined but whose combination strikes us as a difficulty happily overcome the result then appertains to the fancy. (Thompson 1984 [1845]: 278)

Again, this extract is not so much a discussion on the faculties as operating psychological powers as one on the objects which these faculties are apt to produce. The overall impression we thus get from Poes discussions of the mental faculties is that he does see a distinction in their products: fancy and imagination both combine existing materials to produce new results, but the imagination leads to results which give us dim bewildering visions of a far more ethereal beauty beyond (Thomspon 1989 [1840]: 337), whereas fancy simply creates new and unexpected combinations that are typically less harmonious and less beautiful. In the end, then, what Poe seems most interested in is not so much the psychology of the mental faculties he refutes Coleridges position on this matter without explicitly arguing one of his own but the type of poetry, or art, which they create. We will now see how Poes views coincide or differ from those of Coleridge.

Poes Coleridge
It is perhaps relevant at this point to remind the reader of the awe and esteem in which Poe held Coleridge. While on one occasion Poe laments that Coleridges mind should have been buried in metaphysics, in the same passage he also declares:
Of Coleridge I cannot but speak with reverence. His towering intellect ! his gigantic power ! [ ...] In reading his poetry I tremble like one who stands upon a volcano, conscious, from the very darkness bursting from the crater, of the fire and the light that are weltering below. (Thompson 1984 [1836]: 10)

Interestingly, Poe seems to think that Coleridges main fault lies in an excess of profundity: He goes wrong by reason of his very profundity (Thompson 1984 [1836]: 8), like the stargazer who looks too intently at the star and is no longer conscious of all for which the star is useful to us below its brilliancy and its beauty (ibid.). That said,

Poe greatly appreciated the Biographia Literaria, the work where Coleridge presents his philosophical, theological and psychological views among details of his life and times and which features his theory on the mental faculties. While expressing his regret that it has not been republished in America, Poe describes this work as perhaps, the most deeply interesting of the prose writings of Coleridge, whose republication would be rendering an important service to the cause of psychological science in America (Thompson 1984 [1836]: 188). That Poe was more than familiar with Coleridges thought on the mental faculties is hereby established. The following paragraphs will now show that Poe indeed chose a less psychological and more poetic treatment of the imagination and fancy than the one which Coleridge elaborated.

Coleridges theory of consciousness

Coleridges discussion of fancy and imagination is not limited to the famous last passage which ends both Chapter XIII and the first part of the Biographia Literaria. Meditations on how the mind works occupied his thoughts long before he came into contact with the German thinkers (Schelling, Fichte, etc.) who influenced his thought on the matter (see Wordsworth 1985: 28), and the foundations for the statements in Chapter XIII are laid from the beginning chapters of the Biographia onwards. Thus we find in Chapter IV:
Repeated meditations led me to first suspect (and a more intense analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions and effects, matured my conjecture into full conviction) that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or at the furthest the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. (Coleridge 1956 [1817): 50)

Coleridges psychological theory is not easy to understand, as his ideas on the imagination are in fact an attempt to describe nothing less than the nature of consciousness itself (Richards 1960: 6). Moreover, in the famous passage where Coleridge finally nails down his theory, the imagination is split up into primary and secondary imagination, a dichotomy which needs some explanation before going into further detail on the difference he made between imagination and fancy. Here, then, is the first part of Coleridges frequently quoted passage:
The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. (Coleridge 1956 [1817): 167)

As Jonathan Wordsworth indicates, there seems to be an orthodoxy (which) has grown up among scholars which holds that the secondary imagination, despite the usual force of the words, was more important to Coleridge than the primary (Wordsworth 1985: 23). This consensus is confirmed for instance in Richards Coleridge on Imagination, where the author states that The Primary Imagination is normal perception that produces the usual world of the senses (Richards 1960: 58). Richards interpretation and explanation of the secondary imagination is of great interest and very well-formed, but he does not dwell on what Coleridge understood by the primary imagination, which he restricts in one stroke to sensual perception, and which the rest of his work more or less

ignores. Jonathan Wordsworth, however, makes a very strong case contradicting the widely accepted supremacy of Coleridges secondary imagination. His argument that this interpretation of the concepts stems from the preconceptions with which they have been approached, (Wordsworth 1985: 26) may here be completed by stating that it is also the aims with which scholars have broached the subject, and the context in which the concepts were made to function, namely poetics and literary criticism, which sustain the consensus he refutes. The scope of this essay does not allow me to go into the details of Wordsworths discussion of the topic, but the gist of the argument needs to be presented here. As Coleridge says himself, the primary imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception, but it is also much more than that, it is the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. (cf. supra). This means, as Wordsworth indicates, that the primary imagination is an ultimate stage of love, or consciousness, or perception (Wordsworth 1985: 31) in the most sublime sense, a faculty which allows the subject to merge with God: With the primary imagination man unknowlingly re-enacts Gods original and eternal creative moment (Wordsworth 1985: 25). Indeed, as Wordsworth also tells us, imagination is for Coleridge an act of faith (Wordsworth 1985: 46). Besides pointing to Coleridges own unmistakable language (primary and secondary are unambiguous terms), Wordsworth also convincingly argues that Few people have rated the evidence of their senses lower than Coleridge, or would have been less inclined to celebrate it in exalted biblical language (Wordsworth 1985: 48), which Coleridge indeed does with the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. Moreover, Coleridge talks about ALL human perception, and there is nothing which allows us to limit perception to the usual world of the senses, as Richards does (Richards 1960: 58). Wordsworths conclusion that for Coleridge The primary imagination at its highest is the supreme human achievement of oneness with God; the secondary, though limited by comparison, contains the hope that in the act of writing the poet may attain to a similar power (Wordsworth 1985: 50) is therefore the one which is followed here. As this is an article in the field of comparative literature and translation studies, it is of course the secondary imagination which will be in focus here, and which I take Poe to allude to when he mentions Coleridge. As we have seen, Poes concerns with the faculties were limited to their products, mainly in the field of poetic composition, and did not extend to Coleridges philosophical or psychological studies. Still, it is important to point out that for Coleridge A man may work with two very different tools at the same moment; each has its share in the work, but the work affected by each is distinct and different (Coleridge 1956 [1817): 160). We can now continue with the second part of Coleridges theory:
It [the secondary imagination] dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. (Coleridge 1956 [1817): 167)

Coleridges secondary imagination is thus also a creative power, a faculty of the mind which re-combines the materials supplied by the primary imagination, and in these new combinations it always strives towards unity and harmony. It should therefore indeed not surprise us, as Richards points out, that there should be a connection between poetry and the ordering of life for Coleridge (Richards 1960: 59). Moreover, as Wordsworth

indicates, the fact that the creative imagination could merge into the primary gives to the poet a special position in the Ascent of Being (Wordsworth 1985: 49). Both the struggle for unity and harmony and the special position in which this puts the subject are thoughts which we also find in Poes treatment of the products of the imagination, as allowing the creator or the reader of imaginative poetry to catch a glimpse of things supernal and eternal. (Thompson 1984 [1845]: 1293) Turning our attention to Coleridges treatment of fancy, we find that the discussion in Chapter XIII ends with:
Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will which we express by the word choice. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. (Coleridge 1956 [1817): 167)

Fancy, then, also recreates, though it does not modify existing materials, which Coleridge calls fixities and definites. Rather, as Richards puts it,
Fancy [...] collects and re-arranges, without remaking them, units of meaning already constituted by Imagination. In Imagination the mind is growing; in Fancy it is merely reassembling products of past creation ... (Richards 1960: 59)

Or, as Wordsworth explains, Fancy is cumulative and her works are the Daughters of Memory: imagination modifies, and by recreating the materials of experience produces the oneness that for Coleridge [...] is ultimate truth (Wordsworth 1985: 34). Coleridge thus also denies fancy any innovative power: it does not shape or modify, it does not dissolve(s), diffuse(s), dissipate(s), in order to re-create (cf. supra), just as Poe denied fancy the predominance of novelty and obviousness. For Coleridge fancy obeys Hartleys laws of association: it is the aggregative and associative power (Coleridge 1956 [1817): 160) which evokes nothing and combines nothing of which the particulars are not already there and this does not exclude Poes element of unexptectedness in the combination.

Creative powers compared

How then, does Poes treatment of the mental faculties compare with that of Coleridge? Firstly, it is clear that both Coleridge and Poe see the imagination as more than simply a creative force: it is a power which brings the subject within reach of God, the ideal, the sublime and the eternal. Poes indebtedness to Coleridge for his use of the imagination may be located precisely in his claim that the imagination does not create anything at all, in the sense that he thereby echoes Coleridges more elaborate ascendance by which all the materials which the secondary imagination uses are provided by the primary imagination. For both authors the imagination works with materials that already exist, with the nuance that for Coleridge these materials can be modified before the process of recombination, while for Poe it is rather the process of recombination which enacts the modification of the particulars. The most important difference would thus lie with the authors treatment of fancy. For Coleridge the two faculties are very different (though they can be operant at the same time in the same mind), and we have seen that on this point Poes disagreement with Coleridge is self-contradictory and is not confirmed by his own use of the terms in his literary criticism and in his tales. Poe even repeats Coleridges associative power when he makes fancy the locus of a process of association in The Pit and the Pendulum:

After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel. (Mabbott 1978: 681)

When adding to this example the involuntary nature of the fancies which plague Poes narrators, and the fact that these fancies always appear when the subject is in some altered state of consciousness, we do see a difference with Coleridges attribution of choice to fancy, while Poes claim that fancy would be the same kind of conscious act of knowledge as the imagination becomes difficult to follow. To end this comparison, we may attempt to explain Poes red herring by pointing at the very different perspectives from which Poe and Coleridge studied the faculties. In Chapter XII of the Biographia, Coleridge talks about the necessity of postulating a coalescence of subject and object in every act of consciousness (and, by reduction, in the imagination): All knowledge rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject, says Coleridge (Coleridge 1956 [1817): 144). The most straightforward illumination of Coleridges statement that During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs (Coleridge 1956 [1817): 145) is perhaps given by Coleridge himself when he states that Truth is correlative to Being. Knowledge without a correspondent reality is no knowledge; if we know, there must be somewhat known by us. To know is in its very essence a verb active. (Coleridge 1956 [1817): 150), which not only confirms the coincidence of subject and object that underlies his further discussion on the mental faculties, but which also brings us back to the imagination as an act of knowing and an essentially creative power. Poes concerns with the imagination do not lead him to such heights of psychological and philosophical exploration. The fact that, in spite of designating Coleridge as the originator of the distinction between fancy and imagination, Poe does not touch upon Coleridges own differentiation between primary and secondary imagination, already points towards a different aim and a different application. Could it be that Poe simply did not want to go into the metaphysical realm in which he felt Coleridge was wasting his talents? Such a position would certainly coincide with his lamentation that Coleridge wasted his genius on such profundities, that such a mind should be buried in metaphysics, and, like the Nycanthes, waste its perfume upon the night alone (Thomspon 1984 [1836]: 11), thus losing sight of his true object of contemplation, namely poetry itself. In spite of his knowledge and interest in Coleridges main sources among the German romantic philosophers, Poes aim, then, seems simply to describe the faculties with regard to the objects which they produce, which would also explain why he did not make a clearer distinction between fancy as a verb or a noun, in other words, between the process and the product.

La reine des facults

I will now look at how Baudelaire dealt with the distinction between fancy and imagination. That Baudelaire had read some of Poes discussions on the mental faculties is a known fact, since several passages of the Notes Nouvelles sur Edgar Poe (published in 1857) are unavowed translations of Poes The Poetic Principle, in which Poe talks about the topic - this plagiarism has been largely demonstrated by Paul Valry (1957), Arthur S. Patterson (1903), Claude Richard (1989) and other commentators on Baudelaire as translator of Poe (see also Wallaert 2004). Very clear evidence that Baudelaire was familiar

with the distinction between fancy and imagination when he published the Histoires Extraordinaires in 1857 is also found in the fact that Baudelaire talks about la reine des faculties from 1855 onwards (in his essay on Ingres, see Baudelaire 1976 [1855]: 585), a phrase which also constituted the title of one of his chapters in his Salon of 1859. Furthermore, Baudelaires understanding of the distinction between fancy and imagination was enhanced by his reading of Catherine Crowes The Night side of Nature (1848), which had been translated into French as La Face nocturne de la nature. Baudelaire cites this source in Le gouvernement de limagination of that same Salon of 1859, and his translated quotation of Crowe concerning the imagination leaves no doubt that Baudelaires understood and agreed with the distinction between the mental faculties as Poe had also established it:
- Par imagination, je ne veux pas seulement exprimer l'ide commune implique dans ce mot dont on fait si grand abus, laquelle est simplement fantaisie, mais bien l'imagination cratrice, qui est une facult beaucoup plus leve, et qui, en tant que l'homme est fait la ressemblance de Dieu, garde un rapport loign avec cette puissance sublime par laquelle le Crateur conoit, cre et entretient son univers. (Baudelaire 1976 [1859]: 624)

In La reine des faculties Baudelaire describes in more detail how the imagination works, and this description is also reminiscent of the creative force that uses and recombines already existing materials, precisely as we found it in Poe, and also in Coleridges secondary imagination.
Elle dcompose toute la cration et, avec les matriaux amasss et disposs suivant des rgles dont on ne peut trouver l'origine que dans le plus profond de l'me, elle cre un monde nouveau, elle produit la sensation du neuf. []. L'imagination est la reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Elle est positivement apparente avec l'infini. (Baudelaire 1976 [1859]: 621)

With apparente avec linfini we find, moreover, that for Baudelaire too, the imagination is what links the subject to infinity (which in Baudelaires catholic thought obviously means the eternal, the divine). In his unavowed quotations and paraphrases of Poes The Poetic Principle, some of which he repeats in his first essay on Thophile Gautier, Baudelaire uses the following words to confirm this:
Cest cet admirable, cet immortel instinct du Beau qui nous fait considrer la Terre et ses spectacles comme un aperu, comme une correspondance du Ciel. [] Cest la fois par la posie et travers la posie, par et travers la musique, que lme entrevoit les splendeurs situes derrire le tombeau. [] Ainsi le principe de la posie est, strictement et simplement, laspiration humaine vers une beaut suprieure, et la manifestation de ce principe est dans un enthousiasme, un enlvement de lme. (Baudelaire 1976 [1859]: 114)2

In The Poetic Principle we find: An immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odours, and sentiments amid which he exists. And just as the lily is repeated in the lake [...] so is the mere oral or written repetition of these forms, and sounds, and colours, and sentiments, a duplicate source of delight. But this mere repetition is not poetry. [...] We still have a thirst unquenchable [...] This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us but a wild effort to reach the beauty above, and The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness this struggle, on the part of souls fittingly constituted has given to the world all that which it (the world) has ever been enabled to understand and to feel as poetic. (Thompson 1984 [1850]: 76-77)
2

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However, says Baudelaire in the same essay, this enlvement de lme should not be confused with passion, the latter producing what he calls la posie du cur. The elevation of the soul which he holds to produce poetry is not passion, but the imagination:
Le coeur contient la passion, le coeur contient le dvouement, le crime; lImagination seule contient la posie. (Baudelaire 1976 [1859]: 115).

So Baudelaire did distinguish between fancy (la fantaisie) and the imagination, and he also discusses fancy in a paragraph which features in another chapter of his 1859 Salon:
... la fantaisie est dautant plus dangereuse quelle est plus facile et plus ouverte; [] elle ressemble lamour quinspire une prostitue et qui tombe bien vite dans la purilit ou dans la bassesse, dangereuse comme toute libert absolue. Mais la fantaisie est vaste comme lunivers multipli par les tres pensant qui lhabitent. Elle est la premire chose venue, interprte par le premier venu ; et, si celui-l na pas lme qui jette une lumire magique et surnaturelle sur lobscurit naturelle des choses3, elle est une inutilit horrible, elle est la premire venue souille par le premier venu. (Baudelaire 1976 [1859]: 645)

For Baudelaire fancy thus has nothing in common with the imagination: it is unreliable, dangerous, available to all, and if it is not used by those who have imagination it leads to trashy and horrible worthlessness. Considering how clearly he saw the distinction between the two terms, and considering that he knew the meaning of fancy as it was employed both by Poe and by other Anglo-Saxon authors, it is all the more surprising to observe how Baudelaire translates fancy and imagination when these appear in the tales he gave to the French public.

Imagination and fancy in the Baudelaire translations

We will begin by looking at how Baudelaire translated the term imagination (and the related verb forms, imagine(d)), as this is the least problematic of the two. Most of the time, Baudelaire translates occurrences of imagination with the equivalent terms (noun and verb) in French. Still, there are at least two occurrences where Baudelaire is completely off the mark. The first appears in Morella:
These- these speculative writings were, for what reasons I would not imagine, Morellas favourite and constant study, ... (Mabbott 1978 : 225 226) Ces livres, pour des raisons que je ne pouvais concevoir, faisaient son tude constante et favorite; (Richard 1989: 139)

In Brnice we find a second and more significant occurrence, and here Baudelaire translates imagination with the term which he himself designated as denoting fancy:
Thus awaking from the long night of what seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy land into a palace of imagination into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition ... (Mabbott 1978: 210) Emergeant ainsi au milieu de la longue nuit qui semblait tre, mais qui ntait pas la non existence, pour tomber dun coup dans un pays ferique, dans un palais de fantaisie, dans les tranges domaines de la pense et de lrudition monastiques, (Richard 1989: 132)

Here Baudelaires choice of words echoes Catherine Crowes The Night side of Nature (La Face nocturne de la nature).
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Baudelaire here inverts the terms fancy and imagination, for no obvious reason, and I will for now leave these translations without further comment. The translations of fancy are far more problematic than these two translations of imagination, since, as we indicated earlier, Poe very often used the verb or the noun to signal hesitation on the part of the subject and to instil doubt in the reader as to how to posit the events in the narrative, a technique which ranks these tales firmly in the fantastic mode. There are hardly any occurrences of fancy which Baudelaire translated by the equivalent which he used in his own essay (fantaisie), and some of his translations take away that fundamental element which characterises the tale as a fantastic, and not a gothic narrative. So, in The Fall of the House of Usher, we find three occurrences where fancy signals the possibility that the narrator can no longer trust his own perception of things. These occurrences are all translated in a way that partly or completely annuls this possibility in the French version:
1. ... in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, ... (Mabbott 1978: 406) dans le sens intrieur et mystrieux de luvre, je crus dcouvrir (Richard 1989 : 413)4 ... it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me) it appeared to me that, ... (Mabbott 1978: 414) ... il mavait sembl, mais je conclus bien vite une illusion de mon imagination, il mavait sembl que (Richard 1989 : 418) ... the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragons unnatural shriek as described by the romancer. (Mabbott 1978: 414) lexacte contrepartie du cri surnaturel du dragon dcrit par le romancier, et tel que mon imagination se ltait dj figur. (Richard 1989: 419)

2.

3.

In the first case, Baudelaires use of crus dcouvrir, combined with other elements in the translation of the tale (which I discuss at length in Wallaert 2009), strongly works to annul the fantastic mode in which The Fall of the House of Usher is cast. The same can be said of Baudelaires replacement of fancy by imagination in example two and three, where, moreover, the actions of the fancy are also mistranslated: deceived and conjured up have rather less positive connotations than the act of creating an illusion and the verb phrase stait figur have. Baudelaires use of imagination changes the perception of the narrator, who is not prone to uncontrollable fancies which lead him to arbitrary associations, but who becomes a man with a perverse imagination, and these occurrences all work to pull the narrative into the gothic mode. That such a view also coincides with the image which Baudelaire painted of Poe is, in my opinion, not a coincidence, since such interventions can be observed throughout the Baudelaire translations. Thus we find, in Ligeia ... it is by that sweet word alone by Ligeia that I bring before mine eyes in fancy the image of her who is no more (Mabbott 1978: 311) translated as ...il me suffit de ce mot si doux, Ligeia! pour ramener devant les yeux de ma pense limage de celle qui nest plus. (Richard 1989: 363), and the phrase in the distemper of her fancy (Mabbott 1978: 323) we find translated as au drangement de ses ides (Richard 1989: 370). In The Oval Portrait we again find the inversion of the distinction, as Baudelaire twice translates fancy by imagination. Interestingly, in the first of these two cases it occurs in Poes text in the phrase the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe,
Richard here gives je crus dcouvrir, whereas Le Dantecs edition features je dcouvris. Richard makes no comment on the change.
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(Mabbott 1978: 662), which is Poes gentle way of stabbing at the gothic gloom of the English author. Baudelaires translation by limagination de mistress Radcliffe (Richard 1989: 590) shows that the translator was either unfamiliar with Radcliffes pure gothic, or that he wanted to cast Radcliffes work in a more positive light than Poe was doing, since , as I have indicated at the beginning of this article, Baudelaire tended to associate Poes own tales, and even Poes persona, with the genre. Another significant occurrence in The Oval Portrait is where Poe associates fancy with half-sleep (a subject which intrigued Poe, and which he not only exploited in his some of his tales, but also discusses in the Marginalia, see Thompson 1984 [1846]: 1383):
Least of all, could it have been that my fancy, shaken from its half slumber, had mistaken the head for that of a living person. (Mabbott 1978: 664) Encore moins devais-je croire que mon imagination, sortant dun demi-sommeil, et pris la tte pour celle dune personne vivante. (Richard 1989: 591)

More cases of the inversion of fancy and imagination are found in The Pit and the Pendulum, the first one of which, moreover, features fancy in the company of association:
1. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel. (Mabbott 1978: 681) Ce bruit apportait dans mon me lide dune rotation, peut-tre cause que dans mon imagination je lassociais avec une roue de moulin. (Richard 1989 : 646) 2. And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave. (Mabbott 1978: 682) Et alors se glissa dans mon imagination, comme une riche note musicale, lide du repos dlicieux qui nous attend dans la tombe. (Richard 1989: 647)

It is mesmerising, especially concerning the second case, to see how Baudelaire, who has himself described the imagination as a supreme power, can translate that same faculty as being liable to intrusions by unwanted ideas. More such examples occur in The Black Cat, where each occurrence of fancy is translated by imagination: ... I fancied that the cat avoided my presence (Mabbott 1978: 851) is here translated by je mimaginai que le chat vitait ma prsence (Richard 1989: 684), and the more elaborate description of fancy as an impressionable faculty, liable to be used and abused by anyone and anything (like the prostitute with which Baudelaire had himself compared it) in
... Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for the startling fact just detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy. (Mabbott 1978: 853)

is translated by
Quoique je satisfisse ainsi lestement ma raison, sinon tout fait ma conscience, relativement au fait surprenant que je viens de raconteur, il nen fit pas moins sur mon imagination une impression profonde. (Richard 1989: 696)

Baudelaire sometimes translates fancy by either esprit, as in The Premature Burial, where For some minutes after this fancy possessed me (Mabbott 1978: 966) is translated by Pendant quelques instants aprs que cette pense se fut empare de mon esprit (Richard 1989: 762), a translation which, in the light of what we have seen, still

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seems rather unsatisfactory. Another example of this choice is found in The Pit and the Pendulum, where Baudelaire translates in the disorder of my fancy (Mabbott 1978: 685) by dans le dsordre de ma pense (Richard 1989: 650). In order to evaluate the overall effect of these translation choices, I would begin by stating that it is particularly the translations of fancy by pense or ide which strongly pull the French text towards the gothic mode. Thus, instead of having a narrator who falls prey to involuntary mental leaps (usually in some altered state of consciousness), Baudelaires narrators reason and think and by turning them into rational beings he cancels the possibility for the reader to suspend the positing of the events as either supernatural or conjured up in the narrators disturbed mind. I might then add that for todays French readers of Poe, the inverted translation of fancy by imagination, though impossible to account for on Baudelaires part, may work slightly less to annul the fantastic element in the tales, since in contemporary French usage the term imagination carries less of its former content of sublimity and beauty. Still, any French speaker will certainly find a great difference between the terms fantaisie and imagination as designating mental faculties. In any case, considering that Baudelaire called the imagination la reine des facults, giving it such a role in his translations is a highly contradictory translation strategy: he had made the distinction very clearly himself and had read and confirmed what Poe and others had to say about the topic, which makes his repeated inversions an inexplicable choice.

Findings and conclusions

Baudelaire, then, though aware of the essential distinction between the mental faculties, seems not to have suspected and did not repeat the consistency with which Poe applied this distinction in his tales. Such an approach to Poes work coincides with the image which Baudelaire forged for Poe in his two biographical essays, where he presented Poe as a degenerate and a drunk whose accidents of genius were the results of his socalled opium-abuse, rather than the creations of a skilled technician.5 This seems to me a general attitude on Baudelaires part which greatly influenced his translation strategies, and the abundance of examples where Baudelaire does not translate the fundamental difference between the two mental faculties, of which I have only given a handful here, confirms this impression. In other words, I believe that the consistently inverted translation of fancy by imagination substantiates Baudelaires tendency to underestimate Poes technical skills, and I associate this attitude with Baudelaires specific project for his author, a project of appropriation not only of Poes persona, but also of Poes work. This appropriation of the work can obviously be located in Baudelaires plagiarisms of Poes ideas on literary composition, and more subtly in the fact that he moulded certain aspects of Poes fiction to his own literary tastes and interests. As far as Poes distinction between fancy and imagination is concerned, I have shown that this is largely derived from Coleridges description, though Poe does not explicitly acknowledge this, and though his treatment of the distinction between the
See Baudelaire, Charles. 1852. Edgar Allan Poe: sa vie et ses ouvrages. In Le Dantec (ed.), 1951, p. 1001 1029 and Baudelaire, Charles. 1856. Edgar Poe: sa vie et ses uvres. In Le Dantec (ed.), 1951, p. 10301048.
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mental faculties is less concerned with the psychological questions which interested Coleridge, and more with the implications it had for our reading of poetry and our experience of art in general. Poe did apply the difference between fancy and imagination as mental processes in his tales, where fancy in particular plays the role of signpost of the fantastic mode. I have demonstrated that when Baudelaires translations do not apply the distinction he makes in his own essays, this translation strategy can result in an annulment of the fantastic mode and create a more gothic type of narrative. We can attribute this strategy to Baudelaires specific project for his translations of Poes work, and ascribe his inversion in translation of fancy and imagination to his recurrent underrating of Poes consistency of thought.

References
1976. BAUDELAIRE, C., Oeuvres Compltes II, Ed. Claude Pichois, Paris: Gallimard Pliade,

BERMAN, A., La retraduction comme espace de la traduction, Palimpsestes (Retraduire), 1990, n4, Paris : Publication of the Sorbonne Nouvelle - Editions Erasmus, 1-7. BERMAN, A., Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne, Paris: Gallimard, 1995. COLERIDGE, S.T., Biographia Literaria or Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Everymans Library, 1956 [1817]. LE DANTEC, Y. (Ed.), Edgar Allan Poe: uvres en prose, Paris: ditions Gallimard Pliade, 1951. LEFEVERE, A., Mother Courages Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature. Modern Language Studies, 1982, 12: 4, 3-20. MABBOT, T.O. (Ed.), Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and Sketches (1831-1842). Vols. 2 & 3, London: Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, 1978. MESCHONNIC, H., Potique du traduire, Paris: Verdier, 1999. 1903 PATTERSON, A.-S., Linfluence dEdgar Poe sur Charles Baudelaire, Grenoble: Allier Frres, RICHARD, C (Ed.), Edgar Allan Poe Contes, Essais, Pomes, Paris: Laffont, 1989. RICHARDS, I.A., Coleridge on Imagination, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960. THOMPSON, G.R. (Ed.), Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, New York: Library of America, 1984. TODOROV, T., Introduction la littrature fantastique, Paris : ditions du Seuil, 1970. VALERY, P., uvres I. Paris: Gallimard - Pliade, 1957, 598-612. WALLAERT, I., Baudelaires Rewriting of Poe: A Para-Textual Critique of the Translations Ph.D. thesis, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Library, 2004.

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WALLAERT, I., Du fantastique au gothique : La chute de la maison Usher de Charles Baudelaire. Traduire, 2009, n219, 47-69. WORDSWORTH, J. The Infinite I AM. In Gravil, R., Newlyn, L. and Roe, N., Coleridges Imagination. Essays in memory of Pete Laver. 1985, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 22-52.

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