Death and Translation

The first translation of a Baudelaire poem into Chinese, a 1924 version of “A Carcass” by Xu Zhimo, offers an example of creative adaptation in translation: in his version and preface Xu assimilates Baudelaire to the early Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi. This is a strange choice on general grounds, but reflects the translator’s strategy of creating a recognizable identity for the Flowers of Evil, and for modernist poetics generally, within the world of Chinese thought. Furthermore, the content of Baudelaire’s poem, the changes made to it in Xu’s translation, and the relationship Xu devises with the works of Zhuangzi together outline a different theory of translation: not the creation of equivalents, but the chewing, digestion, and assimilation of a previous text, whether native or foreign, as part of the life-process of a literary tradition. Xu’s version of “A Carcass” enacts what Baudelaire’s poem describes, thereby displacing the ground of translational equivalence.