The work of Charles Baudelaire has been available to readers of Chinese for almost a century, serving as an important touchstone from May 4 to the “misty poets” and beyond. The list of writers who seriously engaged with Baudelaire's work (above all Les fleurs du mal [1857] and the Petits poèmes en prose [1869]) reads like a Who's Who of modern Chinese letters, including Zhou Zuoren, Lu Xun, Li Jinfa, Dai Wangshu, Wen Yiduo, Ai Qing, Duo Duo, and Bei Dao.
By many accounts the seminal figure of European modern poetry, Baudelaire has become a somewhat mythical figure, even a caricature, attached, sometimes as if by free association, to labels as diverse as Symbolism, decadence, Satanism, aestheticism, and not least modernity—all by authors for and against any or all of the above. Such is the case even in Baudelaire's native France; how much more so the case, then, when linguistic,...
