Though now, like most American poets of the early twentieth century, something of a forgotten figure, Edna St. Vincent Millay was a greatly acclaimed writer in her time, also, rather unusually for a poet, an engaging personality. A bohemian in an era when there were serious risks in stepping out of line, especially in strait-laced East coast America, she did what she wanted with her own life and without making a song and dance about it.
When George Dillon sent her some of his translations of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal , she not only agreed to write an Introduction but became so captivated that she started doing some translations of her own and the eventual volume was a collaboration. Some of what she says in her Introduction sounds strangely today  : she finds it necessary to defend offering to the American public the poems of a man who committed the unforgivable sin of living openly with a woman for many years out of marriage and who took opium. But much of what she says about the business of translating is very much to the point — though one is not obliged to agree with her on everything. Many thanks to our American corresp0ndent, Roger Hunt Carroll, for bringing this Introduction to my attention.

“To translate poetry into prose, no matter how faithfully and even subtly the words are reproduced, is to betray the poem. To translate formal stanzas into free verse, free verse into rhymed couplets, is to fail the foreign poet in an important way. With most poets, the shape of the poem is not an extraneous attribute of it: the poem could not conceivably have been written in an y other form. When the image of the poem first rises before the suddenly quieted and intensely agitated person who is to write it, its shadowy bulk is already dimly outlined; it is rhymed or unrhymed; it is trimeter, tetrameter, or pentameter; it is free verse, a sonnet, an epic, an ode, a five-act play. To many poets the physical character of their poem, its rhythm, its rhyme, its music, the way it looks on the page, is quite as important as the thing they wish to say; to some it is vastly more important.
(…) When George Dillon wrote me that he was translating some of the Fleurs du Mal into English verse, and that he was using in every instance the meter and form used by Baudelaire in the original poem, I was very much interested; this had always seemed to me the only way to go about such a task. It is true that the translator, who is hard put to it enough in any case to transpose a poem from one language into another without strangling it in the process, here takes upon himself an added burden; but he is more than rewarded when he finds that his translation, when read aloud directly after the original, echoes the original, that it is still, in some miraculous way, the same poem, although its words are in a different language. The poetry has been pretty roughly handled, possibly, but its anatomy at least is still intact.
(…)   Poetry should not, and indeed cannot properly be translated except by poets. But there is more to it than that; it is as complicated as a blood-transfusion. It is doubtful if any English poet could translate equally well the poems of Pierre de Ronsard, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset and Charles Baudelaire. It is quite conceivable that William Wordsworth could have made an excellent translation of the poems of Victory Hugo; but one drop of the blood of Wordsworth in the veins of Baudelaire would have meant instant death. Baudelaire himself was so eminently fitted to translate the works of Poe that one feels sometimes when reading the translation that Edgar Poe wrote his own stories both in English and French, and one is not sure in which language one prefers them. But Baudelaire in his imitation of Longfellow was not so successful. Quite apart from the question of meter, a natural, unbridgeable gulf existed between the minds and the tastes of the French and American poets.
(…) It is impossible to make a good translation of a poet of whom one disapproves. To excuse him or to condemn him is, for the translator, equally impertinent and equally fatal. The poem is the thing. Is it interesting ? — is it beautiful? — is it sublime? Then it was written by nobody. It exists by itself. “

from Introduction to the Dillon/Millay translation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1936)



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