A wondrous terrain ringed by vines of unruly syntax and dotted with the fruit of words refusing domestication by any single tongue.  
        —Mia You

Cyclamen / Poems After Baudelaire 
Alix Chauvet

Tenement Press / Yellowjacket 20
978-1-917304-09-2 / 149pp / £17.50.

A suite of unfaithful translations /
transversions of works drawn from 
Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal /
Flowers of Evil / A bunch of flowers 
in decay, pressed and frayed / 
‘A flock of pockmarked words.’

I have had a gullible and complicit admiration for Baudelaire since the day I was introduced to him; namely, the day I learned the word ‘albatross.’ I had been asked to memorise a poem of the same name and illustrate it in a school notebook. I drew the bird with a strong line in the centre of a blank page turned blue, its giant wings spread out, as I had also just been told that they prevented it from walking. Making the ‘prince of clouds’ mine through my strokes enmeshed me to the poet from the age of seven on. 
        This conviction—both my understanding Baudelaire and my being seen by him—followed me into my adolescence when I read the entirety of Les Fleurs du mal / The Flowers of Evil for the first time. I felt attracted to the violence of the collection; a ferocity that resonated with the intensity of those years of inner turmoil. Despite the recurrent obscenities against women, I sided with the ‘reader’—with the ‘brother,’ the ‘fellow man’—to whom the work is addressed. I was manifestly suffering from a literary Stockholm syndrome, forgiving the author for every one of his crudities, recognising each element of beauty within them, and padding them out with talismanic thinking to undermine the wound. 
        Translating Baudelaire’s oeuvre responds to a need to explore this connivance. I want to reach the hanging point at which I simultaneously encounter familiarity and alienation by immersing myself in his poems. I share Lisa Robertson’s intuition that the substance of Les Fleurs du mal is feminine—a ‘bildungsroman in the feminine’—in that by reading its thorny passages and filling them with my own voice, I experience a disarming appropriation. I envision my rewritings as a practice of feminine freedom, in which I hold the transgressive foil of language instead of enduring its blade in silence. 
        To begin with the translation of the ‘Spleen’ series, amongst all others, is fortuitous. Their echo of the misty views of an autumnal Amsterdam last October certainly prompted such a step. In hindsight, the elusive nature of the Anglicism ‘spleen’ gives further credence to this occurence. The term bears new meanings in its Baudelairian usage, so that translating it back into English involves a shift in signification. 
        Like a rhizome, the definition of the blood-filtering organ is reoriented towards apathy. Deep melancholy. Disgust with life. Such a displacement reveals both the kinship between languages and the transformations at play in the translation process, which has been part of my method. The latter is metonymic, introspective and intuitive, for it draws from its source more than it has, through contingent associations mixing intra- and intersemiotic features. Following Baudelaire’s lines one by one, I cast homologous sentences onto the page as with a pendulum. This throwness produces resonances and dissonances that fog up the original text as much as they reveal it.
        These cryptic correspondences to which I alone hold the key put the filiation between the source material and its translation to the test. I summon belief from the reader by playing with the nebulous open-endedness of language. Multiplying hermetic symbols, I jeopardise access to meaning, deliberately resisting narration in favour of collision and event as I write. My intention is not to be understood nor to comprehend, but to transpose the emotions and physical sensations aroused while reading Baudelaire’s verses. 
        In this regard, my method is embodied. Corseted in twelve syllable lines, my sentences mimic the Alexandrian form of the original poems, using metrics as a container, like a womb. Filled with aggression, sadness and derision, they contrast the inherent theme of death with that of birth, offering a feminist counterweight to their source, allowing me to turn my submissive collusion into an assertive sisterhood. 
        —Alix Chauvet

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A Perdu ‘Book of the Year’ 2025.





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Brick & mortar bookshops /
order via asterism.





(Praise for Cyclamen.)

Through these creative ‘translations’ of Charles Baudelaire, Alix Chauvet—artist, designer, poet—refuses fidelity in favour of flirtation: her ‘flowers of evil’ line Amsterdam’s canals, drink from the same rainclouds as Rachel Ruysch’s bewitching bouquets, sprout through peat, and are tended by a distinctly feminist and nomadic sensibility. Chauvet—akin to Olive Moore, Sean Bonney and Lisa Robertson—takes the nineteenth-century French decadent as a contemporary accomplice for aesthetic and linguistic misbehaviour. Walter Benjamin once wrote of Baudelaire that he is ‘der geheime Architekt der Moderne,’ and in Chauvet’s hands, those foundations are made porous, unbuilt into cast shadows, into ribbons, into veins streaming across the page. Accompanied by scans of the French poems and Chauvet’s shadow photography, what Cyclamen ultimately offers us is a regenerative rewilding of the English language: a wondrous terrain ringed by vines of unruly syntax and dotted with the fruit of words refusing domestication by any single tongue.  
        —Mia You

Alix Chauvet’s take on Les Fleurs du mal is clever and delicious. Her poems upend the language of Baudelaire and channel it through a feminist lens, both critical and sensual—sharp and funny—I’ve never read anything like it.
       —Nadia de Vries

Alix Chauvet turns Baudelaire inside out, riffing off flavours, associations, sound resemblances, odd lines of thought and query, hints and orts in the source that ring true and screwy, and patches together strange surreal corporeal entities... Language events that estrange the dark sentences of the French poet, tracking potential triangulations, latencies in the precincts of the textual unconscious, pilfering lines to generate lines of inquiry and surmise and a new ‘estranged soma’ of radical translation-as-new body; new work that is feminist, contemporary, sprightly and alive with speculative energies; a Baudelaire exploded by Rimbaud, Dada, Stein.
        —Adam Piette