Packaging a Posy of Perversity: Eduardo Marquina’s 1905 Spanish Translation of Les Fleurs du mal

What is it about?

This article focuses on the first Spanish ('made in Spain') translation of Baudelaire's _Les Fleurs du mal_ and considers why it appeared later than translations of and from other works by Baudelaire, in contrast to what happened in many other countries and in spite of the fact that Baudelaire was known first and foremost, in Spain as elsewhere, as 'the poet of _Les Fleurs du mal_. The article also attempts to demonstrate that Spain was, contrary to what was and is believed, was not an intellectual and aesthetic backwater at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

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Why is it important?

The article, as well as challenging the uninflected assumption of the cultural peripherality of Spain during the period in question (as stated above), intentionally resists the temptation, to which some recent studies of Baudelaire's reception have succumbed, to 'fix' Baudelaire as a yardstick of aesthetic modernity in order to study response to his work as a measure of the 'backwardness' or peripherality of the milieu of reception. Studies thus conceived do not, in my view, always take sufficient account of the nuances, apparent contradictions and polarisations of response that a systematic and rigorous trawl for evidence of reception can bring to light and that, all things considered, should be taken into account in a comprehensive assessment of reception.

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