Review
La Fanfarlo...is a subtle and penetrating study...Baudelaire has, in it, analyzed with rare insight his own personality at the time of his extravagant life at the Hotel Lauzun. -- Enid Starkie
The Baudelaire who wrote this curious novella in the mid-1840s was not yet that more famous Baudelaire who would create the poems of Lesfieurs du mal; nor was he a writer with sensibilities entirely alien to those that produced the poems. La Fan/arlo-part bitter fictionalized autobiography, part parody, part ambiguous poetic exploration, and the poet's only completed work of fictional prose -is very much the work of an apprentice beginning to find his way. In terms only of plot, the story is slender enough: trying to help in acquaintance reclaim her husband from an infatuation with La Fanfarlo, the young poet Samuel Cramer himself falls in love with the exotic dancer and slides from the pursuit of his poetry into the commercialized world of advertising and politics. But this story of a poet "fallen very low" also develops hints of an early notion of the "correspondences" which inform Baudelaire's later work and make him so important to Rimbaud and Mallarm6. An eaten truffle intimates the eternal, having "the effect of many zeros after a number"; the smallness of a bedroom marks the vastness of the experience of love it contains; most importantly, the rouge and "cheap finery" the poet insists La Fanfirlo wear during lovernaking is a parodistic counterpart to something greater -a love which is "less a matter of the senses than of the intellect." The material frippery of Samuel Cramer's degradation is never really "far removed from the purest idealism." Such a portrait of the poet as young dandy both situates Baudelaire firmly in the excesses of a youthful over-ripe Romanticism and establishes the terms for a critique which surpasses such a position. This apprentice piece is thus a pivotal work.Greg Boyd's translation is the only one I've seen of La Fan/arlo -is lucid and enjoyable. Besides his Introduction and Notes, the volume also contains the French text. -- From Independent Publisher
The Baudelaire who wrote this curious novella in the mid-1840s was not yet that more famous Baudelaire who would create the poems of Lesfieurs du mal; nor was he a writer with sensibilities entirely alien to those that produced the poems. La Fan/arlo-part bitter fictionalized autobiography, part parody, part ambiguous poetic exploration, and the poet's only completed work of fictional prose -is very much the work of an apprentice beginning to find his way. In terms only of plot, the story is slender enough: trying to help in acquaintance reclaim her husband from an infatuation with La Fanfarlo, the young poet Samuel Cramer himself falls in love with the exotic dancer and slides from the pursuit of his poetry into the commercialized world of advertising and politics. But this story of a poet "fallen very low" also develops hints of an early notion of the "correspondences" which inform Baudelaire's later work and make him so important to Rimbaud and Mallarm6. An eaten truffle intimates the eternal, having "the effect of many zeros after a number"; the smallness of a bedroom marks the vastness of the experience of love it contains; most importantly, the rouge and "cheap finery" the poet insists La Fanfirlo wear during lovernaking is a parodistic counterpart to something greater -a love which is "less a matter of the senses than of the intellect." The material frippery of Samuel Cramer's degradation is never really "far removed from the purest idealism." Such a portrait of the poet as young dandy both situates Baudelaire firmly in the excesses of a youthful over-ripe Romanticism and establishes the terms for a critique which surpasses such a position. This apprentice piece is thus a pivotal work.Greg Boyd's translation is the only one I've seen of La Fan/arlo -is lucid and enjoyable. Besides his Introduction and Notes, the volume also contains the French text. -- From Independent Publisher
Language Notes
Text: English, French
