The Influence of Form

I have written about my approach to translation from one language to another here. Recently, it occurred to me that recasting a poem from one form to another in the same language is also a form of translation. Let me illustrate.

In April of this year, I posted my translation of the introduction to Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. The fourth stanza reads as follows:

The Devil holds our puppet strings,
He leads us through the murk and mire
Nearer to Eternal Fire
And makes us like disgusting things...