Baudelaire’s ‘Une Charogne’

Abstract

In the late 1980s I taught Baudelaire’s ‘Une Charogne’ to a class of first-year students using the Richard Howard translation of Les Fleurs du mal (1982). Howard was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the institution (one of them, anyway) where I was un-gainfully employed: The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a progressive professional college for would-be artists, architects, and engineers located in the neighbourhood of New York City formerly known as the Lower East Side but now called, for reasons of real estate gentrification, the East Village. The year was likely 1987 or soon thereafter because 1987 was the year the Pet Shop Boys released their synth-pop hit ‘I Want a Dog’. The dog the Pet Shop Boys wanted was a Chihuahua and Richard Howard had a little dog that he sometimes carried around with him, perhaps so that when he got back to his small flat, he could hear somebody bark (as the song goes). Naturally, whenever Howard would sit outside my office, I would play ‘I Want a Dog’ at very high volume on a boom box (it was the ’80s, after all).