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Tier 2 — Wallaert, "Writing foreign: the paradoxes of Baudelaire's neologizing strategies in his translations of Poe" (2012)

The project's second Tier 2 source (after S-venuti-invisibility), and the first that anchors a claim about what a translator actually did across a body of work, rather than about reception or theory. It was read to keep one claim on A-baudelaire-chat-noir — that Baudelaire compensates for a close pair's flattening by coining — from resting on the lead agent's reading of a single story.

Identity

Ineke Wallaert, "Writing foreign: the paradoxes of Baudelaire's neologizing strategies in his translations of Poe," Palimpsestes, vol. 25 (2012), pp. 69–92.

Provenance & access route

Read via the open-access edition on OpenEdition Journals (https://journals.openedition.org/palimpsestes/1049?lang=en), WebFetch, 2026-07-24 (S013). Consultation logged in wiki/base/consulted.md. The article is in copyright; this page carries a summary in the project's own words plus two brief attributed phrases, per charter §7.

Summary in the project's own words

Baudelaire's reputation is for close, even literal fidelity to Poe. Wallaert tests that against his handling of lexical invention specifically, and finds the practice pulls in two directions at once.

Going in, he standardises. Several of Poe's own coinages — words Poe made up, whose oddity does work in the English — come out as ordinary French: metaphysicianism → sciences métaphysiques (Wallaert notes the irony is lost), busy-bodyism → an explanatory phrase, bugaboo → the culturally domesticated croque-mitaine. Where Poe is lexically strange, Baudelaire is often lexically normal.

Coming out, he invents. Elsewhere Baudelaire produces French neologisms of his own: some as structural calques of Poe's forms (unincorporate → incorporellement; imparticularity → imparticularité; solidiformes), and — the striking category — some spontaneously, where Poe's text has nothing unusual at all: transmondain, crépusculeux for a plain "dusky," réceptibilité for a standard "susceptibility," spectrale, which he later reuses in Les Fleurs du Mal.

Wallaert's reading of the paradox is that the standardisations are domesticating — removing what might register as foreign — while the spontaneous coinages are a foreignising impulse enacted through lexical creation, "writing foreign" by making the target language strange on the translator's own initiative rather than the author's. The net effect she describes as an appropriation: Baudelaire's choices amount to "an appropriation of the source text, an appropriation which remains hidden behind a smokescreen of apparent literalness." He is, in her phrase, "not as literal a translator as he may appear at first sight," and the translation work functioned for him as a rehearsal ground for his own poetic vocabulary.

What it can ground

• That Baudelaire's coining is a documented, repeated method, not an artefact of one story. This is the specific job it does for A-baudelaire-chat-noir: the instances found there (hyperdiabolique, antihumain, the added figure affreuse harmonie, intraduisible for "unutterable") are fresh cases of a pattern established independently, so the anchor's claim about compensation-by-coinage is anchored rather than internal-only.
• That a translator can be lexically inventive and lexically flattening in the same text, which is a further instance of the within-class inconsistency the project has now seen in three precedent anchors (claim C4, TH-20260724-translation-distance-axes).
• That the domestication↔foreignisation pair, applied to a real translator's corpus, does not resolve into a position. Wallaert's translator is domesticating and foreignising simultaneously, by different mechanisms, in the same volumes. This is independent scholarly support for the project's standing complaint (S-venuti-invisibility, ES-20260724-fluency-and-foreignness) that the binary is too coarse — and it is a different route to that complaint than the project's own (which came from the Botchan pun).
• A caution the project should carry: stylistic compensation in a close pair is not free. Wallaert reads the coinages as appropriation hidden behind apparent literalness. Where A-baudelaire-chat-noir describes coining as the near pair's repair for cognate flattening, this source insists that the repair is also a re-authoring.

What it cannot ground

• Nothing about English→French in general. It is about one translator and one source author.
• No evaluation. Wallaert describes and interprets; she is not ranking Baudelaire against other translators of Poe, and this page must not be cited as saying his versions are good or bad.
• It does not verify this project's instances. The four coinages listed on the anchor page were found by the lead agent in the stored text; Wallaert does not discuss "Le Chat noir" among the examples retrieved. The pattern is hers; the instances are the project's and remain internal-judgment-only at the instance level.
• Single-reading caveat. The article was read once, in its open-access web edition, and summarised; page-level citation beyond the bibliographic range above is not available from that reading.