Managing imitation: Translation and Baudelaire's art criticism

This article examines in the role of the concept of translation in Baudelaire's art criticism. By focusing on those aspects of Baudelaire's Salon writings that privilege originality and imagination in the arts, the role of imitation in his aesthetic theory has been largely overlooked or necessarily dismissed. I argue that Baudelaire uses the notion of translation in his art critical writings as part of a more general strategy to rid the art he admired of any traces of imitation. At the same time, translation allows Baudelaire covertly to accept the very practice of imitation in the arts that he condemns.