Allegory of Translation in Baudelaire's Un Mangeur d'opium

Baudelaire's version of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater in Un mangeur d'opium demands reading as an allegory of translation. Opium-eating, which involves the ingestion of a dangerous foreign substance, operates as a metaphor for translation, which can incorporate a questionable foreign text into a national literature. Thus Baudelaire distances himself from what he sees as the opium-eater's stylistic and rhetorical excesses, even to the point of rendering De Quincey's "I" as "il" rather than "je." This rewriting of De Quincey's text reflects in extreme form Walter Benjamin's thesis that translation is an essential moment in a text's accession to the canon. (AA)