[Brian Watson]

^ I think the one you're referring to is collected in The Catbird’s Song: Prose Pieces, 1963-1995.

Added in: Just checked. There are two of them in that volume, 'Poe and the Art of Suggestion', and 'Edgar Allan Poe's Eleonora'.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Baudelaire loved Poe, and the influence of Poe on his own work is obvious. Mallarmé probably came to Poe through B.

There is a collection of Baudelaire's essays translated into English, which I have in a box somewhere, that includes a great essay on Poe. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays is the name of the book. It has been while since I read it, but I found online this synopsis of Baudelaire on Poe.

In "Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages" (Edgar Allan Poe, His Life and His Works) Baudelaire notes views that were probably influenced by de Maistre as well as brought out by Poe: belief in original sin; faith in the imagination, which Baudelaire called "la reine des facultés" (the queen of faculties); approval of the cult of Beauty and of poetry for its own sake; and hatred for progress and nature.

In 1854 and 1855 Baudelaire's first translations of Poe's writings were published in Le Pays. A meticulous translator, Baudelaire was known to hunt down English-speaking sailors for maritime vocabulary. His translations of Poe culminated in Histoires extraordinaires (1856; Tales of Mystery and Imagination), which included "Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages" as a preface; Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires (1856; New Tales of Mystery and Imagination); Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym (1858; originally published as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1838); Eureka (1863; originally published 1848); and Histoires grotesques et sérieuses (1865; originally published as Tales of Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840).

And Baudelaire's influence on modern literature is immense. Poe has a lot to do with that.

Richard, about your question on translations of American lit. in other countries, Italy's bookstores are loaded with them, including Poe. There's a particular fascination with Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, much more so than in the States, it seems to me.

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

I think it's a trend we see in many other fields too. We Europeans latch on to a few names that then become very famous...in Europe. I remember being pole-axed when I met three Americans on Lewis in 1986. Billie Holliday was on the radio. And they'd never heard of her.

Duncan

[Jerome Betts]

This tendency was delightfully and sustainedly sent up by the American W.B. Scott in his Gaetan Fignole: Pages de Journal. Gaetan, a polyvalent French writer and intellectual, finds an abandoned copy of Zane Grey's cowboy story Nevada at the Zoo and a running joke of the journal extracts becomes his reading of deep matters into the writings of the author of Riders of the Purple Sage and so on. (See Dwight Macdonald's anthology Parodies 1960.)

Andrew, "A meticulous translator, Baudelaire was known to hunt down English-speaking sailors for maritime vocabulary."
Really? Most commendable, but I have to admit that the Round the Horne overtones of Monsieur Charles doing a sort of "Hello, sailor! Show us your marline-spike!" routine somewhere in dockland gave me my laugh of the day.

John, my Cassell's New French Dictionary ,now glowing red-hot with over-use, gives " sapristi, saperlotte, saprelotte, saperlipopette (fam.) euphemisms instead of sacristi."
Make of that what you will.

I think the Goons occasionally added 'nurk!' to 'Sapristi!' for reasons best known to themselves.

[Gregory Dowling]

I'm enjoying the erratic vagaries of this thread.

Thanks, Jerome, for the information on sapristi and saperlipopette. I'm pretty sure Captain Haddock says "sapristi" (along with "mille sabords de tonnerre de Brest"). It's certainly not Italian.

Andrew's right about the extreme popularity of Edgar Lee Masters in Italy; there are an extraordinary number of editions of the Spoon River Anthology. I don't know whether it's due to Fabrizio De André's song versions of them or whether he turned them into songs because they were already so popular. In any case, I have to say I find his versions more enjoyable than the original poems. He remedied the defect Eliot found in the Anthology: "Mr Masters required a more rigid verse-form, and his epitaphs suffer from the lack of it."

[John Whitworth]

I accept correction. What was it that Blimberg said? He was the fat Italian in the French Foreign Legion (Luck of the Legion) in the middle of The Eagle. Nope. His name was Bimberg and he thought continually about food. It was Corporal Trenet, no doubt on leave from singing 'La Mer'. who said Sapristi.

[FOsen]

Originally Posted by Richard Meyer

Early on the French embraced Poe as a genius, and his influence on French literature is significant. But how much importance should be placed on the French view? After all, the French also revere the American comedian and entertainer Jerry Lewis—an excessive admiration that has always puzzled many Americans.

This gives me an idea for a poem - I'm not sure how it will go, just that the refrain will be, "Quoth the Bellboy, Haaaaaay, Laaaaaayydie!!!!"