Traduit de l'américain from Poe to the Série Noire: Baudelaire's greatest hoax?

This article reviews the new light shed in 1952 on Charles Baudelaire's translation and critical analysis of Edgar Allan Poe by W.T. Bandy, which exposed the French poet's plagiarism of American sources. Our aim here is to suggest that Baudelaire's Poe project, with its wilful problematisation of originality and translation, author and translator, preempts Marcel Duhamel's own translation project of 1945, the Série Noire. We compare these two Parisian translation projects as two major hoaxes of French literature and two foundational stages in the development of French crime fiction. Indeed, we suggest that Baudelaire's original translation praxis is an act of anticipatory plagiarism (of Duhamel's praxis) just as he himself considered Poe's poetry to be anticipatory plagiarism of his own work.