The work of Charles Baudelaire has been available to readers of Chinese for almost a century, serving as an important touchstone from May 4 to the “misty poets” and beyond. The list of writers who seriously engaged with Baudelaire's work (above all Les fleurs du mal [1857] and the Petits poèmes en prose [1869]) reads like a Who's Who of modern Chinese letters, including Zhou Zuoren, Lu Xun, Li Jinfa, Dai Wangshu, Wen Yiduo, Ai Qing, Duo Duo, and Bei Dao.

By many accounts the seminal figure of European modern poetry, Baudelaire has become a somewhat mythical figure, even a caricature, attached, sometimes as if by free association, to labels as diverse as Symbolism, decadence, Satanism, aestheticism, and not least modernity—all by authors for and against any or all of the above. Such is the case even in Baudelaire's native France; how much more so the case, then, when linguistic, cultural, and geographic distance allow for greater misreadings but also perhaps a freer play of the imagination. Indeed, Baudelaire became known in China though various mediations: sometimes as a briefly referenced literary myth, sometimes read in the original French, sometimes in translations (of varying quality—and qualities: ranging from Classical Chinese to free verse). At different historical moments critics and fellow poets have, with varying degrees of justification, identified Baudelaire with radical individualism and Catholicism, reaction and revolt against social injustice, formal perfection and the shattering of conventions. The waters of Baudelaire's reception are murky, occasionally deep, but always teeming with life, including, one might hope, some as-yet unidentified species. The potential of a topic such as Baudelaire's reception in China is, then, great, and it is exciting to see the topic taken up in two recent books, Gloria Bien's Baudelaire in China and Yang Yuping's Baudelaire et la poésie Chinoise souterraine au temps de la Révolution Culturelle.

Bien's book touches at least briefly on the full historical range of Baudelaire's reception, pursuing no particular thesis beyond establishing the duration and breadth of the French poet's influence or rumors thereof. The book's first part provides a broad contextual framework through chapters discussing possible similarities between Baudelaire's verse and a number of Classical Chinese poets, providing an overview of Baudelaire's reception by Chinese literary writers, and then recounting the history of Chinese translations of the poet and finally his critical reception. The second part of the book consists of four chapters exploring Baudelaire's association with and possible influence on a large number of Chinese writers, largely grouped in terms of such broad aesthetic categories as decadence and Symbolism.

As this brief overview might suggest, Bien's approach prioritizes information over interpretation. Almost any reader will be sure to learn something from this wide-ranging and thoroughly researched study, which should serve as a useful reference for many years to come. Indeed, Bien cites so extensively from the poets she considers, often including the Chinese text, that the book constitutes a kind of mini-anthology of Baudelairean poetry in Chinese, including an appendix collecting twenty-one different Chinese translations of what is perhaps Baudelaire's most famous poem, “Correspondances”—a small treasure for anyone interested in Chinese translation. The downside of this approach, however, is that the organization and ultimately the ideas of the book rely on broad and often weak literary-historiographic categories whose status is barely examined. Asking whether a given poet was a “decadent” or a “symbolist” will strike many contemporary readers as an unproductive question, at least without some explanation of why one would want to stick with the vocabulary that framed Baudelaire's earliest reception in China (and many other places as well). The single passing reference to Walter Benjamin indicates the extent to which the book is uninterested not only in the history of Baudelaire criticism, but any number of different scholarly discourses that might have brought out the broader significance, if not urgency, of this fascinating subject: translation studies, postcolonial theory, or current debates about “world literature,” to name just a few.

Yang Yuping's study also shows a similar lack of interest in the history of Baudelaire criticism or indeed any methodologies beyond literary-historical approaches to modern Chinese literature. However, Yang's book has a much sharper historical focus, corresponding to its argument: that Baudelaire was a frequent reference for unofficial, “subterranean” poetry in China from the late 1950s through the 1960s, that is, for many of the then-young men who are now the elder statesmen of contemporary Chinese poetry. Following a brief but rich overview of Baudelaire's pre-1949 reception, Yang focuses on the crucial coincidence of the centenary of Les fleurs du mal and the launch of the One Hundred Flowers campaign in 1957. In July of that year, the journal Translation (译文) published a special issue on Baudelaire, which included articles by French Surrealist Louis Aragon and the Soviet critic Vilgelm Venyaminovich Levik, along with nine translations by the poet Chen Jingrong, translations that would in important respects constitute the Baudelairean corpus for the underground poets.

Much of the rest of the book centers on poets associated with Baiyangdian: first Shi Zhi, a “disciple” of Baudelaire, that is, of the translations of Chen Jingrong. The book's longest chapter reconstructs the Baudelairean exchanges amongst “the three musketeers” of Baiyangdian: Mang Ke (Jiang Shiwei), Gen Zi (Yue Zhong), and Duo Duo (Li Shizheng), each of whom was marked by their encounter with the French poet in different ways. This is followed by an entire chapter on Bei Dao and one on the Shanghai poets Zhu Yulin and Chen Jianhua in the 1960s.

As with Bien's work, the numerous citations add up to a sort-of anthology; for example, Yang cites all ninety-seven lines of Gen Zi's “March and the End of the World” in both the original Chinese and in French translation. While some of the juxtapositions meant to demonstrate Baudelaire's influence become a bit too broad and thematic (melancholy, the city), many textual connections are precisely demonstrated. Moreover, Yang makes a number of convincing arguments about the ways in which well-known Baudelairean themes and tropes were refunctionalized into a kind of Aesopian language: fallen nature a critique of the official virtues of the countryside, Baudelaire's famous sunsets becoming a commentary on Mao. After reading Yang's study, it would be hard to take seriously charges of Chinese Baudelaires as derivative, belated, or “decadent.” Yang also resists the temptation to tell this story as one of a great Western genius awakening the poets of an oppressed East. While Baudelaire's mid-century reception is presented as part of a broader underground reaffirmation of subjectivity and the aesthetic strongly associated with the “silent revolution” (Bei Dao) of translating Western poets (García Lorca, Eliot, and Tsvetaeva are referenced a number of times), Yang also emphasizes that this worked in concert with a rediscovery of both classical poetry and Chinese modernism from the 1920s to the 1940s.