It has often been claimed that there exists a chasm between the theory and practice of translation. As Douglas Robinson has alleged in his book The Translator's Turn, translators seem to do mainly "what feels right" without paying much heed to theoretical injunctions. Theoreticians of translation, on the other hand, tend to locate their argument in an abstract realm that appears removed from the concrete task of translating a given text. Few people remember, for example, that Walter Benjamin's famous essay on the task of the translator was written as the preface to his translation of Baudelaire's "Tableaux Parisiens," since the author never descends from his lofty theoretical heights to address the specific problem of how to render Baudelaire's poetry in German. Using his own translations of Baudelaire as a springboard, Clive Scott aims to bridge the gap between translation theory and practice by theorizing his own "apprenticeship," as he calls it, in re-imagining Baudelaire in English.