From the book
Intimate Journals
Charles Baudelaire · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordPoncif brings together a reproducible design and a conventional formula.
- In Intimate JournalsFusées XX announces that creating a cliché is genius, then converts the judgment into a personal obligation.
- In this editionThe 2026 English chooses ‘cliché’ and uses translator's note 372 to recover the technical drawing-template sense of poncif.
- A place to readCréer un poncif, c’est le génie.
Meaning
Poncif brings together a reproducible design and a conventional formula. Its visual sense is a drawing prepared so that its outline can be transferred; its figurative sense includes the commonplace or cliché. The paradox of creating a poncif depends on both originality and repeatability: someone must first produce what later users find ready-made.
The neighbouring concetto points toward an ingenious turn or conceit. Commonplace and ingenuity need not be enemies if a striking invention becomes a durable form. But the notebook does not simply authorize copying existing formulas. Its imperative is to create one.
Use in the book
Fusées XX announces that creating a cliché is genius, then converts the judgment into a personal obligation. The distinction between invention and repetition is easy to miss in English, where cliché usually names only the exhausted result. The fragment values the capacity to establish a pattern strong enough to circulate beyond its first occasion.
Fusées I supplies another account of shared language: common expressions have an immense depth of thought, like holes dug by generations of ants. Their ordinariness is collective labour, not necessarily spiritual emptiness. The image asks the writer to excavate inherited speech rather than judge it solely by freshness of surface. Mon cœur mis à nu CXIII likewise places the grand style beside the claim that nothing is more beautiful than the commonplace.
This does not contradict every attack on formula. The military metaphors catalogued in Mon cœur mis à nu LXI–LXIII23 expose conformity disguised as boldness: literary fighters speak in an army's ready-made idiom while imagining themselves independent. The difference is not simply old versus new language. It concerns whether a form can still organize perception or has become a social costume. Fusées XX's adjacent reminders about Rabbe's tone, the kept-woman tone and the eternal tone similarly treat manner as something to hear, test and transform, not a generic badge of originality.
Places to read
- Fusées XXCréer un poncif, c’est le génie. Je dois créer un poncif. — The maxim becomes a personal task of invention.
- Fusées XXLe concetto est un chef-d’œuvre. — Ingenuity sits beside the repeatable formula rather than excluding it.
- Fusées Itrous creusés par des générations de fourmis — Common speech is imagined as the product of accumulated labour.
- Mon cœur mis à nu CXIIIrien de plus beau que le lieu commun — The later note gives the commonplace a place in grand style.
Translation in this edition
The 2026 English chooses ‘cliché’ and uses translator's note 372 to recover the technical drawing-template sense of poncif. That division is readable but makes the sentence initially more paradoxical than French readers aware of the visual meaning may find it. Concetto remains in Italian, while ‘commonplace’ renders lieu commun elsewhere. These should be read as a connected problem of form and reuse, not standardized into a single pejorative word.
Source note
The Académie française’s dictionary records the perforated transferable drawing and the figurative conventional model under poncif: Académie française dictionary. This lexical range supports the distinction between inventing a reusable form and merely repeating an exhausted formula.