This essay adopts a cultural rather than a descriptive approach to explore the translation strategy exhibited by Eduardo Marquina’s 1905 Spanish translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. Following a survey of the reception of Baudelaire’s work in Spain from 1857 to 1910 and its translation from the 1880s, the essay develops the hypothesis that Marquina’s transformations of the source text work to accommodate the poetological conventions of a Spanish literary system primed, from well before this first translation of the poems appeared, to react unfavourably to the verse by a critical discourse that predominantly portrayed Baudelaire’s poetry as unpalatably or counterproductively transgressive. It argues that this accommodation was achieved by stylistic strategies embodying elements of performance that function to ‘deflect’ the force of potentially contentious propositional content.