The Flowers of Evil, which T.S. Eliot called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language, shocked the literary world of nineteenth century France with its outspoken portrayal of lesbian love, its linking of sexuality and death, its unremitting irony, and its unflinching celebration of the seamy side of urban life. Including the French texts and comprehensive explanatory notes to the poems, this extraordinary body of love poems restores the six poems originally banned in 1857, revealing the richness and variety of the collection....

Controversial book of verse, first published in 1857, presented in a handsome dual-language edition, together with superb selection of great French poet’s other works: prose poems from "Spleen of Paris," critical essays on art, music and literature, as well as personal letters. Line-by-line English translation, with original French text on facing page.
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Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, "The Flowers of Evil": the city and its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and mortality, and the liberation provided by the sensual delights of intoxication, art and women. Published posthumously in 1869, "The Spleen of Paris" was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry - a format which Baudelaire saw as particularly suited for expressing the feelings of uncertainty, flux and freedom of his age - and one of the founding texts of literary modernism....

Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) was one of the greatest French poets of the 19th century. Charles Baudelaire, poète maudit, the self-styled Satanic man whose collection THE FLOWERS OF EVIL (Les Fleurs du Mal) is marked by paeans to sexual degradation such as The Litanies Of Satan and Metamorphosis Of The Vampire . Baudelaire himself revelled in a life of filth, and kept as his poetic muse a diseased mulatto prostitute. THE FLOWERS OF EVIL is now presented in a brand new translation that vividly brings Baudelaire s masterpiece to life for the new millennium. This volume also includes key texts from Baudelaire s ARTIFICIAL PARADISE, his notorious examination of the effects of intoxication by alcohol and psychotropic drugs. In On Wine And Hashish and The Poem Of Hashish , Baudelaire brilliantly evokes the agony and ecstasy of addiction. With an introductory essay by Guillaume Apollinaire, published for the first time in English. Cover illustration by Odilon Redon. Solar Nocturnal presents classic texts by key forerunners of modernism. One of the founders of Modernism, an early champion of Cubism, and inventor of the term Surrealist. Critic, poet, novelist, theorist, pornographer. Russell Dent lives in Brighton, UK, and has previously translated he works of Maurice Rollinat....

This bold new translation with facing French text restores once banned poems to their original places and reveals the full richness and variety of the collection. This book is intended for general readers interested in Baudelaire, French poetry and 19th-century French culture. Students of Baudelaire, French literature....

The poetic masterpiece of the great nineteenth-century writer Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil is one of the most frequently read and studied works in the French language. In this compelling new translation of Baudelaire's most famous collection, Keith Waldrop recasts the poet's original French alexandrines and other poetic arrangements into versets, a form that hovers between poetry and prose. Maintaining Baudelaire's complex view of sound and structure, Waldrop's translation mirrors the intricacy of the original without attempting to replicate its inimitable verse. The result is a powerful new re-imagining, one that is, almost paradoxically, closer to Baudelaire's own poetry than any previous English translation. Including the six poems banned from the first edition, this Flowers of Evil preserves the complexity, eloquence, and dark humor of its author. Brought here to new life, it is hypnotic, frank, and forceful....

Between 1855 and his death in 1867, Charles Baudelaire inaugurated a new--and in his own words "dangerous"--hybrid form in a series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen. Important and provocative, these fifty poems take the reader on a tour of 1850s Paris, through gleaming cafes and filthy side streets, revealing a metropolis on the eve of great change. In its deliberate fragmentation and merging of the lyrical with the sardonic, Le Spleen de Paris may be regarded as one of the earliest and most successful examples of a specifically urban writing, the textual equivalent of the city scenes of the Impressionists. In this compelling new translation, Keith Waldrop delivers the companion to his innovative translation of The Flowers of Evil. Here, Waldrop's perfectly modulated mix releases the music, intensity, and dissonance in Baudelaire's prose. The result is a powerful new re-imagining that is closer to Baudelaire's own poetry than any previous English translation....

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