Paris Spleen

by Charles Baudelaire, Louise Varèse (Translator)

Overview

One of the founding texts of literary modernism.

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, Paris Spleen 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811200073
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/17/1970
Series:	New Directions Paperbook , #294
Pages:	118
Sales rank:	369,637
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) is most famous for his groundbreaking collection of verse The Flowers of Evil, but his essays, translations, and prose poems have been equally influential.

Louise Varèse was an American biographer and translator of French. She is known for her translations of Stendhal, Proust, Georges Simenon, Julien Gracq, St.-John Perse and Arthur Rimbaud.

Editorial Reviews

"He possessed, as it were, a profound intuition of the obstinate, amorphous contingency which is life..."

Jean-Paul Sartre

"The cadenced prose beats in perfect time with the pulse of the slumbering city, where only the strange is awake. The atmosphere is old, dirty, often sordid, and yet, somehow, glorious.... The translation is almost perfect."

Chicago Tribune - John Randolph

"The king of poets, a true God." - Arthur Rimbaud

"Sorrell has often dared to mirror more exactly than most previous translators Baudelaire's elaborate syntax. He has a point here, and his accurate versions give the reader a heady experience of the originals." - TLS

From the Publisher