The Flowers of Evil

by Charles Baudelaire

Overview

Loneliness, temptation, the fragility of man in a soulless new age . . . The controversial, banned masterpiece from the nineteenth-century French poet.
 
Sparking scandal in France, declared “an outrage to public morals” and “an offense to religious morals” by the Ministry of the Interior, The Flowers of Evil plunged Charles Baudelaire into a controversy that his public image never quite overcame. Nevertheless, the collection has since been lauded as a landmark in literary history and its writer extolled as the first modern poet.
 
With themes of love, world-weariness, beauty, and death, The Flowers of Evil juxtaposes the sublime with the commonplace. In the section titled “Parisian Scenes” are some of Baudelaire’s greatest poems—“The Swan,” “The Little Old Women,” and “The Seven Old Men”—which give readers an unsentimental view of the City of Light and of a bleak urban existence. As the Wall Street Journal proclaimed, “There is a sense in these angry, eructating late fragments of a man fully releasing himself to what he called ‘the joy of downward descent.’ And where Baudelaire went, modernity tended to follow.”
 
“The essence of a genius.” —The Guardian
 
“The profound originality of Charles Baudelaire is to represent powerfully and essentially modern man.” —Paul Verlaine

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504081092
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	11/29/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	73
File size:	922 KB

About the Author

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist and art critic. His poems exhibit mastery in the handling of rhyme and rhythm, contain an exoticism inherited from Romantics, but are based on observations of real life. His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrializing Paris during the mid-nineteenth century. Baudelaire’s highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé, among many others. He is credited as the first Modernist and believed to have coined the term modernity (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

The modern literary spirit was born out of the measured angles so carefully calculated by Laclos. He was the first element discovered by Baudelaire, who was a refined and reasonable explorer from a privileged background, but whose views on modern life contained a particular madness.
Laclos delighted in inspiring the corrupt bubbles that rose from the strange and rich literary mud of the Revolution. Like Diderot, Laclos was the intellectual son of Richardson and Rousseau, and his work was continued by Sade, Restif, Nerciat - some of the most notable philosophical storytellers of the late 18th century. Most of them, in fact, contained the seeds of the modern spirit, and they were poised to create a triumphant new era for arts and letters.
During this nauseating and often brilliant era of Revolution, Baudelaire mingled his spiritualistic poison with the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, a strange American, who had composed, in the poetic field, work which was as disturbing and as marvellous as the work of Laclos.
Baudelaire then is the son of Laclos and Poe. One can easily untangle the influence that each exerted on Baudelaire's prophetic mind and on his work, both so full of originality. As of this year, 1917, when his work enters the public domain, we can not only place him in the front rank of the great French poets, but also award him a place alongside the greatest of universal poets.
The evidence for the influence of the cynical writers of the Revolution on Les Fleurs du Mal can be seen everywhere in Baudelaire's correspondence and in his notes. When he decided to translate and adapt Poe's works, strangely, he found a higher lyricism and moral feeling than he had thought was present in the writings of the marvellous Baltimore drunkard and his prohibited readings.
In the novelists of the Revolution, he had discovered the importance of the question of sex.
From the Anglo-Saxons of the same era, such as de Quincey and Poe, Baudelaire had learned that there were artificial paradises. Their methodical exploration - supported by Reason, the revolutionary goddess - enabled him to reach the lyrical heights towards which the mad American predicants had directed Poe, their contemporary. But Reason blinded him, and he abandoned it as soon as he had reached the heights.
Baudelaire then is the son of Laclos and Edgar Allan Poe, but a son who is blind and insane...

Table of Contents

Translator's Introduction
The Flowers of Evil
Dedication
To the Reader
Spleen and Ideal
Benediction
The Albatross
Elevation
Correspondences
"I like to bring to mind . . ."
Beacon Lights
Sick Muse
Mercenary Muse
The Bad Monk
The Enemy
Bad Luck
The Life Before
Gypsy Travelers
Man and Sea
Don Juan in Hell
Pride Punished
Beauty
The Ideal
Giantess
The Mask
Hymn to Beauty
Exotic Perfume
Hair
"I adore you . . ."
"You would take the whole universe . . ."
Sed Non Satiata
"In her flowing pearly garments . . ."
Dancing Serpent
Carrion
De Profundis Clamavi
Vampire
"One night while I lay . . ."
Posthumous Remorse
The Cat
Duel
The Balcony
The Possessed
A Phantom
"I give you these verses . . ."
Semper Eadem
Altogether
"What will you say this evening . . ."
Living Torch
Reversibility
Confession
Spiritual Dawn
Evening's Harmony
Flask
Poison
l Sky in Confusion
Cat
The Fine-looking Ship
Invitation to the Voyage
The Irreparable
Conversation
Autumn Song
To a Madonna
Afternoon Song
Sisina
Franciscæ Meæ Laudes
To a Creole Lady
Moesta et Errabunda
Revenant
Autumn Sonnet
The Sorrowing Moon
Cats
Owls
The Pipe
Music
Burial
A Fantasy Print
Dead Man Glad
The Vessel of Hate
The Cracked Bell
Spleen
Spleen
Spleen
Spleen
Obsession
The Taste for Nothing
Alchemy of Pain
Sympathetic Horror
Heautontimoroumenos
Beyond Remedy
The Clock
Parisian Scenes
Landscape
The Sun
To a Redheaded Beggar Girl
The Swan
The Seven Old Men
The Little Old Women
The Blind
To a Woman Passing By
The Skeleton Laborer
Evening Twilight
Gambling
Danse Macabre
Love of a Lie
"I have not forgotten . . ."
"The big-hearted servant . . ."
Fog, Rain
Paris Dream
Morning Twilight
Wine
The Soul of the Wine
The Ragpicker's Wine
The Assassin's Wine
The Wine of the Solitary
The Wine of Lovers
Flowers of Evil
Destruction
A Martyr
Women Damned
The Two Good Sisters
The Fountain of Blood
Allegory
His Beatrice
A Voyage to Cythera
Love and the Skull
Revolt
Saint Peter's Denial
Abel and Cain
Litanies of Satan
Death
The Death of Lovers
Death of the Poor
The Death of Artists
End of Day
Dream of a Curious Character
The Voyage
The Banned Poems
Lesbos
Women Damned
Lethe
To Her, Too Merry
The Jewels
Metamorphoses of the Vampire

What People are Saying About This

Norma Cole

"This is the Baudelaire translation for our time--and for all time. Relentlessly straightforward, surprisingly succinct, hilarious and horrifying as they are, these poems have never been as readable in English."
— Norma Cole, author of Spinoza in Her Youth

Cole Swensen

“There are numerous translations of Les Fleurs du Mal in print, but none even approach Waldrop’s-he alone captures the speed and verve of the real Baudelaire.”

From the Publisher

"This is the Baudelaire translation for our time—and for all time. Relentlessly straightforward, surprisingly succinct, hilarious and horrifying as they are, these poems have never been as readable in English."—Norma Cole, author of Spinoza in Her Youth

"There are numerous translations of Les Fleurs du Mal in print, but none even approach Waldrop's-he alone captures the speed and verve of the real Baudelaire.""—Cole Swensen, Iowa Writers' Workshop

"This is the Baudelaire translation for our time—and for all time. Relentlessly straightforward, surprisingly succinct, hilarious and horrifying as they are, these poems have never been as readable in English."—Norma Cole, author of Spinoza in Her Youth

Editorial Reviews

"Thus the delight and curiosity of Keith Waldrop's new translation. It's close to plain prose: 'versets,' he calls them, paragraphs divided where Baudelaire's stanza's break. It's by no means the first prose translation, but it's the most charming: I don't recall another version, verse or prose, that slips so easily into the comradely 'we.'"—The New York Times Book Review

"Waldrop's translations soar...perhaps getting closer to Baudelaire's rich tone than any other English translation."—Chicago Review

"Thus the delight and curiosity of Keith Waldrop's new translation. It's close to plain prose: 'versets,' he calls them, paragraphs divided where Baudelaire's stanza's break. It's by no means the first prose translation, but it's the most charming: I don't recall another version, verse or prose, that slips so easily into the comradely 'we.'"—The New York Times Book Review

"The task of the translator...is to reconcile the strengths of the poet with his new surroundings, setting him in flight with wings that do not impede his walk. In part from the landing on versets, but more particularly from his deftness in English and the depth of his understanding of Baudelaire, Keith Waldrop has created a Flowers of Evil that, one gesture, can come to terms with the new needs of poetry readers in English and the foreignness of the language of Les Fleurs du mal."—Rain Taxi

"This is the Baudelaire translation for our time—and for all time. Relentlessly straightforward, surprisingly succinct, hilarious and horrifying as they are, these poems have never been as readable in English."—Norma Cole, author of Spinoza in Her Youth

"There are numerous translations of Les Fleurs du Mal in print, but none even approach Waldrop's-he alone captures the speed and verve of the real Baudelaire.""—Cole Swensen, Iowa Writers' Workshop

"This is the Baudelaire translation for our time—and for all time. Relentlessly straightforward, surprisingly succinct, hilarious and horrifying as they are, these poems have never been as readable in English."—Norma Cole, author of Spinoza in Her Youth

From the Publisher

Mid-nineteenth-century poet and translator Baudelaire is one of the great progenitors of modern poetry. Jonathan Keeble's excellent narration reminds us just how radical this work was and why parts of it were banned in France as late as 1949. Keeble restrains some of the passionate excesses that are part of Baudelaire's radicalism, preserving the contrasts that let the heights of passion stand out. Passion can be low-key as well, and Keeble shows he understands that in the way he delivers a body of work ranging in subject from Satan to cats. A real oversight is the lack of credit on the cover to the translator, James McGowan, who did a fine job. D.M.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile