'The Flowers of Evil' by Charles Baudelaire
Time to put poetry forward! A few days ago, we received this beautigul glowing cover. Alma Books have recently published a new English version of French poet Charles Baudelaire's most famous work, The Flowers of Evil, translated by Anthony Mortimer.
'Judicially condemned in 1857 as offensive to public morality, The Flowers of Evil is now regarded as the most influential volume of poetry published in the nineteenth century. Torn between intense sensuality and profound spiritual yearning, racked by debt and disease, Baudelaire transformed his own experience of Parisian life into a work of universal significance. With his unflinching examination of the dark aspects and unconventional manifestations of sexuality, his pioneering portrayal of life in a great metropolis and his daring combination of the lyrical and the prosaic, Baudelaire inaugurated a new epoch in poetry and created a founding text of modernism.'
As Nicholas Lezard points out in this article for The Guardian, 'translating Baudelaire is probably about as difficult as it gets. Not only do you have to keep as closely as is practical to the original verse forms – and Baudelaire was a master of these, toying with the classical structures of French verse, making it somehow both precise and fluid at the same time – you have to try to bring out his gift for nuance in the vocabulary." And The Flowers of Evils have been translated beofre by several poets such as George Dillion, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jacques Leclercq, Stefan George, William F. Aggeler. Anthony Mortimer - already praised for his virtuoso translations of Petrarch, Dante and Villon - took the challenge nevertheless, and succeeded in producing a new version that 'not only respects the sense and the form of the original French, but also makes powerful English poetry in its own right.'
What is all the more enjoyable about this book, is its "dual- text" lay out: the French poem faces its English translation. To quote Nicholas Lezard once more, 'now you have much less excuse not to read Baudelaire than before, for this translation not only makes one of the best stabs yet at making him accessible to the monolingual English speaker, but comes with the original on the facing pages, so that even if all you have is school French, you can get some idea of what the poetry is really like.'
Here is one poem we love at FrenchBooksUK, and wanted to share with you in both the original and Anthony Mortimer's translation:
