About the Book
A major work of world literature, The Flowers of Evil scandalized Baudelaire’s contemporaries and reinvented beauty in the midst of modernity. Probing the depths of the modern psyche in a voice at once caustic and vulnerable, melancholic and humorous, Baudelaire’s infamous book brings to the surface a new understanding of evil, of eroticism, and of social life through an astonishing variety of poetic forms and styles.
When it was published in 1857, six poems of the volume’s poems were banned on charges of obscenity. Baudelaire then reworked the book into a masterfully expanded version published in 1861. This new translation by acclaimed poetry scholar Nathan Brown includes the banned poems in a facing-page, dual-language edition of the definitive 1861 version, along with a major new introduction to the significance of Baudelaire’s work. Brown has carefully preserved the lineation, figurative language, punctuation, and grammatical structures of the original, finally giving us a version of The Flowers of Evil suitable for the general reader as well as scholars and teachers working in English. Recognized as the most successful translation of Baudelaire’s major work by eminent poetry critic Marjorie Perloff, this version of Baudelaire sets a new standard for fidelity to the original and sensitivity to the tone of this central work of modern literature.
About the Author :
Charles Baudelaire was the foremost poet of modern French Literature. Known for revolutionizing the tone and content of modern lyric poetry, he was the author of The Flowers of Evil, Paris Spleen, and Artificial Paradises, as well as the epochal essay, “The Painter of Modern Life.”
Nathan Brown is Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Poetics at Concordia University, where he is founding director of the Centre for Expanded Poetics. He is the author of Baudelaire’s Shadow: An Essay on Poetic Determination (2021), Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (2021), and The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (2017).
Review :
The unfailing vision of Baudelaire who trumpeted the space and light of the future.
A meticulous new translation of one of the most important masterworks of poetry. Ever. Modern, elegant, depraved, erotic, innovative, urban, decadent, lyrical, romantic, melancholic, cursed, dark, indecent, beautiful...Les Fleurs du mal.
All the true, modern, poetic colours, remember Baudelaire was the first to find them.
Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language.
I have, over the years, seen and taught many translations of Les Fleurs du Mal, some by celebrated poets, some by leading scholars, but to my eye and ear, Nathan Brown's is the most successful. Here is a superb translation of one of the great poetic works of modernism.
I've never been able to read any translations of Baudelaire except the plain prose versions in Francis Scarfe: the verse always sounded too lofty in English. But Nathan Brown somehow manages to stay true to Les Fleurs du mal's darkness and cheap thrills-and to what old Eric Auerbach called its essential 'aesthetic dignity'.
Fleurs du mal is full of beauty and riddles which are notoriously difficult to render in English. I'm so grateful that Nathan Brown, a scholar of such rigor and sensitivity, has taken the plunge and translated this ever-living masterpiece, and by a novel and much-needed approach: with nimble fidelity to the line, with a commitment to "hear" the poem and be out of its way, to let Baudelaire speak to us, as directly as he can, through the prism of a new mind.
Nathan Brown's exceptional new translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal not only deftly avoids many of the common pitfalls of other translations, it offers a welcome corrective to them. Brown's translations are elegant, precise, sparse, and accurate. They brilliantly succeed in conveying Baudelaire's startling, audacious, and inimitable poetic voice.
Nathan Brown's careful, restrained translation of Les Fleurs de mal accomplishes what no English edition of Baudelaire has quite achieved: a balance of formal precision and readability, with a respect for the inherent mystery and complexity of these poems. This skillful edition sets a new standard.
Some poems, like Baudelaire's 'The Eyes of the Poor,' impressed me so much that I wanted to make a song of them. Their style, for me, already has a kind of musical rhythm. Singing 'How Beautiful You Are' is like going into oral tradition. I take more pleasure expressing love in this Baudelaire poem than singing 'Friday I'm in Love.
I like Shakespeare, but I also like Joe Brainard. I like Rilke, but I also like Bill Knott. Probably in terms of affinity, the richest body of work for me would be Baudelaire. You can tell I'm talking about personal affinity, where I always go back and get the most stimulation from Baudelaire.
Despite the cool-kid hype this is very good stuff....The clarity of Baudelaire's ennui-"I am an old boudoir full of withered roses"-finds in Brown's English a second home.
Despite being born more than two hundred years ago, Charles Baudelaire's poetry retains the feeling of something contemporary. In Verso Books' new dual-language edition of The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal), translated economically by Nathan Brown, the poet's contradictory, shape-shifting, and still-startling voice emerges afresh.
