Customer Reviews

Baudelaire: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

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the "Everyman's" series is the best stocking stuffers ever created. I am a bit of a Baudelaire buff, and I must say, this small version is perhaps my favorite. There is not much else to say. I have spent the time sorting through the poorly translated, badly misquoted versions of Flowers of Evil. Learn from my mistake. Pass by the frilly, big, seventeen color dustjacket editions and buy this little guy. It will not dissapoint you. Good day.

Baudelaire is credited, along with Whitman and Dickinson, with being the inventor of modern poetry. I wish someone would actually explain why modern poetry begins with him. (email anyone?)

But this book really is great. Get the Everyman's Pocket Poet's version. It's got all (or almost all, I haven't counted) of Baudelaire's masterpiece "Les Fleur Du Mal," in a good translation by Richard Howard (though also check out Norman Shapiro's). And it has selections from Michael Hamburger's wonderful translation of Baudelaire's prose poems, "Le Spleen Du Paris." The best of these is "GET DRUNK," or "Enivrez-vous!" It begins:

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters; that's our one imperative need. So as not to feel Time's horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down, you must get drunk without ceasing. ....

Baudelaire was full of dark energy like that. It disgusts and attracts. When it gets tiresome--and, like too much honey and too much Delacroix, reading about maggots eating lovers' flesh, will get tiresome--just put it down. When you pick it up you'll get some fresh insights. How fresh? As fresh as the in simile B. uses in "the Vampire": "bind[ing] me . . . as gambler to his winning streak." Nicely done. Plus the book is small so you can sneak it into work and easily goof off.

This beautiful collection of Baudelaire includes Les Fleurs du mal as well as several prose poems. Richard Howard has produced an extraordinary translation of this singularly great poet. Baudelaire's place as a symbolist and one of the founding figures of modern poetry are beyond doubt. His woven attunement to the modern condition, with haunting observations of crowd psychology, drugs, prostitution, and disease are incomparable representations of urban life. Les Fleurs du mal rightly became a paradigmatic text which would provide the vision of a future poetic landscape for Rimbaud, Mallarme, and Valery. This collection is artfully arranged and impressively translated.

The images containd in this book are frighteningly familiar and distanlty arranged. With every page the reader will be forced to go wherever the lines may travel. To and fro the words swagger and stumble. Gifted and pitiful, sad scenes flood out onto the page. Sexual-sciFi, erotica at it's finest before it ever had a name. Psycho-manipulative and potent. At times it will make you laugh, both in humor and in disgust. A definite add-on to any literate collector of art. Intense and a very fine book of scattered wisdom.

this translation was produced by a contemporory American poet Richard Howard, whose poems were included in the Norton Anthology of English Poetry. - English is my third language. - I agree with the review of Howard's version in 'Baudelaire in English'.