Customer Reviews

Les Fleurs Du Mal (English and French Edition)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

You have to be a detective when you're looking for customer reviews of translations of Great Books Not in English. For example, does anyone know that this is the Richard Howard translation? That would be valuable to know, but this virtual bookstore doesn't think that's important enough to tell you, so I'm telling you. (Then again, who knows where you are reading this?). This certainly is the first and most important thing any literate person buying an English edition of Baudelaire would want to know. Hence, this review.

This - Richard Howard's translation, published by Godine - ISBN: 0879234628 - is the most meticulous and lyrical in English. Although it should go without saying, Les Fleurs du Mal is a book of poems. These are poems written in the 19th century. In France. In French. Not 21st century France. Not 21st century French. Certainly not English prose masquerading as verse. Something very specific. So, even before the reader can get to the fact that it's Baudelaire, he needs to be relocated, as it were, and not have to worry about the process. Put another way, getting from there to here requires a guide. No one is better qualified for that task than Richard Howard. And he has succeeded in ways that no previous English translation has managed. This is only possible because, in addition to being the present translator, Richard Howard is one of America's finest poets. As RH knows better than anyone, "giving pleasure means taking pains." This translator has taken pains and given us a heady whiff of CB's "sickly flowers."

... This book does indeed include the original French version in its second half, and Richard Howard's breathtakingly vivid and vital English translation in its first half. This is the definitive English translation of Les Fleurs du Mal, and by far my favorite.

As to the substance of this remarkable book of poetry, Baudelaire's work is one of such groundbreaking genius on so many levels that it may never be equaled. He has achieved Gustave Flaubert's great aim of "le seul mot juste" (the unique right word) with such consistency that one can only smile in amazement and wonder. The aural music created by this poetry intoxicates as the meaning of the words strikes deep into the heart of the reader, putting into words thoughts and feelings that he could never express. These alternate with shocking and horrifying images that bring to mind Kafka's "Metamorphosis." Longing, irony, desolation, desire, betrayal, anger, melancholy, ecstasy, alienation, and more are Baudelaire's subjects, and his words are the arrows in his quiver that never miss their mark. A few of my favorites are: The Albatross, Elevation, Hymn to Beauty, The Head of Hair, The Cat, Spleen III, The Clock, and Hymn.

As a look into the human heart and mind, I rank this work with Michel de Montaigne's "Essays." It would also land on my list of universal, desert-island books.

Let me declare immediately that I agree with the other reader-reviews here: Richard Howard's translations of these poems are rich, sensual, potent, lurid renderings. His verse forgoes the shoehorn of obeying the foreign rhymes (a decision shared by Dante's best translators) and pursues instead a laden, incantatory English that is utterly full and alive--really alive and vital, almost writhing in his versions of Baudelaire's most charnel poems (like "Carrion," "Against Her Levity," and the grim crescendo of "To the Reader"), and with a nearly pungent eros in the coutless mistress poems. One need only read the French originals (included in the book's second half) to appreciate the alchemy of Howard's admixture of fidelity and music. They don't sound self-conscious like most translations, and I find myself reading them aloud.

But as for the whole volume--well, despite Howard's introductory apologia and his Keats quip, we could use explanatory notes, even if they're just stashed inobtrusively in the back, as with the Oxford Press edition. Howard calls such notes an "overbearing gloss," but we could always ignore them, if we wanted, so I don't see what the danger is. I find context valuable--after all, Baudelaire wrote within one. Howard's Baudelaire both stirs and harrows me, but it also awakens an earnest and respectful curiosity, the kind that must bring any translator to their authors in the first place, and ironically my proper curiosity makes this unannotated book incomplete.

I appreciate Howard's stout chronolgy of Baudelaire's life and work, but we could use an account of Baudelaire's aims, of symbolist poetry, of his sources and his impact. Howard's introduction offers four pages of detailed translator's defense and thanks to his supporters; surely Baudelaire and his work deserve at least as much attention! Baudelaire wrote "The Living Torch," for instance, in response to Poe's "To Helen": why not reprint Poe's little poem for us, with clarifying remarks about the history between the two writers? Baudelaire dedicates other poems to Hugo--but how come, and how are they fitting responses to Hugo? Such background would allow this volume to be a definitive Baudelaire experience, not just a definitive English rendering. Every other edition I've seen offers such helps, though I'm sure many others don't. And as I said, a book can include notes and you can choose to ignore them.

Anyway, Howard still gives us a bravura, rousing, chilling English Baudelaire. That is, obviously, the most essential thing about a book of foreign poetry, and it is what I celebrate and recommend about Howard's volume.

As both poet and critic, Baudelaire stands in relation to French and European poetry as Gustave Flaubert and Edouard Manet do to fiction and painting; as a crucial link between Romanticism and modernism and as a supreme example, in both his life and work, of what it means to be a modern artist. His catalytic influence was recognized in the nineteenth century by Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé and Swinburne and, in the twentieth century by Valèry, Rilke and T.S. Eliot.

Baudelaire's poetic masterpiece, the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) consists of 126 poems arranged in six sections of varying length. Baudelaire always insisted that the collection was not a "simple album" but had "a beginning and an end," each poem revealing its full meaning only when read in relation to the others within the "singular framework" in which it is placed. A prefatory poem makes it clear that Baudelaire's concern is with the general human predicament of which his own is representative. The collection may best be read in the light of the concluding poem, Le Voyage, as a journey through self and society in search of some impossible satisfaction that forever eludes the traveler.

The first section, entitled Spleen et idéal, opens with a series of poems that dramatize contrasting views of art, beauty and the artist, who is depicted alternately as martyr, visionary, performer, pariah and fool.

The focus then shifts to sexual and romantic love, with the first-person narrator of the poems oscillating between extremes of ecstasy (idèal) and anguish (spleen) as he attempts to find fulfillment through a succession of women whom it is possible, if simplistic, to identify with Jeanne Duval, Apollonie Sabatier and Marie Daubrun.

Each set of love poems describes an erotic cycle that leads from intoxication through conflict and revulsion to an eventual ambivalent tranquility born of memory and the transmutation of suffering into art. Yet the attempt to find plentitude through love comes in the end to nothing, and Spleen et idèal ends with a sequence of anguished poems, several of them entitled Spleen, in which the self is shown imprisoned within itself with only the certainty of suffering and death before it.

The second section, Tableaux parisiens, was added to the 1861 edition and describes a 24-hour cycle in the life of the city of Paris through which the Baudelairean traveler, now metamorphosed into a flaneru, moves in quest of deliverance from the miseries of self, only to find, at every twist and turn, images of suffering and isolation that remind him all too pertinently of his own. This section includes some of Baudelaire's greatest poems, most notably Le Cygne, where the memory of a swan stranded in total dereliction near the Louvre becomes a symbol of an existential condition of loss and exile transcending time and space.

Having gone through the city forever meeting himself, the traveler turns, in the much shorter sections that follow, successively to drink (Le Vin), sexual depravity (Fleurs du mal), and satanism (Rèvoltè) in quest of the elusive ideal. His quest is predictably to no avail for, as the final section, entitled La Mort, reveals, his journey is an everlasting, open-ended odyssey that, continuing beyond death, will take him into the depths of the unknown, always in pursuit of the new, which, by definition, must forever elude him.

In pursuit of an "evocative magic" of images and sounds, his blending of intellect and feeling, irony and lyricism, and his deliberate eschewal of rhetoric utterance, Baudelaire moved decisively away from the Romantic poetry of statement and emotion to the modern poetry of symbol and suggestion. He was, said his disciple Jules Laforgue, the first poet to write of Paris as one condemned to live day to day in the city, his greatest originality being, as Verlaine wrote as early as 1865, to "represent powerfully and essentially modern man" in all his physical, psychological and moral complexity. Baudelaire is a pivotal figure in European literature and thought, and his influence on modern poetry has been immense.

I've lived with these poems, in the original French, for forty years; when Howard's English translation came out twenty years ago, I read it through, but never felt that it was even worth reviewing. It doesn't rhyme, it doesn't scan, it changes the meaning of the original. Yecch, to put it bluntly.

The whole idea behind Baudelaire's verse is that it is exquisitely classical metre and rhyme, but contains feelings and images that are so advanced that we haven't really caught up with them, even 100 years later. It's the contrast between strictness of form and wildness of content that makes Baudelaire's poetry so incredible.

Enter Howard. His versification is so vague and unfocused, and his words and meaning so far from the original, that I can't recognize Baudelaire at all in this book. It's more like a riff or a sampling of the real thing, and just doesn't work - for me - either as poetry or as translation. I guess you could say that I'm deaf to Howard's music. Even if that is true, I'd stake my reputation that Howard is deaf to Baudelaire's music.

I bought this book because I love baudelaire. I used to own an edition of the complete works of Baudelaire in France (La pleiade). Baudelaire is a must read. Les Fleurs du mal are a masterpiece and I have been reading it for years.
However, this digital version is disappointing. The navigation is quite good but the special french letters are not shown. I dont know if the problem comes from the conversion or directly from an inability of the Kindle 2 to show other letters. For example when there is "coeur" (heart) in a poem, you will see cur instead.
If you already know Les fleurs du mal as I do, it isnt too disturbing. But for a first reading and for non- native french readers it really must be annoying.

I give it 3 stars because baudelaire deserves a 5 but transforming his words is a 1.

I am not a writer, nor a critic. I am a mere reader who appreciates good works. This is one of my staple books, which I often reread and recommend to people who I feel might have the mind to appreciate genius. This is the best translation I know of and as a necessary feature of translated poetry, it includes the original French text, as well. Baudelaire reveals the beauty within darkness and exposes the darkness within light. Brilliance has always been rare, but I would say now it is more rare than ever within the literary field. This may very well be due to books like this going unread by the majority of the population. This is a wonderful book to enhance a person's writing depth, and their understanding of the world. Other great author's and books are: Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud, Mallarme, Antonin Artaud's Anthology and The Death of Satan, Lautremont and Maldoror by Issidore Ducasse, All of the Marquis de Sade's works, Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce, Anne Sexton's Complete Works, La Batarde by Violette Leduc, the diaries of Anais Nin, and Sylvia Plath's poetry.

I'd get this book for the quality of the paper and type (at least that of the version I bought back in the early 90s) and the great presentation of the French originals. People with even a high-school knowledge of French can appreciate Baudelaire's ideas and musicality. It's impossible to translate the latter into English, so why even try?

The best thing about the ideas in the poems is that they are expressed in very simple language. I would have prefered a similarly simple, immediate English translation without resorting to stuffy "poetic" language (as well as over-interpretation--many images sneak into the English that are just not there, or only suggested, in the French). The only way to really appreciate the intricately constructed meter and rhyme is to read the originals.

I know this is probably a matter of taste in translation, but reading the English translations in this volume really brings me down sometimes!

Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal/Flowers of Evil (1861) is known around the world as one of the most important collections of modern poetry. Influenced by Romanticism, Baudelaire (1821-1867) is not only an exquisite poet, but also one of the founders of modernism and the philosopher of modernity. Les Fleurs du Mal simultaneously evokes classic beauty and urban sensibility; true love and decadence; youth and decay; idealism and cynicism: all this and much more in one intoxicating bouquet of poems.

As contemporary as some these themes may be in the openness of our culture, Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal can also seem daunting and distant to American students who may have little background in nineteenth-century French culture or may need some help decoding the nuances of Baudelaire's rich vocabulary.

Professor Edward K. Kaplan's new and exciting edition of Baudelaire's poems bridges the temporal and linguistic gap between American students today and nineteenth-century France. His European Masterpieces Edition of Les Fleurs du Mal (Newwark, Delaware: Lingua Text, Ltd., 2010) includes a biographical and cultural introduction to Baudelaire and his times; translations of terms that American students are not likely to know, supplemented by a French-English glossary that offers more helpful translations of key terms. This accessible yet erudite edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, by a leading Baudelaire scholar and translator, will make Francophiles out of new generations of American students.

Claudia Moscovici, literaturesalon

Note: Although the other listed reviews for this product [[ASIN:B00433TDRG Les fleurs du mal (French Poetry) (French Edition)] mention "Richard Howard's Translation", the book contains French poems only.