Customer Reviews

Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du mal: A Bilingual Edition

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Shapiro manages to capture Baudelaire's essence without sacrificing his form. These versions read like English poetry. They are the best I have read--and I have read them all, past and present. Highly recommended for admirers of Baudelaire and students of the craft (and art!) of literary translation.

This bilingual edition (masterfully translated by Norman Shapiro) carefully transposes the French originals into a formal, poetic English idiom, which captures both the meaning and the music of Baudelaire, the fallen angel and champion of evil. Though conventional in terms of his metrics and poetic forms, Baudelaire is arguably the first great Modernist poet. One dives into the murky miasmata of these pages to discover a world of perverse pleasures, wrathful and sordid imagery and unregenerate vice glorified by one of its most eloquent spokesmen. Baudelaire, a tortured personality, in which profound guilt is contraposed with carnal lust, Satanism, delight in cruelty and a longing for hell, is one of the towering giants of modern European literature. His poetry is a bitter fruit that few can savour with impunity.