Charles Baudelaire

Will Jonson

Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 - August 31, 1867) was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, 'Les Fleurs du Mal' (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stephane Mallarme among many others. He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernite) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.

Les Fleurs Du Mal (English)

Presents the first American translation of the complete text of Baudelaire's 1857 masterwork and includes the complete original French texts for easy comparison

The Complete Text of The Flowers of Evil

Les Fleurs Du Mal

salma

sois charmante et tais toi! mon coeur que tout irrite

Hannah Yang

wow. reading this restored my faith in poetry (which i had admittedly started to give up on, a little). 

while the few poems i read for ulit were brilliant and sufficient in capturing the baudelairean themes of alienation, modernity, memory, grotesqueness, etc. there are so so many gems in this collection of poetry!!! most of these poems were lyrical and haunting and cynical, but a few were just shattering. like a searing, epiphanic voice of the universal. in the least pretentious way possible: they made me feel (ache) in the way that's only possible in poetry. i wish i was fluent in french so i could read these in their original language.

favorite poems: elevation (14), the enemy (20), artist unknown (20-21), man and sea (22-23), semper eadem (45-46), confession (50-51), evening harmony (52), sorrows of the moon (69), alchemy of suffering (78), the swan (90-92), parisian dream (106-108), travelers (151-157)

some favorite snippets:
I've loved the wilderness, I've loved the sea;
no ordinary sadness touches me
though I find savor in the bitterest wine;
how many truths I trade away for lies,
and musing on heaven, stumble over trash
Even so, the voice consoles me: 'Keep your dreams,
the wise have none so lovely as the mad.'

I was like a child in front of a stage,
hating the curtain as if it were in the way...
Finally the cold truth was revealed:
I had simply died, and the terrible dawn
enveloped me. Could this be all there is?
The curtain was up, and I was waiting still.

... The sky was suave, the sea serene; for me
from now on everything was bloody and black
- the worse for me - and as if in a shroud
my heart lay buried in this allegory.
On Aphrodite's land all I found
was a token gallows where my image hung...
Lord give me the strength and courage to behold
my body and my heart without disgust!

-She weeps, you fool, for having lived! and for 
living - yet what she laments the most,
what makes her body tremble head to toe,
is that tomorrow she will have to live,
and all tomorrows after - like ourselves!

It is a bitter truth our travels teach!
Tiny and monotonous, the world
has shown - will always show us - what we are:
oases of fear in the wasteland of ennui!
[...]
Once we have burned our brains out, we can plunge
to Hell or Heaven - any abyss will do -
deep in the Unknown to find the new!

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. Anthony Mortimer, already praised for his virtuoso translations of Petrarch, Dante and Villon, has produced 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.

The Flowers of Evil

C’était assez bien, j’ai plutôt aimé seulement quelques poèmes et le reste était assez long j’ai trouvé :)

Boimond

Pourquoi le recueil des Fleurs du mal a-t-il cette audience aujourd'hui? Parce qu'il représente, depuis 1857, la naissance d'une poésie nouvelle. Baudelaire utilise des formes classiques - le sonnet, l'alexandrin - pour dire la modernité : la bizarrerie, les villes immenses, le malaise d'une existence douloureuse. Face à cette angoisse, il nous propose un moyen de vaincre le mal, le dégoût de soi et des autres, le " spleen " : l'idéal d'un langage qui nous montrerait un ailleurs rêvé, un monde enfin habitable.

Safiya 

Alors la poésie on en parle ?
.
Quoique récemment la majeure partie de mes lectures est plutôt prose scientifique loin des figures de styles envoûtantes, j'avais eu la chance quelques années plutôt d'être introduite aux classiques français.
.
Un peu d'Alfred de Musset qui n'écrivait ses pièces qu'en poésie, en passant par Corneille et Racine sans mentionner Le Comédien de France : Jean Baptiste Poquelin connu sous le nom de Molière sur scène.
.
A Dostoievski précédait Guy de Maupassant, et avant de connaître les carnets du sous sol j'ai eu l'aimable rencontre avec Le Horla... Des classiques je voulais aussi désigner les interminables descriptions d'escalier de Zola ou encore les portraits surréalistes de Balzac. Et c'est ainsi que j'ai été bercée par cette littérature. 
.
Évidemment un jour vous avez lu vous aussi un poème à Rimbaud, et si par chance vous avez croisé Cosette vous avez su ce que Victor Hugo allait faire : "Demain, dès l'aube à l'heure où blanchit la campagne,
Je partirai. Vois-tu je sais que tu m'attends."
.
Et tandis que je m'amusais à trouver les rimes qu'elles soient riches, pauvres ou suffisantes, les ABAB ou AABB ou encore les ABBA.. J'ai rencontré Baudelaire.
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Je ne me souviens pas qu'un poète français avait eu plus d'influence sur moi que lui. Ses vers me rappelait vaguement Edgar Allan Poe et je dansais avec son Spleen, le Spleen de Paris... J'aimais les entrelacs de la vie et de la mort en une seule strophe, beauté décrite en laideur extravagante et ainsi de suite jusqu'à la fin de ce recueil extraordinairement charmant.
.
"Comme vous êtes loin, paradis parfumé,
Où sous un clair azur tout n'est qu'amour et joie,
Où tout ce que l'on aime est digne d'être aimé,
Où dans la volupté pure le coeur se noie!
Comme vous êtes loin, paradis parfumé!"
.
— Who dares, in front of Love, to mention Hell?
Curbed forever be that useless dreamer
Who first imagined, in his brutish mind,
Of sheer futility the fatuous schemer,
Honour with Love could ever be combined.
He who in mystic union would enmesh
Shadow with warmth, and daytime with the night,
Will never warm his paralytic flesh
At the red sun of amorous delight.

The Flowers of Evil (Oxford World's Classics)

Emma Lechner

This fully revised and amended edition of Baudelaire's masterpiece of lyric poetry contains all of the poems from all three editions of Les Fleurs du Mal, with both the original French texts and new English verse translations on the facing page. The translations preserve both the original versification and the intrinsic sense of each individual poem.

Les Fleurs Du Mal (English)

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