Flowers of Bad A False Translation of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs de Mal

Poetry. FLOWERS OF BAD is David Cameron's false translation of Charles Baudelaire's 19th century masterpiece, Les Fleurs du Mal. Written over the course of 11 years, it includes translations of all of the poems in Baudelaire's masterpiece, barring those added to the edition posthumously. Inspired by the chance operations of poet Jackson Mac Low, the methods of the Oulipo and the constant misunderstandings that pervade our experience of language, Cameron developed a number of "methods" used to translate the poems, producing poems which are siblings to Baudelaire's poems, and also their most distant cousins. In the afterword to FLOWERS OF BAD, Cameron describes at length the methods he developed and employed in order to arrive at this multitude of translations. Rather than trying to build a bridge across the gap that exists between his and Baudelaire's languages, Cameron descends a rope ladder into the chasm itself.