[literary classics] The Flowers of Evil: The Definitive English L...

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A DUAL-LANGUAGE EDITION OF THE WORK THAT SCANDALIZED PARIS AND REINVENTED BEAUTY

Probing the depths of the modern psyche in a voice at once caustic and vulnerable, melancholic and humorous, Baudelaire’s infamous book brings to the surface a new understanding of evil, of eroticism, and of social life through an astonishing variety of poetic forms and styles. This edition adds the poems banned from the original 1857 publication to the expanded collection of 1861 and includes an introduction from the translator, acclaimed poetry scholar Nathan Brown.

"A meticulous new translation of one of the most important masterworks of poetry. Ever. Modern, elegant, depraved, erotic, innovative, urban, decadent, lyrical, romantic, melancholic, cursed, dark, indecent, beautiful...Les Fleurs du mal."

Jim Jarmusch

"There is no complete English translation available as good as Nathan Brown’s. Brown is extremely adept with his lexical choices, deftly finding words which at once preserve the nineteenth-century context but also are striking in tone and nuance. His versions do a fine job of maintaining the cutting edge of the original, and he avoids preciosity and literariness throughout, without falling into either a drab tonality of ‘translatorese’ or overcompensating in the other direction with forced and inappropriater enderings. This accounts for one of the book’s most notable and precious virtues: versions which are painstakingly literal without being bland—a truly outstanding feature of his renderings.”

Daniel Katz, editor of Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer

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