Les Fleurs Du Mal

Rating:
Summary: A bilingual tour de force
Review: ... 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.

Rating:
Summary: Pehaps one of the strongest poetic works ever
Review: Charles Baudelaire revolutionized the litterary world when "les fleurs du mal" was published. But even in this day and age he doesn't fail to make and impact, and even astonish learned readers with his powerful stanzas. Many scholars would probably disagree, but I see his "Hymne à la beautè" as the cornerstone of this truly "beautiful" collection. Ordinary conventions are turned up and down completely when the Frenchman uses oximorons and other tools to exhibit the beauty of "mal" (evil or bad - not even the title can really be translated). It is a work that can not only chance a reader perspectives on language - but transform the entire preattained convictions of how life should or can be perceived.

Rating:
Summary: This is the Best Translation
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: exemplary translation; mediocre volume
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: exemplary translation; mediocre volume
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, Supernatural , and Always New
Review: The most misunderstood aspect in Baudelaire's mind is to believe Baudelaire thought evil was an exception, while it formed the rule to which the flowers were the despised growth choked by the very ground from which they sprang.

What did Baudelaire write about? Flowers of Evil. Why? To find the new. How? Plunging deep in the Unknown. Where? Any Where Out of the World.

Charles Baudelaire is beyond doubt one of the most important poets for modern literature--for "post-modern" and thereafter, too. Baudelaire has still to be caught up to by the world, that should read Flowers of Evil still were all else destroyed. Baudelaire represents himself as an erotic Gothic Swedenborgian dandy, prostrating himself in his temple of spirituality before the cult of sensibility and personality. His language--always silent--tells of intense self-overcoming refining itself into the purity of vision, of the existential pursuit of a personally determined means for an authentic and better perfected life.

The attractions of novelties, rarities, curiosities or oddities line most of his store, but only to better light the strange awareness Baudelaire brought to his life. The Flowers of Evil are martyrs sacrificing themselves in their swamps of matter incensing the skies of the ideal. The poems, the same as all of Baudelaire's work, are sad prophecies of Baudelaire's own neglected and misunderstood demise. The most misunderstood aspect of all is to believe Baudelaire thought evil was an exception, while it formed the rule to which the flowers were the despised growth choked by the very ground from which they sprang.

Rating:
Summary: Richard Howard's Translation
Review: 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."

Rating:
Summary: Richard Howard's Translation
Review: 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."