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Summary: Les critiques sourds-muets sans valeur
Review: ... As for this book, I wish less people would read it, because it is aimed for a small audience, a bitter and literate one. But don't listen to T.S. Eliot, whose Wasteland is this book and a thesaurus. The parallel French text is nice to have. The translation is more of a self-imposed one rather than a transliteration, but poetry is impossible to fairly translate. Baudelaire's "La Fontaine de sang" is worth the entire book, and the explanatory notes in the back are very helpful. Buy this book if you like Kafka, hate Frost, love Eliot, and enjoy French culture, or if you are a bitter, bitter, man.
Rating: 
Summary: Pretty Good
Review: As translations of poetry go, this is one of the better ones that I have come across. The renderings in English verse are well done, but still do not give the real flavour of the French verses. All the same, it is a good effort and an important contribution to the English speaking world to finally have some decent translations of one of France's greatest poets.
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Summary: Excellent collection of Baudelaire's work
Review: Charles Baudelaire's poetry is some of the best poetry ever written. He explores a number of different themes, often focusing on his personal experiances and emotions. To those of us who have suffered in life, one can easily relate to a lot of the feelings he felt. There are many hidden messages in the poetry, and the language is very rich and educated. You can get a lot of different interpretations out of these poems, which make them all the more relevant to the reader.
The best thing about this book is the fact that it features both the original French and an English translation, side by side. For those who are fluent or well versed in French, this is a dream come true. The translations are expertly done, and great care has been done to preserve the rhyme schemes without losing the meaning of the poems.
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Summary: Required poetry for dreamers
Review: If you have never heard of Charles Baudelaire, now you have. What have you been missing? Well, order this book and you will see that you are missing the preeminant masterpiece of a man with a complete mastery of his language. There are points of aching emotion, periods of baudy, lustful couplings, raw, exposed pain and suffering, but underneath it all is one of the greatest minds to ever put quill to parchment. John-Paul Sartre explains Baudelaire as: "man of shadows, opium addict, dandy, frigid disciple of voulpte and the greatest lyric poet of his age". Mr. Sartre was indeed correct. This version of Flowers of Evil should be required in the library of every disillusioned, but not defeated, weary, but eager, truth seeking dreamer.
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Summary: Paris in the Slums
Review: More than a century after his death, Baudelaire's paradox is intact. He is probably the most widely known lyric poet of modern times, yet his reputation is only indirectly connected to his poetry. We see him as a man of outrageous morals who chose to write about morbid subjects. He is our archangel of alienation. ''Man was born free, yet everywhere he is in chains,'' Rousseau had written. Baudelaire gave us the spectacle of his chains: the ennui, the revulsive morals, the dance of death of city life with its loneliness, its abyss of degradation. Like the albatross dragging its oarlike wings over the deck in his famous poem, Baudelaire described himself as a fallen angel, no longer able to fly and therefore ludicrous, unadapted. This spectacle of horrible reversal - evil for good, cruelty for kindness - is Baudelaire's trademark. Baudelaire was also a profoundly classical poet. His poems represent a climax of strict French style, of which the other important master was Racine.Like Balzac and Dickens, Baudelaire was a poet of the city. His ''Flowers of Evil'' grew in sunless alleys. The disjointed feelings, the ennui, the cruelty that characterize his poems express the shattered connections of life in the city, where everyone is a stranger, where the past is consumed by the present, especially in mid-19th-century Paris, where familiar neighborhoods were being demolished year by year to make way for monumental buildings and vast boulevards. This disjointed city world is Baudelaire's setting. He dreams of fleeing it in his exotic travel poems, which almost always disclose as their destination an inescapable horror of the heart. There was no exit from Baudelaire's Paris, except for the alchemical change proffered by his rituals of language, his ironically beautiful lyrics...
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Summary: the best poete maudit!
Review: Reading a poem by Baudelaire is like sipping chardonnay on the quayside in Paris. Formidable! I always return to this book, and I buy as many translations of it as I can. This one I think is the best. As a poet, Baudelaire was the master of describing the "dark regions" of the human soul. He was the Edgar Allan Poe of poetry.
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Summary: The roots of evil?
Review: This dual language edition of Baudelaire's revolutionary work is an excellent addition to any poetry lover's bookshelf. The translations are well thought out and can be read as works on their own if you do not speak French. However, Baudelaire's poetry is best read in the original French if the reader really wishes to appreciate the gravity and depth of poems such as 'Le Cygne' (Andromac je pense a vous) or marvel at the streets of Paris in the middle of Haussmann's redevelopment plan. Baudelaire allows us to explore our own emotions and leads us on a journey from this world, to the classical world and then on to the next. We see love in many guises, from Baudelaire's various 'amantes' to sex with common prostitutes. We cannot help be amazed by the poet's versatility of subject matter and even of style, particularly in 'Harmonie du Soir'. This collection can be read on many different levels and every time one rereads a poem, there is always something more. I would recommend 'Les Fleurs du Mal' to anyone who has been entranced by French literature all through the ages. You will see love, hate and Paris as you've never seen them before.
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Summary: Best Translation I've Seen
Review: This edition of "Flowers of Evil" contains all of the poems, not in their original order. However, ample introductory material and two tables of contents allows the reader to see what the work was when it was first published. The poems themselves cover many subjects in traditional symbolist style, from cats to gypsies to corpses to a whole section on wine. A must for any student of poetry. However, if you're looking for a translation that is true word for word and does not attempt to preserve the meter and rhyme, this is not the book for you. Mcentyre does a fabulous job tweaking the enlish to preserve poetic structure, but for students of French, and those interested in doing their own translations, other editions are preferable.
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Summary: AN INDISPENSABLE HANDBOOK
Review: This is a magnificent edition of the seminal Fleurs du Mal, printed in its original French and a sympathetic and incisive English that retains rhythm and form in a way rarely seen in recent Baudelaires. For poetry lovers, and lovers of literature, Baudelaire is a first-stop: all of twentieth century poetry is in his debt, yet he is often overlooked in contemporary analysis of influences on poets like Eliot, even Heany. The stark, startling honesty of poems like De Profundis Clamavi, or The Balcony, wipe away the years and bring this rebel visionary of the soul full-dimensionally into our twenty-first century living-rooms. This is an important work, as important as anything in French literature. The frame of "poetry" distracts: Flowers of Evil is life lessons, a handbook more stimulating and life-affirming than any top-ten self-help manual.
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Summary: great translation, lovely poetry
Review: this is a wonderful book. the translation is sympathetic and brings out the best in baudelaire's rich verse, lending an air of polish and depth to the rhymes and rythms of the work. undoubtedly an essential read for any fan of great poetry.
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