The Flowers of Evil
Charles Baudelaire, Robert Wilkinson
Paperback
(Independently published, June 26, 2020)
'All first-rate poetry is occupied with morality: this is the lesson of Baudelaire. More than any poet of his time, Baudelaire was aware of what most mattered: the problem of good and evil.' TS Eliot. This new verse translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), translated by poet and former publishing agent Robert Wilkinson, contains all 126 poems of the expanded 1861 edition. Eliot called Baudelaire 'the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language', and Baudelaire remains, both in academic circles and the popular imagination, the brightest beacon of nineteenth-century French poetry, the lyrical pivot between Romanticism and Modernism. In the translator's opinion Baudelaire is still highly relevant today, and his āmodernā stance prefigures much of the artistic and literary culture that came after him. Some of his poetry appears to anticipate surrealism. He created an original method of art criticism, the personal, subjective kind we now take largely for granted. And he also seems surprisingly contemporary in his analysis of the urban underworld, his compassion for the poor and downtrodden, his distrust of an over-mechanical, dehumanised society, and his fascination with drug-induced states of being. Baudelaire is an artist of his time ā and an artist for all time. The translator's intention in this work is to introduce a poet of extraordinary genius to a new audience, especially a non-French-speaking audience, in a refreshingly direct and readable way.