Judicially condemned in 1857 as offensive to public morality, The Flowers of Evil is now regarded as the most influential volume of poetry published in the nineteenth century. Torn between intense sensuality and profound spiritual yearning, racked by debt and disease, Baudelaire transformed his own experience of Parisian life into a work of universal significance. With his unflinching examination of the dark aspects and unconventional manifestations of sexuality, his pioneering portrayal of life in a great metropolis and his daring combination of the lyrical and the prosaic, Baudelaire inaugurated a new epoch in poetry and created a founding text of modernism.
Anthony Mortimer, already praised for his virtuoso translations of Petrarch, Dante and Villon, has produced a new version that not only respects the sense and the form of the original French, but also makes powerful English poetry in its own right.>
The Flowers of Evil, which T. S. Eliot called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language, shocked the literary world of nineteenth century France with its outspoken portrayal of lesbian love, its linking sexuality and death, its unremitting irony, and its unflinching celebration of the seamy side of urban life. The volume was seized by the police, and Baudelaire and his published were put on trial for offence to public decency. Six offending poems were banned, in a conviction that was not overturned until 1949. This bold new translation, which restores the banned poems to their original places and reveals the full richness and
Nouvel opus dans la collection Ekphrasis, de petits livres de texte au format poche. Dans celui-ci, Le salon de 1846, Baudelaire développe les principes du romantisme et propose un parcours méthodique à travers des peintures de Delacroix et Ingres, éclairant sa conviction que la poursuite de l'idéal doit être primordiale dans l'expression artistique. Le texte est accompagné d'une préface critique de l'historien de l'art Michael Fried.
Les Fleurs du mal (English: The Flowers of Evil) is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857, it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. The poems deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism. This Bilingual English - French edition provides the original text by Baudelaire and its English translation by Cyril Scott. The initial publication of the book was arranged in six thematically segregated sections: 1. Spleen et Idéal (Spleen and Ideal) 2. Tableaux parisiens (Parisian Scenes) 3. Le Vin (Wine) 4. Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) 5. Révolte (Revolt) 6. La Mort (Death) Baudelaire dedicated the book to the poet Théophile Gautier, describing him as a parfait magicien des lettres françaises ( a perfect magician of French letters ). The foreword to the volume, Au Lecteur ( To the Reader ), identifying Satan with the pseudonymous alchemist Hermes Trismegistus. The author and the publisher were prosecuted under the regime of the Second Empire as an outrage aux bonnes moeurs ( an insult to public decency ). As a consequence of this prosecution, Baudelaire was fined 300 francs. Six poems from the work were suppressed and the ban on their publication was not lifted in France until 1949. These poems were Lesbos Femmes damnées (À la pâle clarté) (or Women Doomed (In the pale glimmer...) ) Le Léthé (or Lethe ) À celle qui est trop gaie (or To Her Who Is Too Joyful ) Les Bijoux (or The Jewels ) and Les Métamorphoses du Vampire (or The Vampire's Metamorphoses ). These were later published in Brussels in a small volume entitled Les Épaves (Scraps or Jetsam). On the other hand, upon reading The Swan (or Le Cygne ) from Les Fleurs du mal, Victor Hugo announced that Baudelaire had created un nouveau frisson (a new shudder, a new thrill) in literature. In the wake of the prosecution, a second edition was issued in 1861 which added 35 new poems, removed the six suppressed poems, and added a new section entitled Tableaux Parisiens. A posthumous third edition, with a preface by Théophile Gautier and including 14 previously unpublished poems, was issued in 1868.
"Among the earliest artistic descriptions of the hallucinogenic experience in European literature, the four pieces in this volume document Gautier''s and Baudelaire''s own involvement in the Club of Assassins, who met under the auspices of Dr Moreau to investigate the mind-enhancing effects of hashish, wine and opium.
As well as providing an absorbing account of nineteenth-century drug use, Hashish, Wine, Opium captures the spirit of French Romanticism in its struggle to free the mind from the shackles of the humdrum and the conventional, and serves as a fascinating prologue to the psychedelic literature of the following century.">
