Great critic, poet's poet, spirit of the age. I really should read him sometime.

Anyone recommend a decent translation? I can't be bothered with poetry in the original language.

Was the subject of a Steve Harley song on his "Timeless Flight"(iirc album). Or was it "Endless Flight". Rubbish album.

Read him, he's fantastic. You should be able to get a translation of Fleurs du Mal from Amazon for about £1.50 like I did (although I wouldn't really know how good or otherwise the translation is).

A peculiar thing about degenerate 19th century French poets is the major downers they had on their mums. Like Rimbaud and Lautréamont, Baudelaire's all, "my excuse for a mother who left me to die and is a pig!" She packed your baguettes, washed behind your ears and probably nearly died in childbirth, you ungrateful little sods!

Read the under-appreiciated (in this country) Stéphane Mallarmé after him. Superb stuff.

Well, I've gone ahead and got a bilingual version. Let's compare notes at a later date.

Have you read his criticism? Essay on Delacroix is supposed to be very good.

I've just loaded up on Mallarme, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, having read A Rebours last week en vacances. (En vacances, Rodney, en vacances.)

Not that Huysmans mentions Rimbaud, but I needed him to get the free postage.

Tubby, I was going to recommend a bilingual version, but if you get stuck, get the Richard Howard translation.

I haven't read the Delacroix piece, will have to look for that. And what Horse said about Mallarme.

Thanks for the recommendations. Mallarme gets mentioned a lot in connection with art, so I'm keen to get round to him. Did Rimbaud once say something about ships following trawlers or am I muddling him up with someone else?

I've got a decent bilingual edition of Baudelaire now. Will start that when I go to Gloucs at the weekend.

Hmm, Not Me, I thought Baudelaire was obsessed with his mother and dependent on her to a huge degree.

I'm sure he was, but I've only got my memory of Fleurs du Mal from years ago to go on.

(Ah, the second poem's the bit I was thinking of: The Blessing. There's just something of the French kid from South Park about it.)

As ever, ua is right. The Richard Harris translation is the best. In the meantime, my favourite:

Élévation


Au-dessus des étangs, au-dessus des vallées,
Des montagnes, des bois, des nuages, des mers,
Par delà le soleil, par delà les éthers,
Par delà les confins des sphères étoilées,


Mon esprit, tu te meus avec agilité,
Et, comme un bon nageur qui se pâme dans l'onde,
Tu sillonnes gaiement l'immensité profonde
Avec une indicible et mâle volupté.


Envole-toi bien loin de ces miasmes morbides;
Va te purifier dans l'air supérieur,
Et bois, comme une pure et divine liqueur,
Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces limpides.


Derrière les ennuis et les vastes chagrins
Qui chargent de leur poids l'existence brumeuse,
Heureux celui qui peut d'une aile vigoureuse
S'élancer vers les champs lumineux et sereins;


Celui dont les pensers, comme des alouettes,
Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor,
— Qui plane sur la vie, et comprend sans effort
Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes!

Elevation


Above the lakes, above the vales,
The mountains and the woods, the clouds, the seas,
Beyond the sun, beyond the ether,
Beyond the confines of the starry spheres,


My soul, you move with ease,
And like a strong swimmer in rapture in the wave
You wing your way blithely through boundless space
With virile joy unspeakable.


Fly far, far away from this baneful miasma
And purify yourself in the celestial air,
Drink the ethereal fire of those limpid regions
As you would the purest of heavenly nectars.


Beyond the vast sorrows and all the vexations
That weigh upon our lives and obscure our vision,
Happy is he who can with his vigorous wing
Soar up towards those fields luminous and serene,


He whose thoughts, like skylarks,
Toward the morning sky take flight
— Who hovers over life and understands with ease
The language of flowers and silent things!


— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

All available at www.fleursdumal.org

Translation, however well and sensitively done, is always and inevitably inadequate. When writing his original verse, Baudelaire would have been considering at some level the tones of the vowels and the beats of the consonants and the way in which words inexplicably merge and relate with one another, to create an overall and fluid conduit for his meaning.

Translations always seem slightly abrupt and jarring, inasmuch as all that I have tried to describe can't be "translated" and possibly contributes to an idea of foreign writers as somehow inherently unstable and sentimental, so strangely jumpy are the rhythms of their writing.

I think that last point is excellent.

Done a couple of Les Fleurs Du Mal. Generally I'm finding the imagery is piled rather high, terrific images though they are. I'm probably trying to read it too much like a passage of Shakespeare, with the metaphors keeping close enough to the general sense not to slow me down.

Very promising.

You lose a good amount in the translation of literary prose, but for something like Baudelaire, it would be like watching a Jacques Demy film version done in black and white without the sound. You will know what's going on but it won't come anywhere close to understanding, or more exactly feeling how good it really is.

In addition to the poetry mechanics involved that wingco covers above (alliterations, flow, rhymes etc), translation also blunts the original work as words have different meanings outside of their cultural contexts. Beyond the meaning, they also evoque different images and feelings that are more specific to their cultural environments.