Charles Baudelaire: The Complete Verse (Anvil Editions) (English and French Edition)

Seems like there's no luck in finding a decent free verse translation of Charles Baudelaire's collected poetry. Always has to be a gimmick of some sort. I purchased the Walter Martin translation--which is an English translation wrought in rhyming verse. But I'd been hoping for something a little more reliably accurate, and hence I thought of going for this as an addition. I did read the squib describing the poems as French poetry accompanied by prose captions, but thinking this might be a mistake, I looked around and thought this squib mistakenly missed that the English free verse translation would be on facing pages with the addition of a prose caption. Nope. Not even. Just the French poetry--with a little caption telling us with no line breaks what the poem says. This is to help us with translating the French for "professional purposes".Sigh. I can get "Flowers Of Evil", Baudelaire's most popular collection, in nice English free verse translations. I can even get "Paris Spleen", another grouping of poems, in an English free verse translation. But not the collected poems? Why is this?When someone writes a poem, it deserves to be translated as poetry. A prose transmutation away from the actual poem is obviously going to miss almost too much. What does the white space at the end of a line mean? How does it add to the poem's meaning? What about the gentle turnarounds of wit that make a line break or enjambment powerfully meaningful?Gone, gone, gone.I know poetry is difficult to translate. I know many have serious problems with forcing a translation to rhyme in English. And I know that, oftentimes, the best available translations are wrought in free verse in order to allow the meanings to surface. Not this one. Nope. "Brave". "Daring".Whatever.Now. I'll go back and forth from the rhyming translation to this prose metamorphosis of what was intentionally written as poetry--all to see what kind of meanings the rhyming version lost, and which kind the prose metamorphoses lost. Maybe I can find Baudelaire emergent in the vast, intractable alleyway between the two buildings of rhyme and prose.

The first translation of Charles Baudelaire I found was by Joanna Richardson (1975) and was a good place to start with his poetry. Years later I found a beautiful translation of Baudelaire's Complete Poems by Francis Scarfe (2nd Ed. 2012) that changed my view on them entirely. Baudelaire translated most of Poe's poetry and his poems (like Poe's) are vivid, other-worldly and haunted by a deep longing but also beautiful and visionary in nature.I understood that Baudelaire’s translations of Poe became the foundation of the (French) symbolist/imagist poets work to follow in the 19th century (including Rimbaud). Poe was a Virginian for some time (having attended UVa. and his work and especially his poems have become more important for me as time has gone on. I loved the freedom of Baudelaire and the symbolist poets, it is a beautiful and exalted language of the dream.

Agree with the review by Strand.Some comparisons with other editions of Les Fleurs du mal: Howard's translations are not on the same or facing page. McGowan's translations are in verse, and sometimes favor rhythm over accuracy. Certainly word order can change. Some examples:"La sottise, l'erreur, le peche, la lésine" McGowan: Folly and error, stinginess and sin. Scarfe: Stupidity, error, sin and meanness."baise et mange" McGowan: suck and kiss, Scarfe: kisses and nibbles"Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie" McGowan: If slaughter, or if arson, poison, rape. . . Scarfe: If rape and poison, dagger and arsonEpouvante is translated by McGowan as daunted, Scarfe as horrified.Scarfe is more literal. McGowan translates "crispe ses poings" as rages, Scarfe says "clenches her fists."I think if you are trying to read it in French, with a ready English reference, the Scarfe is preferable, and if you want a poetic, less literal, but more flowing English translation the McGowan would be a good choice.

Poetry is an important part of my world and being able to share it in English is powerful!

.iwas so excited to order this book I Bought this to have a bilingual text with English on the facing page. The format of this book is cumbersome and the type face so small that I’m planning to return it.

This book contains all his poems. The unrhymed English translations, which seemquite accurate, are shown below the originals on each page. I liked this layout,which makes it clear that the beautiful imagery work best in the original French.

Interesting

Thank you!