The Flowers of Evil: The Definitive English Language Edition [Paperback]

A DUAL-LANGUAGE EDITION OF THE WORK THAT SCANDALIZED PARIS AND REINVENTED BEAUTY

Probing the depths of the modern psyche in a voice at once caustic and vulnerable, melancholic and humorous, Baudelaire’s infamous book brings to the surface a new understanding of evil, of eroticism, and of social life through an astonishing variety of poetic forms and styles. This edition adds the poems banned from the original 1857 publication to the expanded collection of 1861 and includes an introduction from the translator, acclaimed poetry scholar Nathan Brown. The unfailing vision of Baudelaire who trumpeted the space and light of the future.
—Patti Smith

A meticulous new translation of one of the most important masterworks of poetry. Ever. Modern, elegant, depraved, erotic, innovative, urban, decadent, lyrical, romantic, melancholic, cursed, dark, indecent, beautiful...Les Fleurs du mal.
—Jim Jarmusch

All the true, modern, poetic colours, remember Baudelaire was the first to find them.
—Marcel Proust

Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language.
—T.S. Eliot

I have, over the years, seen and taught many translations of Les Fleurs du Mal, some by celebrated poets, some by leading scholars, but to my eye and ear, Nathan Brown’s is the most successful. Here is a superb translation of one of the great poetic works of modernism.
—Marjorie Perloff, author of The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage

I've never been able to read any translations of Baudelaire except the plain prose versions in Francis Scarfe: the verse always soundel#â