Paris Spleen

Between 1855 and his death in 1867, Charles Baudelaire inaugurated a new—and in his own words "dangerous"—hybrid form in a series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen. Important and provocative, these fifty poems take the reader on a tour of 1850s Paris, through gleaming cafes and filthy side streets, revealing a metropolis on the eve of great change. In its deliberate fragmentation and merging of the lyrical with the sardonic, Le Spleen de Paris may be regarded as one of the earliest and most successful examples of a specifically urban writing, the textual equivalent of the city scenes of the Impressionists. In this compelling new translation, Keith Waldrop delivers the companion to his innovative translation of The Flowers of Evil. Here, Waldrop's perfectly modulated mix releases the music, intensity, and dissonance in Baudelaire's prose. The result is a powerful new re-imagining that is closer to Baudelaire's own poetry than any previous English translation.

One of the founding texts of literary modernism. Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil: the city and its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and mortality, and the liberation provided by the sensual delights of intoxication, art, and women. Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry—a format which Baudelaire saw as particularly suited for expressing the feelings of uncertainty, flux, and freedom of his age—and one of the founding texts of literary modernism.

Charles Baudelaire is primarily remembered for his seminal collection of poems Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), which alone would guarantee him a place in the pantheon of the great figures of world poetry. However, in his later years Baudelaire always intended to publish another book of poems, namely the prose poems of Paris Spleen (Le Spleen de Paris). He thought of the prose poem as a means of going beyond the traditional poetic forms of rhyme and metre. This year marks the bicentenary of Baudelaire's birth, and this new translation of the complete prose poems pays homage to one of the greatest poets of all time.

From Edouard Manet to T. S. Eliot to Jim Morrison, the reach of Charles Baudelaire's influence is beyond estimation. In this prize-winning translation of his no-longer-neglected masterpiece, Baudelaire offers a singular view of 1850s Paris. Evoking a mélange of reactions, these fifty "fables of modern life" take us on various tours led by a flâneur, an incognito stroller. Through day and night, in gleaming cafés and filthy side streets, this alienated yet compassionate esthete muses on the bizarre in the commonplace, the sublime in the mundane. As the work reveals a teeming metropolis on the eve of great change, we see a Paris as contradictory, surprising, and ultimately unknowable as our guide himself. Superbly complemented by twenty-one period illustrations by Delacroix, Callot, Manet, Whistler, Baudelaire himself, and others, The Parisian Prowler is an essential companion to Les Fleurs du Mal and other works by the father of modern poetry. In the preface to this edition, translator Edward K. Kaplan explains how the volume's illustrations act as a graphic subtext to the narrator's observations.

Baudelaire composed the series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen between 1855 and his death in 1867. He attached great importance to his work in this then unusual form, asking, "Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?"

Paris Spleen, a diverse collection of fifty prose poems, is provided here in a clear, engaging, and accurate translation that conveys the lyricism and nuance of the original French text. Also included is a translation of Baudelaire's early novella, La Fanfarlo, which, alongside Paris Spleen, sheds light on the development of Baudelaire's work over time. Raymond N. MacKenzie's introductory essay discusses Baudelaire's life and the literary climate in which he lived and worked. Focusing on the theory of the prose poem, MacKenzie suggests that Baudelaire turned to this form for both aesthetic and ethical reasons, and because the form allowed him to explore more fully the complexities of the modern, urban, human condition. By turns comic, somber, satiric, and self-questioning, Paris Spleen is one of the nineteenth century's richest masterpieces.

Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil: the city with all its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and mortality, and the liberation provided by the sensual delights of intoxication, art and women.Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry - a form which Baudelaire saw as particularly suited for expressing the feelings of uncertainty, flux and freedom of his age - and one of the founding texts of literary Modernism. This volume also includes Baudelaire's 1851 essay 'Wine and Hashish'.

Unique collection of Baudelaire's sensual poems about sex and death, rebellion, and corruption features definitive translations of 51 poems from Flowers of Evil, plus 14 prose poems from Paris Spleen.