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Baudelaire's Banned Poetry: The Censored, Erotic & Vampiric - Illustrated Bilingual Edition
The Forbidden Poems of Les Fleurs du Mal and Les Épaves with Original French, Modern Translations, Contemporary Transcreations & 80 Erotic Illustrations from Two Centuries
In 1857 the French government banned six poems from Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. The court admitted their literary brilliance-then ordered them suppressed for "offending public morality." These forbidden works fused raw pleasure with suffering, set exquisite cruelty beside beauty, joined erotic longing to total oblivion, allowed seduction to end not in repentance but in horror and metamorphic ruin, and treated female same-sex desire with unflinching sympathy. Their legal exile lasted until 1949. They never truly disappeared.
How do you translate the scandal when the old euphemisms no longer shock? This definitive illustrated bilingual edition restores these poems and goes further than any previous collection. For the first time, each appears in three powerful versions side by side:
- Baudelaire's original French, preserving the cadence, perfume, and formal mastery of the 19th-century originals
- Faithful contemporary English translations that capture his music and meaning without softening the shock
- Bold literary "transcreations" by Dante Remy-new poems that enter Baudelaire's symbolic and psychological structures and follow them into the 21st century's
- Additionally, an extensive introduction exploring the 1857 trial, the nature of poetic scandal, and the art of "translating the forbidden"
- The visual history: 80 erotic illustrations drawn from two centuries of private, limited, and banned publications of Baudelaire's poetry.
Experience Baudelaire the way his first readers did: with unease, fascination, seduction, and moral uncertainty.
"Your Fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars." —Victor Hugo
"You have found a way to rejuvenate Romanticism... You are as unyielding as marble, and as penetrating as an English mist." —Gustave Flaubert
"Baudelaire is the first seer, king of poets, a true God." —Arthur Rimbaud
"All first-rate poetry is occupied with morality: this is the lesson of Baudelaire." —T.S. Eliot
"Baudelaire was the first to grasp the productive force of the alienated man and, by reifying it, to give it greater power." —Walter Benjamin
"In Les Fleurs du mal piety sneers, debauchery makes the sign of the cross, and Satan teaches the most profound theology." —Marcel Proust
"Baudelaire had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine... and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish." —Joris-Karl Huysmans
"The unique and supreme pleasure in love lies in the certainty of doing evil." —Charles Baudelaire