French poet, essayist, art critic and translator Charles Baudelaire inaugurated a new era in world literature - indeed, he coined the term 'modernity'. This fresh translation of his best poetry, by eminent translator, poet, and novelist Philip Terry, lays bare the richness and the long afterlife of Baudelaire's verse, and brings out all the originality of his ideas.Here, in lushly visual and sonorous verse, we find themes that still preoccupy us today. Baudelaire captured life in the city like no one else, drawing a portrait of Paris as the ultimate glittering seductress - and also as a fragmented landscape peopled by isolated individuals. As much as an urban eyewitness, he was an incisive personal poet, vividly evoking the ebb and flow of desire: the joy of fulfilling it, the agony of feeling, and even worse, not feeling it. Terry's bold, contemporary translation style makes clear why Baudelaire, a century and a half after his death, is still the painter of modern life.



Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was born in Paris. Trained in law, he flouted his family's wishes that he pursue a steady career to become a writer. Baudelaire spent freely and drank copiously, becoming known as a dandy in artistic circles, but his writing also quickly gained him renown as an influential thinker and belletrist. His first poetry collection, The Flowers of Evil, published in 1857, confirmed both sides of his reputation - it was instantly influential and highly praised, but also the subject of a notorious obscenity trial. Baudelaire worked across many genres, writing art criticism, poetry, essays, and translations, notably of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Always short of money, and increasingly subject to symptoms of syphilis, he embarked on an ill-fated lecture tour of Belgium, where he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1866, rendering him unable to speak for the final months of his life. His immense influence on French and English literature, already clear in his lifetime, has lived on since his death.Philip Terry was born in Belfast, and is a poet, translator, and a writer of fiction. He has translated the work of Georges Perec, Michèle Métail and Raymond Queneau, and is the author of the novel tapestry, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. His poetry and experimental translations include Oulipoems, Dante's Inferno, and Dictator, a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Globish, which refracts his experience of working with migrants in Sicily with Stories in Transit.The Penguin Book of Oulipo, which he edited, was published in Penguin Modern Classics in 2020, and Carcanet published his edition of Jean-Luc Champerret's The Lascaux Notebooks, the first ever anthology of Ice Age poetry, in April 2022. His version of Dante's Purgatorio, relocated to Mersea Island in Essex, was published in October 2024 - "A Dante like no other" (London Review Bookshop).



The greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language



Terry is a highly resourceful experimentalist



"Your fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars..."



'The fame of the Fleurs du Mal has steadily increased. This book ... has, over the decades, acquired the stature of a classic.'



"the first seer, the king of poets, a true God."



The greatest poet of the nineteenth century



No one has written on the poor with more genuine tenderness than Baudelaire, that "dandy," did. Baudelaire's line was so vigorous, so firm and beautiful that it lured the poet to overstep some bounds without realizing it....Baudelaire as the man who wrote best on the humble people and on the beyondIt remains nevertheless true that those stately condemned poems, added to the others, produce a wholly different effect. They are restored to their position among the greatest in the book, like those crystal, haughty waves which majestically rise after the evenings of storm and which broaden the boundless vision of the sea with their alternating crests.



dans une lettre écrite en 1868 : ""Les Fleurs du Mal" on commencera peut-être à les comprendre dans quelques années. Faut-il vous dire à vous qui ne l'avait pas plus deviné que les autres, que dans ce livre atroce, j'ai mis tout mon cœur, toute ma tendresse, toute ma religion (travestie), toute ma haine. Il est vrai que j'écrirais le contraire, que je jurerais mes grands dieux que c'est un livre d'art pur, de singeries, de jongleries, et je mentirais comme un arracheur de dents."'...into this appalling book I have placed all my heart, all my affection, all my faith (in disguise), all my hatred. It's true that I would write the opposite, I would swear by my mighty gods that it's a book of pure art, of apery, sleight of hand, and I'd be lying like a gutter tooth-puller.'