LES FLEURS DU MAL

Last week I finished reading Baudelaire's lengthy collection of poems. Well, what I read was the latest edition, kind of like a ultimate edition dvd of a movie that's been out for decades but they keep on adding, I don't know, a ten-minute interview, so all the mugs have to buy the thing for a ultimate price. It had the original french text as well as the "new" english translation with far too many notes. The poems themselves didn't quite live up to my expectations bar a few notable exceptions. Une Charogne or A Carcass is a rather obvious favourite but I found it to encapsulate the best of Baudelaire's work in one poem:

-And you, in your turn, will be rotten as this:

Horrible, filthy, undone,

O sun of my nature and star of my eyes,

My passion, my angel in one!

It got all the morbid, provocative stuff that Baudelaire's infamous for but, unlike some of the lesser poems in the book, maintained a message and truth rather than feeling like mere attempts to outrage. In fact the poem felt close to the best Smiths songs, those that deal with miserable subjects but are lit with a, albeit twisted, glint of optimism. Beauty amidst the drudgery. Light at the the end of Moz's darkened underpass. I don't think I can fairly comment on Baudelaire as I think that poetry, much more so than novels or plays, really suffers in the translation for, in my opinion, the dense sentences of Proust or Genet seem more poetic than the sometimes clumsily translated (especially where the translation is attempting to keep Baudelaire's rhyme structure) Flowers of Evil .