The following is a list of translations in English of Les Fleurs du Mal. The list is not complete. The listings with photos attached are in my collection. 1. F.P. Sturm The Poems of Charles Baudelaire, 1906 2. J.C. Squire Poems & Baudelaire Flowers, 1909 3. Arthur Symons Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal I am unsure of the date of first publication. I know the poems through an anthology entitled Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine: Selected Verse & Prose Poems edited by Joseph M. Bernstein, 1947  4. Lewis Piaget Shanks Les Fleurs du Mal: The Complete Poems, 1926  5. Beresford Egan and C. Bower Alcock Flowers of Evil, 1929 6. George Dillon and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Flowers of Evil, 1936 St. Vincent Millay rendered her translations as approximations of the French alexandrine. There is a discussion of the problems of translating into English hexameters in her preface. This, and the Lappin book (see below) are the only two works I know that use this approach instead of the iambic pentameter. "We soon found that we often came much closer to the effect we wanted by importing into the 12-syllable line---whenever...it seemed bumpy or unbalanced---one or two (infrequently three) extra syllables, still always keeping the line, however, a line of six feet".  7. James Laver / Jacob Epstein Charles Baudelaire: Flowers of Evil, 1940 8. C.F. MacIntyre Baudelaire: One Hundred Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal, 1949 This translator dispenses with the alexandrine: "I hope my practice of mixing pure with slant or suspended rhymes, of employing consonance and assonance, and of using as nearly as possible the word order of good prose will give the reader some understanding of the effect of the poet created..."  8. Roy Campbell Poems of Baudelaire, 1952  9. William Aggeler Charles Baudelaire: The Flowers of Evil, 1954  10. Marthiel and Jackson Mathews Charles Baudelaire: The Flowers of Evil, 1955  11. Francis Scarfe Baudelaire: Selected Verse, 1961 12. Francis Duke The Flowers of Evil and Other Poems of Charles Baudelaire, 1961 "The iambic pentameter with its elegance, sonority, flexibility, force, and illustrious history, needs no defence as to its intrinsic merits."  13. James Laver, editor Charles Baudelaire: The Flowers of Evil, 1971  14. Joanna Richardson Selected Poems of Baudelaire, 1975 15. Jack Hibberd Baudelaire: Le Vin des Amants, 1977  15. Richard Howard Les Fleurs du Mal, a new translation, 1983 Howard's translations do not rhyme but emphasizes the structural relationship amongst the poems: "I have employed all the artifices in my power to make up for, even to suggest, the consentaneous regularities that the persistent use of rhyme affords...eschewing 'terminal consonance' for the sake of cumulative effects, that 'secret architecture' Baudelaire so prided himself upon."  Lappin's translations do no rhyme either; he takes " a strategic approach featuring de-emphasis of rhyme in favor of rhythm". He approximates Baudelaire's alexandrines in English with a "flexible, often- defective anapestic tetrameter. A commitment to a rhyme-scheme complicates the rendition of content and impairs accuracy.  Waldrop has rendered the poems as prose "versets" with paragraph breaks between stanzas. |
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