Baudelaire's Banned Poetry, The Censored, Erotic & Vampiric Pocketbook Bilingual Edition

Baudelaire's Banned Poetry: The Censored, Erotic & Vampiric

Pocketbook Bilingual Edition from Black Fern

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, let seduction 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 pocketbook bilingual edition gathers the censored poems of Les Fleurs du Mal and Les Épaves and presents each in three versions:

• 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
• An introduction on the 1857 trial, the nature of poetic scandal, and the art of "translating the forbidden"

Produced as a pocketbook, this bilingual poetry collection goes where you go. Slip it in a coat pocket or purse, keep it on the nightstand, or read it at the bus stop. Baudelaire has never been this easy to carry, or this hard to put down.

Experience Baudelaire the way his first readers did: with unease, fascination, seduction, and moral uncertainty.