Les Fleurs de Mal (flowers of evil) is a collection of poems by romanticism poet Charles baudelaire and is the bulk of its poetic output after 1840. A hallmark of modern poetry, it charters new uses of aesthetics in which beauty makes appearances through sublime ways thanks to a poetic language befitting the trivial side of reality. This opus would eventually be the main source of influence to late authors such as Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.
Compared to the Puritanism of Victorian England, Paris enjoyed a much more lax mindset regarding being proper and sticking to common ethics. Being considered a haven for tolerance where the naughty pieces (including those concerning apologies to the practice of unfaithfulness within wedlock, ménage à trois and lewd all-out orgies) by Jacques Offenbach were allowed to flourish without the slightest constraint, the intial
release of Les Fleurs du Mal had to overcome a measure of criticism as some bits of it contained verses suggestive of pornography:
Elle était donc couchée et se laissait aimer,
Et du haut du divan elle souriait d’aise
À mon amour profond et doux comme la mer,
Qui vers elle montait comme vers sa falaise.
She was then lying down and let herself be loved
And on the couch she smiled with delight
at my deep love, gentle as the sea
to which she went down to as a cliff
The author was adamant that his ‘livre atroce’ was impure
and that the individual poems poured out their full significance only if the reader went over them within the ‘cadre sigulier’ in which he had set them. The 100 poem collection was doled out into 5 chapters:
Spleen et Idéal (Spleen and Ideal)
Tableaux parisiens (Parisian Scenes)
Le Vin (Wine)
Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil)
Révolte (Revolt)
La Mort (Death)
‘Tableaux parisiens’, was inserted into the revised
structure used for the 126 poems of the 1861 edition. Les Fleurs du mal
records, in poetry in which lyricism and irony are fused, the quest of
divided modern man for an ‘ideal’—variously sought in art, eroticism,
travel, drugs, and political, social, and metaphysical revolt—that
forever eludes him, plunging him back into the agony of isolation and
despair that Baudelaire called ‘spleen’. Oscillating from one extreme to
another, the quest is open-ended, ever to be renewed, and takes the
seeker beyond the realms of life and death ‘au fond de l'Inconnu pour
trouver du nouveau’
I BÉNÉDICTION
Lorsque, par un décret des puissances suprêmes,
Le Poète apparaît en ce monde ennuyé,
Sa mère épouvantée et pleine de blasphèmes
Crispe ses poings vers Dieu qui la prend en pitié:
When by a degree of supreme forces
the poet appears bored in his world
his mother terrified and ridden with blasphemies
She clenches her fists towards a pitying God.
— « Ah ! que n'ai-je mis bas tout un nœud devipères,
Plutôt que de nourrir cette dérision !
Maudite soit la nuit aux plaisirs éphémères
Où mon ventre a conçu mon expiation !
Ah, when I was down in a viper pit
Rather than nourish this mockery
Cursed be the night of ephemeral pleasures
Wherein my stomach has devised my atonement.
Puisque tu m'as choisie entre toutes les femmes
Pour être le dégoût de mon triste mari,
Et que je ne puis pas rejeter dans les flammes,
Comme un billet d'amour, ce monstre rabougri,
Because you chose me among all women
For being the disgust of my sad husband
And that I can't throw myself into flames
Like a love letter, this scrubby monster
Je ferai rejaillir ta haine qui m'accable
Sur l'instrument maudit de tes méchancetés,
Et je tordrai si bien cet arbre misérable,
Qu'il ne pourra pousser ses boutons empestés!»
I will come out of your hate that overwhelms me
With the cursed instrument of your wickedness
And so I choke this wretched tree
that was unable to sprout its plagued buds!
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