Charles Baudelaire Paris Scenes

The ‘Tableaux Parisiens’ (Paris Scenes) section of Les Fleurs du Mal contains eighteen poems which record a twenty-four-hour tour of the city: a type of Joycean journey from the point of view of a dandy Odysseus. Many of the poems in the sequence possess the sharpness and intensity of a dream, a dédoublement, enabling us to contemplate life in a manner that merges the fantastic and the sordidly realistic.

These new translations are accompanied by artist Sally Castle’s responses prompted by the work of Constantin Guys, Baudelaire’s favourite ‘painter of modern life’.

‘These unblinking translations by Ian Brinton offer us a revival of Baudelaire’s offense against public morals. Hand-in-hand with the poet’s unquiet ghost, Brinton reminds us of the transparency of our contemporary mores so that we see through to Baudelaire’s genius, to his insistent sense of mortality in its Romantic eroticism and corruption. To understand the poet “tranced in envy” at the antics of these corpse-like erotics is to glimpse a form of compassion, of pity for the human condition. This strange and haunting quality is there at every turn of Brinton’s Baudelaire.’ — KELVIN CORCORAN

Author Biography

Ian Brinton is a graduate from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, who has spent nearly forty years as a Secondary School teacher in five different schools around the country. After retirement in 2009 he has become a full-time writer of both poetry and criticism. For some years he edited the magazine The Use of English for The English Association and is now co-editor of both Tears in the Fence and SNOW. He has been closely involved with the setting up of the Cambridge University Modern Poetry Archive and reviews regularly for both The London Magazine and Golden Handcuffs Review.
Sally Castle has designed covers and illustrated over thirty books for Two Rivers Press. She has a reputation for original hand lettering, and a particular interest in linocut printmaking, environmental lettering and mixed media artwork. Notable public work includes the Walking Words panels at Chatham Place in Reading and the Forbury Square stone, also in Reading. As well as commissioned work, her experimental lettering and paintings are regularly exhibited in galleries and exhibitions.