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 dedoublement, 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
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