More info: The Flowers of Evil

Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil reinvented beauty in the midst of modernity and has deeply influenced the course of world literature since its publication in mid-nineteenth century Paris. With profound irony, moral complexity, and formal virtuosity, Baudelaire’s singular volume speaks in a voice at once caustic and vulnerable, melancholic and humorous, bringing to the surface new depths of psychological and social life through an astonishing variety of poetic forms and styles.  

This new translation by poetry scholar Nathan Brown presents precise English versions of Baudelaire’s poems alongside the French text. Brown has carefully preserved the lineation, figurative language, punctuation, and grammatical structures of the original, finally giving us an edition suitable not only for the general reader but also for use by scholars and teachers working in English. Recognized as the most successful translation of The Flowers of Evil by eminent poetry critic Marjorie Perloff, this version of Baudelaire sets a new standard for fidelity to the original and sensitivity to the tone of this central work of modern literature. 

More info: Baudelaire's Shadow

A central, inescapable contradiction runs throughout The Flowers of Evil: to be determining is to be determined. In Baudelaire’s Shadow, Nathan Brown elucidates and theorizes this dialectical problem of determination as it works across the spiritual, sexual, metaphysical, social, and aesthetic dramas of Baudelaire’s volume. Combining close formal analysis of particular poems with a synthetic grasp of the book as a whole, while developing a philosophical approach capable of grappling with its complex ironies, Brown studies figures of mediation across chapters focused on death, the void, the actuality of the social, and the materiality of the signifier. Each of these thematic and conceptual cruxes, he argues, can be understood in terms of a dialectic of determination—of agency bound up with its negation—functioning at the level of both form and content. Brown shows that such an approach clarifies the stakes of Baudelaire’s Romantic Satanism, his treatment of race and eroticism, the conceptual relation between Spleen and Ideal, the significance of ekphrastic representation and apocalyptic imagination, the use of free indirect discourse, and the ambiguity of metaphorical reference. Written as a continuous essay in a style at once poetic and philosophically rigorous, Baudelaire’s Shadow sheds new light on The Flowers of Evil and its significance for our understanding of modern poetry and subjectivity.

Nathan Brown is Associate Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Poetics at Concordia University, Montréal, where he directs the Centre for Expanded Poetics. He is the author of Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique and The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics. His translation of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil was also published by MaMa in 2021.