1 1

Flowers of Evil

Flowers of Evil

by Charles Baudelaire, translated from the French by George Dillon and Edna St. Vincent Millay

$20.00
$20.00
Available as E-Book French Literature Poets & Poetry
Format
This title can be purchased from your favorite e-book retailer,
including  many independent booksellers.

Buy on Amazon   Buy on iBooks   Buy on Barnes&Noble
Charles Baudelaire invented modern poetry, and Flowers of Evil has been a bible for poets from Arthur Rimbaud to T. S. Eliot to Edna St. Vincent Millay, who, with George Dillon, composed an inspired rhymed version of the book published in 1936 and reprinted here, with the French originals, for the first time in many years.

Millay and Dillon, while respectful of the spirit of the originals, lay claim to them as to a rightful inheritance, setting Baudelaire’s flowing lines to the music of English. The result is one of the most persuasive renditions of the French poet’s opulence, his tortured consciousness, and his troubling sensuality, as well as an impressive reimagining of his rhymes and rhythms on a par with Marianne Moore’s La Fontaine or Richard Wilbur’s Molière.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Poets
ISBN: 9781681378282
Pages: 288
Publication Date:

Praise

In [Millay and Dillon’s] Flowers of Evil a path has been opened for the blending of French and English poetry. Here are translations not smelling at all of the dictionary. ‘The Litanies of Satan’ in particular seems to come from a dim chapel draped with black banners....Let us hope that this book will stand as an English Baudelaire for some time, without the guidebook counterparts.
—Agnes Lee Freer, Poetry

The perfume of Baudelaire’s infernal flowers still wafts off the page, as powerful a deliriant as ever, 167 years on.
—Mark Dery, 4 Columns

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it