Charles Baudelaire Paris Scenes: A bilingual edition

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 t...