A major work of world literature, The Flowers of Evil scandalized Baudelaire’s contemporaries and reinvented beauty in the midst of modernity. This dual-language edition of the definitive 1861 version features a new translation by acclaimed poetry scholar Nathan Brown and a new introduction.

A major work of world literature, The Flowers of Evil scandalized Baudelaire’s  contemporaries and reinvented beauty in the midst of modernity. Probing the depths of the modern psyche in a voice at once caustic and vulnerable, melancholic and humorous, Baudelaire’s infamous book brings to the surface a new understanding of evil, of eroticism, and of social life through an astonishing variety of poetic forms and styles.

When it was published in 1857, six poems of the volume’s poems were banned on charges of obscenity. Baudelaire then reworked the book into a masterfully expanded version published in 1861.

This new translation by acclaimed poetry scholar Nathan Brown includes the banned poems in a facing-page, dual-language edition of the definitive 1861 version, along with a major new introduction to the significance of Baudelaire’s work.

Brown has carefully preserved the lineation, figurative language, punctuation, and grammatical structures of the original, finally giving us a version of The Flowers of Evil suitable for the general reader as well as scholars and teachers working in English. 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.

Charles Baudelaire was the foremost poet of modern French Literature. Known for revolutionizing the tone and content of modern lyric poetry, he was the author of The Flowers of Evil, Paris Spleen, and Artificial Paradises, as well as the epochal essay, “The Painter of Modern Life.”

Nathan Brown is Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Poetics at Concordia University, where he is founding director of the Centre for Expanded Poetics. He is the author of Baudelaire’s Shadow: An Essay on Poetic Determination (2021), Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (2021), and The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (2017).