What are the best translations of Baudelaire and Rimbaud?

>Most people have a life
You don't know French, therefore your quality of life is undoubtedly pretty piss-poor. If you "had a life", you would've learned French as a child as part of your education. Unfortunately, such opportunities are not afforded to those of your ilk (smelly peasants).

learning french is a part of the canadian curriculum and by grade 12 the students don't know how to spell basic words, they have no accent and they forget it all in a year. Self taught is the only way

>canadian
Stopped there.

Based bilingual chad. I wish i had trilingual Bible with latin and greek.

than stick to poetry you can read, pleb

Hey I read 5 of his poems and got bored and stop reading Baudelaire and I want to learn French in order to read Baudelaire in the original French
How many years will it take me to learn?

This site has multiple translations and multiple editions, you can check them out yourself.
fleursdumal dot org

You know, if you were really someone who liked Baudelaire a lot you probably wouldn't have gotten bored of reading him, even in translation. It might be a waste of your time to learn French solely in order to read him... just a thought.

The Assimil course is 6 months with 30 min daily sessions. Couple that with the series French in Action and you can start reading some simple works in 6 months and work your way up from there.

I don't really get what you're talking about but thanks for the input
That sounds good, thank you

Fine I’ll stick to Catallus, Ovid, Homer, etc. Don’t have time for French. I would never use it

This is true, poetry does not translate well. To demonstrate it to yourself read a bilingual edition of Middle English to Modern English poetry, like Gawain, Pearl, Arthurian epic etc. Off the bat you'll understand 50% of the words, and you will realise how all the arts of languague that make the original sound compelling, like alliteration and metre, are lost in the Modern English translation despite the affinity and commonality of the two.

Baudelaire made most of his money translating Poe into French. I don’t think he would be against reading his poetry in English translation.

>Okay, well, I've read both Baudelaire and Rimbaud, along with Verlaine, Mallarmé, Gautier, Laforgue, Villon, Valéry, etc.
Then you won't mind giving me a quick explanation of how Mallarme and Verlaine use the moon differently as a symbol.

Can anyone recommend english poets that are similar to Baudelaire?

(Besides Poe)

Rimbaud and Baudelaire translate fine. It’s their energy that makes them great. I would rather see the meaning behind the words than hear some pretty words or nice rhymes

Maybe Swinburne?

Which translations are the best?

You're right, I don't know why I didn't think of Swinburne. I'll check out more of his poetry, I've only read The Garden of Proserpine but I really liked it.

I’m not too into poetry, but I think he’s one of the best. Unsure why his star isn’t as bright as other English poets

I liked Martin Sorrell's prose translations.

Attached: Martin Sorrell.jpg (1512x2339, 202.87K)

I don't really care about things like rhyme, alliteration or metre
I read poetry because I like seeing cool words next to cool words

Guys, how do I get into Baudelaire? I tried multiple times but always drop it at the 20th or so poem.

Wait do you sit down and read a poetry anthology like a novel? I have no idea how you're supposed to approach a poetry anthology but that sounds awful. I just pick it up and read a few that catch my attention, or entirely at random.

That's prose Patrick

Wait... You weren't supossed to read it from the beginning to the end like you would listen an album?

has anyone read john ashbery's translation of Illuminations?

Flowers of Evil isn't really an "anthology" in that sense though, it has thematically divided sections and and some sense of progression and development throughout.

As I said to the other user, he's not supposed to be difficult to get into, the aesthetic and emotional payoff is pretty immediate. If it didn't grab you, that probably means it's just not to your taste.

fpbp
/thread

If you really knew those languages French (and language learning in general) would be so easy for you, you would’t say shit like Cool larp though.

Rimbaud maybe but Baudelaire is a master of form and it just doesn’t make sense to read him in translation except for his prose poems.

You don’t get poetry. In great poetry (i.e. pre-modern poetry) there is no separation between “pretty words or nice rhymes” and meaning. The best modernist poets understood this. If you are more interested in the “meaning”, you should read second-rate hack novels, not poetry.

Think of them like music albums. The best ones are not just a random collection of songs, but share various elements between each other. Do you necessarily need to read them in order? Not really, but you need to understand that there is a reason for the order and arrangement of the poems in the overall work.

>of the easiest language for an English speaker to learn
I learned the right language the first time. English.
Foreigners are so backwards sometimes haha.

Don't look for taste of Baudelaire in English poetry of the time, what serves as his heir are the modernists, and there are plenty of those in the English language. Even if Joyce didn't or Beckett or Woolf didn't see Baudelaire as a direct predecessor, they're all "modern" in a way that began with Baudelaire.

Hmm, it seems no one has answered your question. I don't know about Baudelaire but for Rimbaud, the best translation I've seen coincides with some of the best scholarly work done outside France on Rimbaud, mister Wallace Fowlie, a real monument in French literary studied in the states.
If you like it, you should definitely try to pick up the language, even if it takes times :)

Eliot interpolated a line from Baudelaire in The Waste Land, idk if he was a real influence but obviously he at least read him.

Besides Montaigne and Stendhal, no reason to read the French

Ye that's what I'm saying though, it takes like, 50-70 years for Baudelaire's influence to actually be felt. Also I haven't actually read Eliot well but iirc Jules Laforgue and Baudelaire were his two biggest cited influences because they both turned the city into a landscape which could be material for poetry where as in works before it was only nature that could serve as such

So you like your poetry superficial, gotcha

That's weird considering the Augustans did that about 150 years before Baudelaire, but I suppose that was a different sort of poetry.

Yes. Seethe

Baudelaire has enough imagery and emotion to be interesting in translation though. Yes maybe I'm missing the best part but I don't know what I'm missing and it's still worth reading even if it's less than perfect.

still fpbp

Learn French.

you have the reading comprehension of a child

Robert Lowell Imitations is very very good

Imagine being cocky about being born in one part of the world over another. You didn't learn anything. You just happened to get taught English

Yea Forumssisters... we been btfo...

Fpbp