Title: Evil Rhymes
Review: What I like best about this admittedly eccentric translation is the way Walter Martin renders the poems in rhyme. Baudelaire's extreme content--his embrace of putrefaction, filth, sadism and ennui as fit stuff for poetry--owes much of its impact to the tight, disciplined meter he chose for his medium. Most Baudelaire translations don't capture this classical edge in English, turning the poems into free verse or prose. While Martin has to bend the exact meaning a little (often a lot) to get the English to fit, on the whole he does an impressive job of making the verse sound exact and controlled but not too sing-songy. There's no ponderous introduction to bug you either, just a short & highly personal 'Afterthoughts' section with some intriguing insights. This isn't the only translation you'll want to read, but it recovers a side of modernity's bad boy that's hard to find anywhere else.
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