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Title: When the translations are good, they floor you
Review: It's such a pleasure to pick these up again and be reminded of just how cool of a writer Baudelaire was. He manages to move between ruminations on lonliness, decay, and death, and these really great, decedent, in-your-face satires of everything in Paris that pisses him off/makes him fall madly in love. I don't know much French, but the Mathews edition seems kind of uneven to me, probably because it was done by so many different people. Sometimes they just hit this perfect stride and the poems will leave you floored, other times it seems like some of the translators just don't have the energy to render stuff this lively into English without it getting a bit clunky. Maybe I'll read Paris Spleen next?
