Charles Baudelaire: Paris Blues / Le Spleen De Paris: The Poems in Prose with La Fanfarlo

Baudelaire’s prose poems were written over many years and published in magazines between 1855 and his death in 1867. Francis Scarfe’s translations reflect a lifetime’s passion for Baudelaire’s work and a deep understanding of it. The appeal of ‘this beautiful book’, he says in his introduction, ‘lies in its wide range of subjects, its variations of tone and mood, its great variety of presentation and above all in its psychological subtleties. It shows the poet at the height of his powers, totally uninhibited in his expression of wonder, tenderness and compassion’. Francis Scarfe has appended an early prose extravaganza, the delightful short novel La Fanfarlo (1847), which has much in common with the poems. The companion volume, The Complete Verse , contains all Baudelaire’s poetry in verse, from Les Fleurs du mal (1861) to his occasional poems and translations.