Late Fragments Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed by Charles Baudelaire as Translated by Richard Sieburth
While not as well‑known as his other works, Charles Baudelaire’s late poems, drafts of poems, and prose fragments are texts indispensable to the history of modern poetics.
This volume brings together Baudelaire’s late fragmentary writings, aphoristic in form and radical in thought, into one edited collection for the first time. Substantial introductions to each work by Richard Sieburth combine the literary context with formal analysis and reception history to give readers a comprehensive picture of the genesis of these works and their subsequent fate.
Baudelaire’s turn toward fragmentary writing involved not only a conscious renunciation of his aesthetics of perfection and unity, but a desertion of the harmonies of the traditional lyric in favor of the disjunctions of prose. These are daring works, often painful to read in their misanthropy and unconventional beauty.
Richard Sieburth is a translator, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. He has gained widespread recognition for his numerous translations from both German and French literature, receiving a number of awards and prizes for his work. Sieburth is considered an authority on literary modernism, particularly the life and work of Ezra Pound. He has taught at many institutions of higher learning, serving as a professor of French and comparative literature at New York University.
“If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment … all that he has to do is write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple — a few plain words — ‘My Heart Laid Bare.’” But — this little book must be true to its title … But to write it — there is the rub. No man dare write it. No man will dare ever write it. No man could write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.”
Publisher: Yale University Press