Unnamed Pleasures: Essential Poems

"the first seer, the king of poets, a true God." * Arthur Rimbaud *
Unnamed Pleasures is indeed a total pleasure. Philip Terry's Baudelaire is sensual, political, and feverishly brilliant. This intelligent and important new translation manages that difficult thing - to keep Baudelaire's infinitely suggestive symbols as open secrets, quivering with possibilities. -- Clare Pollard
Baudelaire is everything. The genius of Terry's translation makes that foundational, new and thrilling. This book will be my teacher and agitant for the rest of my reading life. I'm shaking with excitement that it's here. Every writer who values their debt to the provocateurs, wicked poets, radical experimentalists and rebels of Modernism, should have this book on their shelf. -- Holly Pester
Philip Terry's ambition in translating this giant literary work from the past is to immerse it in the present, while witnessing its roots and their echoes. Liberated from mimicking Baudelaire's rhyme, but smelted to his rhythms, he floods Baudelaire's idiom with a vocabulary that reaches out to the contemporary. Whether in verse or prose, these translations and the material that accompanies them have all the flexibility needed for this complex aesthetic, an aesthetic for our time and any time, steeped in irony and morality. -- Timothy Mathews
The greatest poet of the nineteenth century * Marcel Proust *
The greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language * T.S. Eliot *
Terry is a highly resourceful experimentalist * TLS *
"Your fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars..." -- Victor Hugo
'The fame of the Fleurs du Mal has steadily increased. This book ... has, over the decades, acquired the stature of a classic.' -- Walter Benjamin
No one has written on the poor with more genuine tenderness than Baudelaire, that "dandy," did. Baudelaire's line was so vigorous, so firm and beautiful that it lured the poet to overstep some bounds without realizing it. ...Baudelaire as the man who wrote best on the humble people and on the beyond It remains nevertheless true that those stately condemned poems, added to the others, produce a wholly different effect. They are restored to their position among the greatest in the book, like those crystal, haughty waves which majestically rise after the evenings of storm and which broaden the boundless vision of the sea with their alternating crests. -- Marcel Proust * https://www.enotes.com/topics/flowers-evil/criticism/criticism/marcel-proust-essay-date-1921 *
dans une lettre écrite en 1868 : ""Les Fleurs du Mal" on commencera peut-être à les comprendre dans quelques années. Faut-il vous dire à vous qui ne l'avait pas plus deviné que les autres, que dans ce livre atroce, j'ai mis tout mon cœur, toute ma tendresse, toute ma religion (travestie), toute ma haine. Il est vrai que j'écrirais le contraire, que je jurerais mes grands dieux que c'est un livre d'art pur, de singeries, de jongleries, et je mentirais comme un arracheur de dents." '...into this appalling book I have placed all my heart, all my affection, all my faith (in disguise), all my hatred. It's true that I would write the opposite, I would swear by my mighty gods that it's a book of pure art, of apery, sleight of hand, and I'd be lying like a gutter tooth-puller.' -- Charles Baudelaire * https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/baudelaire-les-fleurs-du-mal-dans-ce-livre-atroce-j-ai-mis-tout-mon-coeur-ma-tendresse-et-ma-haine-2357427 *
'This new Baudelaire re-releases his enraged energies in surprising and bold ways ... Philip Terry's seething version of 'To the Reader' takes us straight into the disgust vortex and there's no letting up from that point on. He rides the blistering contempt, containing it without ever draining it of its destructive force.' -- Leonie Rushforth