Fleurs du Mal | Hacker News Reader

Fleurs du Mal

fleursdumal.org

161 pointsFrummy59 comments

“Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!“

It is always interesting when random touchstones from my life appear on Hacker News: books like the Aubrey-Maturin (master and commander) series, Ursula Le Guin’s works, Dante, John Le Carre’s George Smiley novels, Tolstoy... and now Charles Baudelaire, at the top of the page no less.

Baudelaire was a dark misanthrope and the poetry is very bleak. His life was not happy and he died at 46. You probably need to have at least a little of the same darkness in your soul to get something out of it.

It’s worth remembering too, how strange and controversial this work was when it first came out, using traditional verse forms but with a relentlessly modern subject, poetry from the gutter of the 19th-century city. Modernism in literature has had 150 years to settle but this is the raw beginnings.

Some good ones: The Albatross, Invitation to the Voyage, Evening Harmony, and the Epilogue (“Le coeur content, je suis monté sur la montagne”). And many others.

Oh hey, I shared this in a comment a while back, dumping my tabs to show that hacker news reads more than code. Along with the lesser known cousin: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26063/...

> You probably need to have at least a little of the same darkness in your soul to get something out of it

In France he's part of the normal curriculum so every student reads and studies some of his poems (sometimes the whole book) between the ages of 15-17. Maybe that explains some of our national character?

The curriculum is larger than what can be taught in a couple of years. Literature professors get to pick the texts that will be studied in class. Therefore, chance plays a role in whether a given student will study Rimbaud or Baudelaire. In my case it was the former.

I used to try to convince the faculty at a stodgy Texas University to let me name courses (this was Texas A&M's Dept of CS); your course? "Baguettes and Baudelaire". My suggestion for the programming language course "Cunning linguists for Typical hands" was outright rejected, BTW. I argued that it had a great movie reference.

I studied both and so did my three kids (each in a different school). You can't really escape Molière, Hugo, Rimbaud and Baudelaire (and some others too).

Baudelaire also translated many short stories from E.A. Poe [1], and the famous The Raven which Poe uses as an example in one of its short essay (or science-fiction story?), The philosophy of composition. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire#Edgar_Allan...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Composition

Another interesting fact about Baudelaire: he was the translator into French of many of Edgar Allan Poe's works. They also shared many common points; Baudelaire said that when he opened one of Poe's books, he was reading subjects and sentences he had already dreamed about.

I love how this site immediately confronts you with the differences between translations, which quickly reveals how much skill and creativity can be in the translations themselves. Especially for poetry, a good translation is not just an imperfect copy, it's an artistic work where the authorship is shared between the original author and the translator.

I'm sure Baudelaire himself would have a few things to say on the topic. His translations of Edgar Allan Poe's works are notorious examples of art in translation. If you've got the French level, they are very much worth reading even if you've read the originals.

In 1968 a British newspaper ran a competition for English translations of "Spleen - Je suis comme le roi..." The poet Nicholas Moore - motivated by a belief that translating poetry was impossible and the project futile - sent in 31 different entries, by post, under false names and with varying levels of absurdity. He didn't win.

You can find them at https://www.ubu.com/ubu/pdf/moore_spleen.pdf, or in his published Selected Poems, along with an essay (written afterwards) about translation. Worth looking out.

(I particularly admire the sarcastic one that begins "I'm like The Winner of The Competition / The one who wrote the strong, rewarding phrase...")

I never read it in English, gotta compare the French & English version.

If someone wants to begin with Baudelaire, I would recommend his collection Le Spleen de Paris[0] - it's not poetry in its usual sense, but a collection of prose poems. I still remember picking the book randomly at our city library when I was 15 and reading the very first poem, L’ Étranger:

THE STRANGER

"Tell me, whom do you love the most, you enigmatic man? your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?"

"I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother."

"Your friends?"

"There you use a word whose meaning until now has remained to me unknown."

"Your fatherland?"

"I am unaware in what latitude it lies."

"Beauty?"

"I would willingly love her, goddess and immortal."

"Gold?"

"I hate it as you hate God."

"So! Then what do you love, you extraordinary stranger?"

"I love clouds... drifting clouds... there... over there... marvelous clouds!"

The book has been with me ever since, and as I'm getting older and re-read it I always discover new things. After all, there are themes a person has to grow into.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Spleen_de_Paris

I love the book.

This page is super interesting to me, because it's so focused and simple. I love the idea of an almost Wiki-like "this is some public domain thing you should know, so it has a dedicated website".

Would make a lot of sense to make it easy to create and host those.

As a husband and cat person, I can relate to this one: https://fleursdumal.org/poem/132

Wait. Does this has to do with the Mistral LLM?

sublime!

Not to look a gift horse too much in the mouth, but I find the multiple English translations overwhelming! But at the same time, the range of interpretation and the different colors a translator can inject are truly wild. There is no true translation, all are copies, all imperfect.

Even in French, the difficulties of reading or recitating it are multiple.

Called out by one of my favorite symphonic metal albums, featuring a Swedish band with an American singer covering French pop songs in metal covers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Fleurs_du_Mal_(Therion_a...

I was thinking of exactly the same album when I saw this post yesterday :)

By the way, while it’s not really metal, you might also like this live version of Sarah Brightman’s - Fleurs Du Mal: https://youtu.be/cOllWAhZhXY. It was filmed in Stephansdom Cathedral in Vienna and I went to visit it after seeing this video. It’s really impressive!

You're right, I did like it. Thanks!

You’re welcome!

I remember in college when I took French classes the professor very highly recommended Fleurs du mal. It was a difficult read for students with just one year of French, but I remember reading some translations and liked them.

I'm pleased: I'm nearly through Duolingo French and I can more or less read that.

I've done a fair bit of outside study, including a few (young adult) books. But it's nice to think that I could perhaps pass a college French class.

How long did it take to get through the DuoLingo French course?

Uh... five years, at a desultory but continuous pace.

Day 170ish of Duolingo German here. It’s both encouraging how far I’ve come and even more daunting than when I started.

Surely you used additional materials? Duolingo doesn’t teach grammar per se…

I had actually done the full Pimsleur course already. I've never tried Duolingo on a language that I had zero experience with.

I might try it on Chinese at some point, just to see what it's like.

Pimsleur doesn't do grammar per se either. They want you to infer it by feel, as a child does.

Right. I grew up in a German speaking house and was functional at 6 or so but lost it later on, so trying to get it back. I’m not sure whether that early exposure helps or hurts.

It forces you to kind of pick it up based on pattern matching. In order to understand things, you don't need great grammar, just passable one.

170 days of Duolingo is not enough. It sort of works... but yes, it takes a few years of daily focused work.

Sure, of course it’s not. I’m not aiming for a cram-course. I find Duolingo’s ridiculously effective gamification keeps me engaged.

I’ve augmented it with a grammar book and YouTube videos. Once I get stuck I plan to do lessons via italki or equivalent.

I think the anime based on this is pretty widely known:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flowers_of_Evil_(manga)

I quite liked the manga, but the anime IMO fell significantly short.

Anime in many ways does a better job of communicating Western culture to young people in the West, than anything that’s produced in the West.

Had to study this at school a while back, it was one of the first books (after Candide by Voltaire) that I found interesting at the time, and still have in my little library.

Okay so amazing website but then I scrolled down and saw "made by Supervert".

From his own website:

> Supervert is the assumed name of a writer using modernist literary techniques to explore sexual perversions

> Once upon a time there was a writer. The Devil spoke to him through a computer. "You will write about perversion, madness, and lust," said Satan. "You will use modernist literary techniques to explore sexual perversions. You will be known as Supervert."

Fascinating rabbit hole (huh), lots of good read.

He made a website about William Burroughs too: https://realitystudio.org/

I have a variety of early printings of this. My favorite being a 1931 edition illustrated by Major Felten, its beautiful.

Love this book and love this website. So many favorites, but just gonna mention one (had to "remix" and edit the translations, none of them sounded good): https://fleursdumal.org/poem/109

— О grief! О grief! Time eats life.

And the hidden Enemy who gnaws the heart

grows on the blood we lose and thrives.

— Ô douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie,

Et l'obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur

Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie!

I first came across this collection of poems via the secular Buddhist author Stephen Batchelor (best known for Buddhism Without Beliefs). He compared the poem Dear Reader (https://fleursdumal.org/poem/099) with a quote from the 9th century zen monk Te-Shan.

The relevant lines from the poem:

    But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds,
    The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,
    The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters,
    In the filthy menagerie of our vices,

    There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy!
    Although he makes neither great gestures nor great cries,
    He would willingly make of the earth a shambles
    And, in a yawn, swallow the world;

    He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears,
    He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe.
    You know him reader, that refined monster,
    — Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!

The quote from the zen monk:

    What is known as "realising the mystery" is nothing other than breaking through to grab an ordinary person's life.

The meaning I take is that the "final boss" of our journey, whether that's in meditation or programming, is confronting and integrating the non-zero possibility that we may never achieve our goals. It's not to dissuade us from even trying, it's rather to remind us where the true battle is: the immediate task at hand. Lack of focus and motivation aren't obstacles on the path, they _are_ the path, they are the final boss itself.

tl;dr success is 1% inspiration 99% perspiration

Thank you! It was really helpful to be reminded of this truth such an unexpected context. I am finally beginning to grab that “ordinary person’s life” & getting there has indeed been _the path_.

May we all get there & be free of suffering.

Glad to see this trending on HN! As I was born in France, I had the pleasure to read it. Just thought the multiple translations available on the site seem like a good corpus to see if frontier models could improve the translation.

Below is o3 take on "Le Chat", given as prompt the French original and all existing translations. I am not an expert in poetry and maybe not versed enough in English poetry specifically, but it looks suboptimal: It changed the structure, some verses seem overlong and I don't find the original beauty in "barbed claw's art".

https://fleursdumal.org/poem/132

Le Chat

Come, lovely cat, upon my ardent breast;

Sheathe in your velvet paw the barbed claw’s art,

And let me drown in eyes where, coalesced,

Cold agate gleams within a molten heart.

While idle fingers roam and fondly chart

Your supple head and sinuous arched spine,

My hand grows drunk on thrills that softly start

Across your vibrant body’s living line.

Then, in my mind, my woman’s gaze is mine:

Like yours, dear beast, it pierces—deep, serene.

From head to foot a perilous airs combine;

A subtle scent swims round her dusk‑brown sheen.

I was thinking about translating 'mal' to 'evil', as a non-native speaker for both languages.

For me, 'evil' seems to have a source and religious undertones. Evil can be stopped by adressing that source. People can avoid it. 'Flowers of evil' are probably given to you by the devil, and you've made a bad choice.

'Mal' is much more passive. It seeps into the world, slowly. It can't be avoided or adressed, only be felt, experienced. I'd translate it closer to 'badness'. The 'flowers of bad' are something you find in your room, and they'll stay there, with you, forever.

I don't even know if this is right, but funny how an attempt to translate shifts the meaning so much for me.

This is the same with "schlecht" in German, but the common translation of the title is still "Die Blumen des Bösen"

So "schlecht" also means both things.

I think it's probably common for languages to have a word that covers both.

But it seems the "evil" connotation is common or maybe even canonical in translations.

So Baudelaire certainly knew the meanings of the words he was using, enjoying the ambiguity. Maybe it's even intended for the translation to remain ambiguous? Just speculation here though.

« Rrose Sélavy demande si les Fleurs du Mal ont modifié les mœurs du phalle : qu’en pense Omphale ? »

The next-level interpretation by Surrealist poet Robert Desnos.

Right or not, it is indeed part of the just debate :)

Stupid but semi-related: when I lived in Chicago, I had just gotten a print copy of this and remember doing a double take when I saw a flower shop with the same name (Les Fleurs du Mal).

> Fleurs du mal / Flowers of Evil

> Les Fleurs du mal appeared on the bookshelves of Paris in June 1857...

Side note: it's not "Fleurs du Mal" but "Les Fleurs du Mal"; it's ok that the domain is shorter and doesn't include the article, but while the text appears to correctly include the article, the titles of each section or edition should too.

as a Siene (and many other rivers in faraway lands) of techies everyone can understand the concept, Baudelaire felt, of being and then creating alone in a crowd

to try to be together with something or someone

I'd like to buy this in book form. Can anyone recommend an english translation?

Fleur du Mal, is that the same (concept) as "Wages of Sin"?

In a sense, it's the opposite of "the roots of evil". It's extremely decadent as a title.

That's a nice connection.

Literally, it is "The Flowers of Evil" (and "Les Fleurs du Mal", not [a] "Fleur du Mal").

The fruits of an ill-gotten gain.

i’ll confess my 18-year old self viewed this type of poetry and french class itself through a rather narrow, pragmatic lens…

Attracting women?

My first introduction to Baudelaire was Groundhogs Day, where Bill Murray learns French to impress a woman.

touché

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