THE FLOWERS OF EVIL. By Charles Baudelaire. (Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 35s.) THE FLOWERS OF EVIL. By Charles Baudelaire. (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 35s.) Tuts bilingual edition ta Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal is an expensive book and would be a worthier project if the translations had not been in verse. Translation can serve two ends: to produce good original poetry in the trans- lator's language or to help the reader with the foreign words he does not know. Here most of the poetry is rather inferior (Roy Campbell and Allen Tate are the only poets anywhere near up to it), while the necessities of forcing the sense into rhyme make these renderings useless from the point of view of the reader with a little French and no inclination to use a dictionary. Of course, it is pleasant to have the French text, but there are cheaper ones on the market.
RICHARD STEVENS
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