Baudelaire's World

Charles Baudelaire is often regarded as the founder of modernist poetry. Written with clarity and verve, Baudelaire's World provides English-language readers with the biographical, historical, and cultural contexts that will lead to a fuller understanding and enjoyment of the great French poet's work.Rosemary Lloyd considers all of Baudelaire's writing, including his criticism, theory, and letters, as well as poetry. In doing so, she sets the poems themselves in a richer context, in a landscape of real places populated with actual people. She shows how Baudelaire's poetry was marked by the influence of the writers and artists who preceded him or were his contemporaries. Lloyd builds an image of Baudelaire's world around major themes of his writing—childhood, women, reading, the city, dreams, art, nature, death. Throughout, she finds that his words and themes echo the historical and physical realities of life in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Lloyd also explores the possibilities and limitations of translation. As an integral part of her treatment of the life, poetry, and letters of her subject, she also reflects on published translations of Baudelaire's work and offers some of her own translations.

Translators are moody darlings—here ecstatic, there mischievous and ready to betray—and criticism is not more faithful either. Aware of this predicament, Lloyd does not only propose a reading but, most significantly, provides a rich ground on which other readings can be drawn. Ultimately, Baudelaire's World has many entries, and many streets entice the reader with illicit charms., Drawing on her own translations as well as those of other poets, Lloyd offers a lively discourse on the possibilities and limitations of translation. For academic libraries with large collections of poetry and poetic criticism., The prose is lively, passionate, even humorous, and scrupulously researched., Lloyd's objective is to scrutinize the culture and influences that shaped the French poet. She does not recapitulate his life, except to illustrate something in the verse.... Few conventional biographies, though, offer so clear a picture of personality and thought process as does Lloyd's critical study., Rosemary Lloyd's latest book brings a fresh approach to Baudelaire studies, thanks to the savvy use of English translations to stress elements easily lost or unappreciated by non-French readers.... Although not a biography in the full sense, her study avoids separating the man and the work. Lloyd wants to indicate how a reading that honors the complexities of his writings might proceed. And in this respect Baudelaire's World achieves its goal.... Accompanied by some previously unpublished illustrations and printed in an edition at once environmentally responsible and esthetically attractive, Rosemary Lloyd's Baudelaire's World makes a nice acquisition for undergraduate as well as graduate libraries. For Baudelaire specialists there are some excellent finds—such as the plate from Francois Baudelaire's illustrated Latin vocabulary—as well as Lloyd's exemplary translations and shrewd assessments of other translations. Specialists will also be usefully directed to lesser-known aspects of the many-sided Baudelaire. For the non-specialist seeking an introduction, Baudelaire's World is a fine place to start: thorough, balanced, thoughtful, amusing and pleasingly written.

Rosemary Lloyd is Rudy Professor of French and Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Indiana University-Bloomington. She is the author, editor, and translator of several books, including Shimmering in a Transformed Light: Writing the Still Life, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle, and Closer and Closer Apart: Jealousy in Literature, all from Cornell.