Fleurs du Mal

“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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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).

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

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

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