Banned and slighted in his lifetime, the book that contains all of
Baudelaire's verses has opened up vistas to the imagination and
quickened sensibilities of poets everywhere. Yet it is questionable
whether a single translator can give adequate voice to Baudelaire's full
poetic range. In compiling their classic, bilingual edition of The
Flowers of Evil, the late Marthiel and Jackson Mathews chose from the
work of forty-one translators to create a collection that is a
commentary on the present state of the art of translation. The Mathews'
volume is a poets' homage to Baudelaire as well. Among the contributors
are: Robert Fitzgerald, Anthony Hecht, Aldous Huxley, Stanley Kunitz,
Robert Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate,
Richard Wilbur, Yvon Winters.