baudelaire epitome of incomprehensibility I was reading poem 24 of Les fleurs du mal, which I translate as The Flowers of Ow, remarking cheerfully to my brother: "Look, look, I mean listen, to this: 'Je m'avance à l'attaque, et je grimpe aux assauts, Comme après un cadavre un choeur de vermisseaux,' ...I'm coming after you like a, a choir, a chorus, of vermin on a corpse. Now isn't that romantic?" He said nothing, so I turned to snark at Baudelare, apropos of poem 26, "Sed non satiata": "So you go ahead and describe how beautiful a black woman is, but then call her a demon? Progressive, Baudelaire, very progressive." Baudelaire didn't answer, so my brother said, "Really." "Yes, yes, look: 'Ô démon sans pitié!'" I put my finger on it. "Hmm." That Hmm expressed quite a low opinion of Baudelaire, so equivocal e_o_i added: "Well, well, maybe not because she's black. Baudelaire's like, symbolic and stuff." (A profound literary observation.) "And at that time, white men weren't supposed to find black women pretty, so... but Orientalism and stuff, there's that... although the exoticism stuff's kind of more about the Caribbean, in other poems too..." I gave up on the commentary and read awhile in silence. 150119 ... e_o_i I like to have a book in my hands, but you can find the whole Fleur du Mal online at http://fleursdumal.org/1857-table-of-contents with translations, often more than one per poem. Also see fun_with_google_translate. 150119 ... e_o_i Fleurs du mal. Multiple ow flowers, not just one. And the capitalization's different in French; usually it's only the first word of a title that's capitalized. 150119 ... also http://blather.newdream.net/b/baudelaire_in_google_translate.html 150119 what's it to you? who go blather from