Unnamed Pleasures

A new translation of the vividly sensual, fantastically macabre verse from the 19th-century Parisian poet who invented modernity.

“The greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language.” —T.S. Eliot

French poet, essayist, art critic and translator Charles Baudelaire inaugurated a new era in world literature—indeed, he coined the term 'modernity'. His critical and poetic work changed everything after, including inspiring some of the most important poets of modern letters, from Arthur Rimbaud to T.S. Eliot. This fresh translation of his best poetry, by eminent translator, poet, and novelist Philip Terry, lays bare the richness and the long afterlife of Baudelaire's verse, and brings out all the originality of his ideas.

Here, in lushly visual and sonorous verse, we find themes that still preoccupy us today. Baudelaire captured life in the city like no one else, drawing a portrait of Paris as the ultimate glittering seductress—and also as a fragmented landscape peopled by isolated individuals. As much as an urban eyewitness, he was an incisive personal poet, vividly evoking the ebb and flow of desire: the joy of fulfilling it, the agony of feeling, and even worse, not feeling it.

Baudelaire’s verse ranges from the gruesome to the ethereal, the sensuous to the macabre, but is always gripping, powerful, and immediate. Terry's bold, contemporary translation style makes clear why Baudelaire, a century and a half after his death, is still the painter of modern life.