The Flowers of Evil

November 26, 2008 at 08:00 PM | categories: Writing | View Comments |

I'm a big fan of Baudelaire's poetry. I am particularly fond of his interest in conveying beauty through typically repulsive imagery - e.g. Une Charogne which features vivid description of a decomposing human body. While I enjoy reading the original French, I've recently discovered a fantastic online resource - http://fleursdumal.org/. This site not only includes the original French, but also numerous English translations. Not being a French native speaker, I find it illuminating to compare the various styles of translations - poetic and literal - with my own understanding of the French material. Certainly one for the bookmarks, to be enjoyed on a rainy November night in San Francisco.

Niall O'Higgins is an author and software developer. He wrote the O'Reilly book MongoDB and Python. He is the co-founder of BeyondFog, Inc which makes Strider Brilliant Continuous Deployment. Strider is a hosted Continuous Integration & Deployment service for Node.JS and Python.

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