Late Fragments

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) is widely regarded as a giant of modern French poetry. Richard Sieburth is Professor Emeritus of English, French, and comparative literature at New York University.

“[A] handsome new book . . . all this inchoate material is given context by Sieburth’s learned, elegantly written commentary. He is the perfect guide.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post“[These] unfinished works written after 1861 and appearing in English together for the first time, Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Belgium Disrobed, and a selection of ‘late prose poems and projects’ deliver what their titles seem to promise: a soul stripped of guises and illusions.”—Ange Mlinko, New York Review of Books“[A] fascinating volume . . . valuable as much for Mr. Sieburth’s brilliant prefaces as for the orts and scraps that Baudelaire scribbled on pieces of hotel stationery. Among the writings are acidulous outtakes from a never-written series of philosophical memoirs.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal“Sieburth makes nuanced choices in his translations. . . . Late Fragments gathers Baudelaire’s final sketches in a way that presents a new image of a man who, much like Ezra Pound, failed to ‘make it cohere.’ Yet by exhibiting these failings, this volume shows Baudelaire at his most relevant: contradictory, fragmentary, raging against the vicissitudes of modern circumstance.”—Aaron Peck, Times Literary Supplement“Richard Sieburth’s superb translation of Baudelaire’s Late Fragments (Yale) is that rare book that provides more than it promises. It opens with a thirty-five-page biographical sketch that surpasses most full-length biographies of Baudelaire in its scholarly depth, succinctness and profound insight. The long introductions to each of the individual works contain some of the best criticism available of Baudelaire’s ‘counteraesthetic of dissonance, dispersion and disjointure’, reprising as it does ‘the entire French inheritance of aphorism, apothegm, epigram, maxim, réflexion, sentence, and pensée.’ Indeed, Baudelaire’s late turn towards the ‘form of the unfinished, the abandoned, the aborted, the ruined’ heralds the larger twentieth-century turn from contained lyric to disjunctive prose.”—Marjorie Perloff, Times Literary Supplement, “Books of 2022”“There could be no finer companion with whom to view the ruins of Late Baudelaire than Richard Sieburth, here in the multiple roles of translator, literary historian, and exegete, in this expansive and magnificent edition. Astonished voyager, set sail . . . ”—Eliot Weinberger“In Richard Sieburth’s lucid and precise translation and commentary, Baudelaire has found at long last a proper English voice.”—Alberto Manguel“Charles Baudelaire, one of the world’s great poets, was also something else: the maker of unforgettable, often troubling aphorisms and prose poems. Richard Sieburth’s commentary is infallibly subtle, and the translations are both loyal and imaginative.”—Michael Wood, Princeton University“Late Fragments is a marriage of true minds: Charles Baudelaire, one of the great poets, who seems more relevant with every passing year, and Richard Sieburth, one of today’s finest—and most poetic—translators. This is a brilliant and indispensable translation milestone.”—Marjorie Perloff, author of Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics  “Richard Sieburth’s translations splendidly capture the dazzling pyrotechnics of Baudelaire’s late style, by turns arrogant and abject, emitting bursts of fragmentary distress signals that often as not become provocations and missiles.”—Peter Nicholls, author of Modernisms: A Literary Guide  “Syphilitic, misanthropic, maudit to the core, in his late years Baudelaire forged from his vertiginous miseries a compelling new idiom; these fractured, elliptical, haunting texts, beautifully translated by Richard Sieburth, present a fatally wounded heart laid bare, stray petals of evil adrift in the abyss.”—Mark Ford, University College London