La Fanfarlo
By (Author) Charles Baudelaire
Melville House Publishing
Melville House Publishing
15th August 2012
United States
Paperback
80
Width 129mm, Height 178mm
94g
A whole ten years before Baudelaire published his great masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil (1857), the great poet penned the only prose fiction of his great career: La Fanfarlo. The novella describes the torrid real-life affair the poet had with Jean Duval, a dancer whose beauty and sexuality Baudelaire came to obsess over. The outcome is a work of raw emotional power and a clear distillation of the Parisian's poetic genius. As Baudelaire himself said, 'Always be a poet, even in prose.'
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), was one of the founding and most influential poets of modern literature. His masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil, is known for its keen psychological insight into the dark side of human nature. Edward K. Kaplan is a professor at Brandeis University and an award-winning French translator.