[HN Gopher] Fleurs du Mal
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Fleurs du Mal
Author : Frummy
Score : 154 points
Date : 2025-05-09 22:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (fleursdumal.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (fleursdumal.org)
| gregschlom wrote:
| As a husband and cat person, I can relate to this one:
| https://fleursdumal.org/poem/132
| baggy_trough wrote:
| sublime!
| cybertronic wrote:
| Wait. Does this has to do with the Mistral LLM?
| kccqzy wrote:
| I remember in college when I took French classes the professor
| very highly recommended _Fleurs du mal_. It was a difficult read
| for students with just one year of French, but I remember reading
| some translations and liked them.
| jfengel wrote:
| I'm pleased: I'm nearly through Duolingo French and I can more
| or less read that.
|
| I've done a fair bit of outside study, including a few (young
| adult) books. But it's nice to think that I could perhaps pass
| a college French class.
| pxc wrote:
| How long did it take to get through the DuoLingo French
| course?
| jfengel wrote:
| Uh... five years, at a desultory but continuous pace.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Day 170ish of Duolingo German here. It's both encouraging
| how far I've come and even _more_ daunting than when I
| started.
|
| Surely you used additional materials? Duolingo doesn't
| teach grammar per se...
| atemerev wrote:
| 170 days of Duolingo is not enough. It sort of works...
| but yes, it takes a few years of daily focused work.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Sure, of course it's not. I'm not aiming for a cram-
| course. I find Duolingo's ridiculously effective
| gamification keeps me engaged.
|
| I've augmented it with a grammar book and YouTube videos.
| Once I get stuck I plan to do lessons via italki or
| equivalent.
| watwut wrote:
| It forces you to kind of pick it up based on pattern
| matching. In order to understand things, you don't need
| great grammar, just passable one.
| jfengel wrote:
| I had actually done the full Pimsleur course already.
| I've never tried Duolingo on a language that I had zero
| experience with.
|
| I might try it on Chinese at some point, just to see what
| it's like.
|
| Pimsleur doesn't do grammar per se either. They want you
| to infer it by feel, as a child does.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| i'll confess my 18-year old self viewed this type of poetry and
| french class itself through a rather narrow, pragmatic lens...
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Attracting women?
|
| My first introduction to Baudelaire was Groundhogs Day, where
| Bill Murray learns French to impress a woman.
| johnea wrote:
| I think the anime based on this is pretty widely known:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flowers_of_Evil_(manga)
| antonvs wrote:
| Anime in many ways does a better job of communicating Western
| culture to young people in the West, than anything that's
| produced in the West.
| layer8 wrote:
| I quite liked the manga, but the anime IMO fell significantly
| short.
| The_Blade wrote:
| as a Siene (and many other rivers in faraway lands) of techies
| everyone can understand the concept, Baudelaire felt, of being
| and then creating alone in a crowd
|
| to try to be together with something or someone
| ordinarily wrote:
| I have a variety of early printings of this. My favorite being a
| 1931 edition illustrated by Major Felten, its beautiful.
| rglover wrote:
| Stupid but semi-related: when I lived in Chicago, I had just
| gotten a print copy of this and remember doing a double take when
| I saw a flower shop with the same name (Les Fleurs du Mal).
| tombh wrote:
| I first came across this collection of poems via the secular
| Buddhist author Stephen Batchelor (best known for Buddhism
| Without Beliefs). He compared the poem Dear Reader
| (https://fleursdumal.org/poem/099) with a quote from the 9th
| century zen monk Te-Shan.
|
| The relevant lines from the poem: But among the
| jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds, The apes, the
| scorpions, the vultures, the serpents, The yelping,
| howling, growling, crawling monsters, In the filthy
| menagerie of our vices, There is one more ugly, more
| wicked, more filthy! Although he makes neither great
| gestures nor great cries, He would willingly make of the
| earth a shambles And, in a yawn, swallow the world;
| He is Ennui! -- His eye watery as though with tears, He
| dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe. You
| know him reader, that refined monster, -- Hypocritish
| reader, -- my fellow, -- my brother!
|
| The quote from the zen monk: What is known as
| "realising the mystery" is nothing other than breaking through to
| grab an ordinary person's life.
|
| The meaning I take is that the "final boss" of our journey,
| whether that's in meditation or programming, is confronting and
| integrating the non-zero possibility that we may never achieve
| our goals. It's not to dissuade us from even trying, it's rather
| to remind us where the true battle is: the immediate task at
| hand. Lack of focus and motivation aren't obstacles on the path,
| they _are_ the path, they are the final boss itself.
|
| tl;dr success is 1% inspiration 99% perspiration
| flats wrote:
| Thank you! It was really helpful to be reminded of this truth
| such an unexpected context. I am finally beginning to grab that
| "ordinary person's life" & getting there has indeed been _the
| path_.
|
| May we all get there & be free of suffering.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| "Hypocrite lecteur, - mon semblable, - mon frere!"
|
| It is always interesting when random touchstones from my life
| appear on Hacker News: books like the Aubrey-Maturin (master and
| commander) series, Ursula Le Guin's works, Dante, John Le Carre's
| George Smiley novels, Tolstoy... and now Charles Baudelaire, at
| the top of the page no less.
|
| Baudelaire was a dark misanthrope and the poetry is very bleak.
| His life was not happy and he died at 46. You probably need to
| have at least a little of the same darkness in your soul to get
| something out of it.
|
| It's worth remembering too, how strange and controversial this
| work was when it first came out, using traditional verse forms
| but with a relentlessly modern subject, poetry from the gutter of
| the 19th-century city. Modernism in literature has had 150 years
| to settle but this is the raw beginnings.
|
| Some good ones: The Albatross, Invitation to the Voyage, Evening
| Harmony, and the Epilogue ("Le coeur content, je suis monte sur
| la montagne"). And many others.
| photonthug wrote:
| Oh hey, I shared this in a comment a while back, dumping my
| tabs to show that hacker news reads more than code. Along with
| the lesser known cousin:
| https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26063/...
| mahkeiro wrote:
| Another interesting fact about Baudelaire: he was the
| translator into French of many of Edgar Allan Poe's works. They
| also shared many common points; Baudelaire said that when he
| opened one of Poe's books, he was reading subjects and
| sentences he had already dreamed about.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Baudelaire also translated many short stories from E.A. Poe
| [1], and the famous _The Raven_ which Poe uses as an example in
| one of its short essay (or science-fiction story?), _The
| philosophy of composition_. [2]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire#Edgar_Allan...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Composition
| bambax wrote:
| > _You probably need to have at least a little of the same
| darkness in your soul to get something out of it_
|
| In France he's part of the normal curriculum so every student
| reads and studies some of his poems (sometimes the whole book)
| between the ages of 15-17. Maybe that explains some of our
| national character?
| af78 wrote:
| The curriculum is larger than what can be taught in a couple
| of years. Literature professors get to pick the texts that
| will be studied in class. Therefore, chance plays a role in
| whether a given student will study Rimbaud or Baudelaire. In
| my case it was the former.
| thechao wrote:
| I used to try to convince the faculty at a stodgy Texas
| University to let me name courses (this was Texas A&M's
| Dept of CS); your course? "Baguettes and Baudelaire". My
| suggestion for the programming language course "Cunning
| linguists for Typical hands" was outright rejected, BTW. I
| argued that it had a great movie reference.
| leshokunin wrote:
| I love the book.
|
| This page is super interesting to me, because it's so focused and
| simple. I love the idea of an almost Wiki-like "this is some
| public domain thing you should know, so it has a dedicated
| website".
|
| Would make a lot of sense to make it easy to create and host
| those.
| rand0m4r wrote:
| Had to study this at school a while back, it was one of the first
| books (after Candide by Voltaire) that I found interesting at the
| time, and still have in my little library.
| khatkhati wrote:
| Love this book and love this website. So many favorites, but just
| gonna mention one (had to "remix" and edit the translations, none
| of them sounded good): https://fleursdumal.org/poem/109
|
| -- O grief! O grief! Time eats life.
|
| And the hidden Enemy who gnaws the heart
|
| grows on the blood we lose and thrives.
|
| -- O douleur! o douleur! Le Temps mange la vie,
|
| Et l'obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur
|
| Du sang que nous perdons croit et se fortifie!
| adamesque wrote:
| Not to look a gift horse too much in the mouth, but I find the
| multiple English translations overwhelming! But at the same time,
| the range of interpretation and the different colors a translator
| can inject are truly wild. There is no true translation, all are
| copies, all imperfect.
| soufron wrote:
| Even in French, the difficulties of reading or recitating it
| are multiple.
| jbellis wrote:
| Called out by one of my favorite symphonic metal albums,
| featuring a Swedish band with an American singer covering French
| pop songs in metal covers.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Fleurs_du_Mal_(Therion_a...
| hbbio wrote:
| Glad to see this trending on HN! As I was born in France, I had
| the pleasure to read it. Just thought the multiple translations
| available on the site seem like a good corpus to see if frontier
| models could improve the translation.
|
| Below is o3 take on "Le Chat", given as prompt the French
| original and all existing translations. I am not an expert in
| poetry and maybe not versed enough in English poetry
| specifically, but it looks suboptimal: It changed the structure,
| some verses seem overlong and I don't find the original beauty in
| "barbed claw's art".
|
| https://fleursdumal.org/poem/132
|
| Le Chat
|
| Come, lovely cat, upon my ardent breast;
|
| Sheathe in your velvet paw the barbed claw's art,
|
| And let me drown in eyes where, coalesced,
|
| Cold agate gleams within a molten heart.
|
| --
|
| While idle fingers roam and fondly chart
|
| Your supple head and sinuous arched spine,
|
| My hand grows drunk on thrills that softly start
|
| Across your vibrant body's living line.
|
| --
|
| Then, in my mind, my woman's gaze is mine:
|
| Like yours, dear beast, it pierces--deep, serene.
|
| From head to foot a perilous airs combine;
|
| A subtle scent swims round her dusk-brown sheen.
| pierrec wrote:
| I love how this site immediately confronts you with the
| differences between translations, which quickly reveals how much
| skill and creativity can be in the translations themselves.
| Especially for poetry, a good translation is not just an
| imperfect copy, it's an artistic work where the authorship is
| shared between the original author and the translator.
|
| I'm sure Baudelaire himself would have a few things to say on the
| topic. His translations of Edgar Allan Poe's works are notorious
| examples of art in translation. If you've got the French level,
| they are very much worth reading even if you've read the
| originals.
| contctlink wrote:
| I never read it in English, gotta compare the French & English
| version.
| cannam wrote:
| In 1968 a British newspaper ran a competition for English
| translations of "Spleen - Je suis comme le roi..." The poet
| Nicholas Moore - motivated by a belief that translating poetry
| was impossible and the project futile - sent in 31 different
| entries, by post, under false names and with varying levels of
| absurdity. He didn't win.
|
| You can find them at
| https://www.ubu.com/ubu/pdf/moore_spleen.pdf, or in his
| published Selected Poems, along with an essay (written
| afterwards) about translation. Worth looking out.
|
| (I particularly admire the sarcastic one that begins "I'm like
| The Winner of The Competition / The one who wrote the strong,
| rewarding phrase...")
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| Okay so amazing website but then I scrolled down and saw "made by
| Supervert".
|
| From his own website:
|
| > Supervert is the assumed name of a writer using modernist
| literary techniques to explore sexual perversions
|
| > Once upon a time there was a writer. The Devil spoke to him
| through a computer. "You will write about perversion, madness,
| and lust," said Satan. "You will use modernist literary
| techniques to explore sexual perversions. You will be known as
| Supervert."
|
| Fascinating rabbit hole (huh), lots of good read.
|
| He made a website about William Burroughs too:
| https://realitystudio.org/
| druskacik wrote:
| If someone wants to begin with Baudelaire, I would recommend his
| collection _Le Spleen de Paris_ [0] - it's not poetry in its
| usual sense, but a collection of _prose poems_. I still remember
| picking the book randomly at our city library when I was 15 and
| reading the very first poem, _L' Etranger_ :
|
| _THE STRANGER
|
| "Tell me, whom do you love the most, you enigmatic man? your
| father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?"
|
| "I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother."
|
| "Your friends?"
|
| "There you use a word whose meaning until now has remained to me
| unknown."
|
| "Your fatherland?"
|
| "I am unaware in what latitude it lies."
|
| "Beauty?"
|
| "I would willingly love her, goddess and immortal."
|
| "Gold?"
|
| "I hate it as you hate God."
|
| "So! Then what do you love, you extraordinary stranger?"
|
| "I love clouds... drifting clouds... there... over there...
| marvelous clouds!"_
|
| The book has been with me ever since, and as I'm getting older
| and re-read it I always discover new things. After all, there are
| themes a person has to grow into.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Spleen_de_Paris
| bambax wrote:
| > _Fleurs du mal / Flowers of Evil_
|
| > Les Fleurs du mal _appeared on the bookshelves of Paris in June
| 1857..._
|
| Side note: it's not "Fleurs du Mal" but "Les Fleurs du Mal"; it's
| ok that the domain is shorter and doesn't include the article,
| but while the text appears to correctly include the article, the
| titles of each section or edition should too.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I was thinking about translating 'mal' to 'evil', as a non-native
| speaker for both languages.
|
| For me, 'evil' seems to have a source and religious undertones.
| Evil can be stopped by adressing that source. People can avoid
| it. 'Flowers of evil' are probably given to you by the devil, and
| you've made a bad choice.
|
| 'Mal' is much more passive. It seeps into the world, slowly. It
| can't be avoided or adressed, only be felt, experienced. I'd
| translate it closer to 'badness'. The 'flowers of bad' are
| something you find in your room, and they'll stay there, with
| you, forever.
|
| I don't even know if this is right, but funny how an attempt to
| translate shifts the meaning so much for me.
| soufron wrote:
| Right or not, it is indeed part of the just debate :)
| pavlov wrote:
| _<< Rrose Selavy demande si les Fleurs du Mal ont modifie les
| moeurs du phalle : qu'en pense Omphale ? >>_
|
| The next-level interpretation by Surrealist poet Robert Desnos.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| This is the same with "schlecht" in German, but the common
| translation of the title is still "Die Blumen des Bosen"
|
| Interesting point, especially since "schlecht" also means both
| things.
|
| I think it's probably common for languages to have a word that
| covers both.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Fleur du Mal, is that the same (concept) as "Wages of Sin"?
| soufron wrote:
| In a sense, it's the opposite of "the roots of evil". It's
| extremely decadent as a title.
| garbawarb wrote:
| I'd like to buy this in book form. Can anyone recommend an
| english translation?
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