Rebel Poems by Baudelaire Charles Whitten Leslie (1 results)

Pamphlet. Condition: Very good. 48 pages. RARE surviving inscribed copy!!! Notable Translator. Two Point Saddle Staple Binding. Off white/very light puce colored paper covers, with photo on the front cover, are clean and sharp. Inscribe by Whitten inside the front cover. The inscription reads "For Ron-In hopes you'll hit the novel of your dreams--or something. These poems, modest as they are make me feel damned good. I hope you get some pleasure out of them; theres even a kind of happy one on page 28 to brighten your day--a beintot until that long [unclear] lunch--Les April 12-'06". Leslie H. Whitten Jr., b. 1928, is a novelist, poet, translator and was a prize-winning investigative reporter. Ten of his novels have been published, plus a biography of Lee Bailey, three books of translations of the French poet Charles Baudelaire, a children's book and a book of his own poems. His books have been praised by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly and many others. As a journalist with the Washington Post, Jack Anderson and others, he covered every president from Eisenhower to Bush, Watergate, other major political scandals, and innumerable other national events. He has reported from the Middle East, Europe and Asia, on the Indochina war, hurricanes and other natural and unnatural ills to which the press is heir. For refusing to reveal his Native American sources despite being jailed by the FBI, he was given a major civil liberties award and was made a Blood Brother of the Iroquois. He has appeared on the "Today" and other national TV shows. Charles Pierre Baudelaire (9 April 1821 31 August 1867) was a French poet, essayist, translator and art critic. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhyme and rhythm, containing an exoticism inherited from the Romantics, and are based on observations of real life. His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrializing Paris caused by Haussmann's renovation of Paris during the mid-19th century. Baudelaire's original style of prose-poetry influenced a generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. He coined the term modernity (modernité) to designate the fleeting experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience. Marshall Berman has credited Baudelaire as being the first Modernist. From information gleaned on line: "Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), was certainly a genius, regarded as such from high school to the time of his death. His unnumerable biographers have also called him the greatest of all French poets, rivaled since the Greeks only by Shakespeare and Goethe. His poems achieve a wrenching clarity quite at odds with the train wreck of his personal life. His history seems a dark, turbulent sky on which the lightning of his poems was projected. The magnificent thunder still rumbles. For some of us, Baudelaire, like a skilled psychotherapist, has changed our lives, peeled away our pretensions and then laid bare the genesis and the meaning of our rawest emotions." -Leslie H. Whitten Jr., in The Introduction. "You will find here a poet-translator who steers between the dangers of expansive ego and slavish transcription. Whitten has not just captured the recurrent symbols and images that express Baudelaire's deep thematics, but he has found the rare and fragile metric and lyric devices to orchestrate and give nuance to the extraordinarily varied Fleurs." -Maurice A. O'Meara, Ph.D., Poet Laureate of France. "These splendid translations, all true to the original meter and rhyming creative pure refined lead us to the authentic, somberly erotic Baudelaire." -Sophy Burnham, best-selling author of A Book of Angels. "Intense, sometimes darkly comic and always wise, these are the best of Baudelaire for the reader in English." Roderick MacLeish, novelist, broadcast commentator & critic. "I have had Baudelaire's work on my shelf for decades and always felt intimidated by the obligation to educate myself by reading his work but I never did. This pamphlet takes away the burden of coping with a monument." -Kirby Congdon. "The result of Mr. Whitten's efforts is true to the feel and spirit of the poems and is, in fact, quite fluid, graceful and capable of making one forget indeed that these are translations from another language." -Phil Wagner, Iconoclast. Whitten was an American investigative reporter, and had a reputation for his horror fiction - Stephen King has listed Whitten's Progeny of the Adder on the list of essential horror novels that appears in his book Danse Macabre. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing thus.