The Parisian Prowler, 2nd Ed. » (2nd Edition)

Edward K. Kaplan, Kaiserman Professor in the Humanities at Brandeis University, teaches French and comparative literature and religious studies. He is the author of Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in The Parisian Prowler (Georgia). His translation of Baudelaire's Parisian Prowler (Georgia) is a winner of the Lewis Galantière Prize of the American Translators Association and a Choice Outstanding Academic Book.

From Edouard Manet to T. S. Eliot to Jim Morrison, the reach of Charles Baudelaire's influence is beyond estimation. In this prize-winning translation of his no-longer-neglected masterpiece, Baudelaire offers a singular view of 1850s Paris. Evoking a mélange of reactions, these fifty "fables of modern life" take us on various tours led by a flâneur, an incognito stroller.

Through day and night, in gleaming cafés and filthy side streets, this alienated yet compassionate esthete muses on the bizarre in the commonplace, the sublime in the mundane. As the work reveals a teeming metropolis on the eve of great change, we see a Paris as contradictory, surprising, and ultimately unknowable as our guide himself. Superbly complemented by twenty-one period illustrations by Delacroix, Callot, Manet, Whistler, Baudelaire himself, and others, The Parisian Prowler is an essential companion to Les Fleurs du Mal and other works by the father of modern poetry. In the preface to this edition, translator Edward K. Kaplan explains how the volume's illustrations act as a graphic subtext to the narrator's observations.

Library Journal

This collection of 50 prose poems, first published in 1862 as Le Spleen de Paris , is Baudelaire's attempt to describe the contradictions, fables, and fictions of city life in an innovative poetic prose. Kaplan's choice of title is indeed a good one, for though it was not the title of the original edition it is an expression often used by Baudelaire. Rendered in present-day English, the poems are restored to their original ``modernity,'' allowing the reader to appreciate Baudelaire's subtle moods and ambiguities. This annotated edition, illustrated with the works of Baudelaire's contemporaries (Daumier, Manet, and Whistler, to name just a few) succeeds in shaking the dust from two earlier translations (Arthur Symons's in 1905 and Louise Varese's in 1947) and brings to light Baudelaire's precocious contributions to modern thought.-- Danielle Mihram, Univ. of Southern California Lib.\