This collection of poems is unique. It is the first and only bilingual edition of the complete sonnets of Charles Baudelaire. Almost half of the poems in the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal
are written in sonnet form. In addition to these Baudelaire wrote a further twelve sonnets, which his friends published in 1868, the year after the poet’s death, in the third and final edition
of Les Fleurs du Mal. A satirical poem in sonnet form, which Baudelaire wrote in 1866 during his sojourn in Brussels, completes this collection. John Tidball has lovingly and painstakingly
translated each sonnet into rhyming English verse, with the translations facing the original poems on the right-hand page. There is an introduction dealing mainly with versification, and
explanatory notes for some of the more obscure references.
