The Complete Poetry and Translations Volume 3: The Flowers of Evil and Others

The third volume presents, for the first time, Smith’s complete translations in French and Spanish, also printing the French and Spanish texts on facing pages. In addition to being a prolific and innovative poet in his own right, Clark Ashton Smith was a noted translator of French and Spanish poetry. Teaching himself French in the mid-1920s, Smith undertook the ambitious program of translating the entirety of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) into English. Over the next several years he succeeded in translating all but six of the 157 poems that comprised the definitive (1868) edition of Les Fleurs du mal. His mentor George Sterling testified to the remarkable spiritual affinity between Smith and Baudelaire, rendering him the perfect translator of this difficult poet. Smith also translated other noteworthy French poets—Paul Verlaine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and Théophile Gautier, among others—as well as such obscure poets as Marie Dauguet and Tristan Klingsor. In the 1940s Smith taught himself Spanish, making splendid verse translations of such poets as Amado Nervo, Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, and and Jorge Isaacs. The great majority of the poems included in his volume are unpublished.