THIS IS CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
THIS IS JANE EYRE
“My Baudelaire is a kind of drag queen, a hysteric, a vampire, a suicidal teenage girl, a depressive, a maniac, a monster, the gothic script itself, a thief, the sun in the south in August, hot, wet and terrible. My Baudelaire is surrounded by a lot of white melting candles in a dark room with dusty purple velvet candles and the poet sits and thinks and listens. My Baudelaire is a drunk. My Baudelaire is a drug addict. My Baudelaire is a prostitute. My Baudelaire is a single mother with student loan debt who lives in the Deep South. My Baudelaire is a woman and a man and neither a woman nor a man but this doesn’t stop her or him from performing man and woman. My Baudelaire has no gender or sex, lives in animalistic delight and animalistic agony. Time, for my Baudelaire, only makes sense in terms of bodily pleasure. My Baudelaire is a sinner and chameleon. My Baudelaire is an English Professor but has been fired from all her jobs. My Baudelaire goes to Walmart at night to buy a boxes of diapers. Sometimes my Baudelaire cries in her parked car in the Walmart parking lot alone and no one sees her. My Baudelaire endlessly grades composition papers. She has read a million personal narratives from students. My Baudelaire is all the stories of her students’ lives. My Baudelaire is a performance trying to find some delight, some beautiful thing balancing on our collapsing plane of ecology, inside nights of burglary and rape and theft and violence. My Baudelaire is the body of some collection of aristocratic beliefs that have been overtaken by the proletariat—their million voices have entered his body, have hijacked his voice, his throat, his eyes, his face, his skin, his being and have unleashed some deep anarchy like cracking a code.”
Baudelaire Translations at Interim
“A Martyr” by Charles Baudelaire at the Best American Poetry blog
“I Love Wine!” by Charles Baudelaire at the Best American Poetry blog
“Allegory” by Charles Baudelaire at Lana Turner
“Damned Ladies” by Charles Baudelaire at Lana Turner