Pobre Bélgica

by Charles Baudelaire

Pauvre Belgique se publicó por primera vez en París en 1952. Esta es la primera edición íntegra, en España, del manuscrito, que además incluye poemas nunca antes traducidos al castellano. El original se encuentra en la Biblioteca Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, en Chantilly. Está formado por treinta y tres capítulos, con distintos tipos de folios, ordenados en carpetas en las que se puede leer un índice.

Charles Baudelaire mantuvo en sus dos últimos años de vida la esperanza de publicar una obra crítica sobre el carácter y las costumbres belgas de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, un trabajo que la muerte le impidió acabar. No se trataba sólo de una sátira de valones y flamencos, iba a ser, como dejó escrito en sus notas, un espejo deformador de los propios vicios de la sociedad francesa. El príncipe de los poetas aseguró al editor Michel Lévy que Pauvre Belgique era el más ambicioso de sus proyectos, un libro “diferente a todo” en el que pretendía mostrar lo que hubiera sido Francia de haber permanecido en manos de la burguesía.

Genres: Nonfiction, Poetry, French Literature, Literature

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1864

About the author

Public condemned Les fleurs du mal (1857), obscene only volume of French writer, translator, and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire; expanded in 1861, it exerted an enormous influence over later symbolist and modernist poets.

Reputation of Charles Pierre Baudelaire rests primarily on perhaps the most important literary art collection, published in Europe in the 19th century. Similarly, his early experiment Petits poèmes en prose (1868) ( Little Prose Poems ) most succeeded and innovated of the time.

From financial disaster to prosecution for blasphemy, drama and strife filled life of known Baudelaire with highly controversial and often dark tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Long after his death, his name represents depravity and vice. He seemingly speaks directly to the 20th century civilization.

Reviews

[niina · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was divided into two parts, to notes and letters, which kind of worked out for the best, making reading easier and keeping the insides well in order and all. However, after reading this I feel it would have been more fruitful to mix the two, if possible to link letters with the notes that considered the subjects discussed in the longer texts. This way they would have better supported each other. Or maybe I should have read the letters first, but I'm one of those that prefer to advance chronologically.

The notes made way better sense after reading the letters, they were more interesting and richer in content in the light of some background stories and the trouble better expressed in the letters. The notes themselves got flattened in the long run, and the repetition started to raise questions and hopes for explanations as they got more regular. The notes were highly critical, or should I say blunt and unfriendly remarks and helped at building up the idea of how and of what Baudelaire suffered most in the country, but only the letters told us why. It would certainly have been interesting to read similar writings by the author of other countries as well, to learn how a French, quite stuck-up dandy sees different cultures, their people and their ways of expressing themselves.

[Anu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the Finnish translation/edition of this (by Antti Nylén).
(http://www.sammakko.com/kauppa/produc...)

[Marina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Qué desconcertante.

[Bert Huisman]

13 t6

[T · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tykitystä. Toistoa, kaunaa ja vihaa. Pidättekö jotain tiettyä Suomen kaupunkia kansoineen vähän hassuna? Lukekaa tämä kirja ja samastukaa!

[Victor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un livre qui peut me mettre dans la sauce au moment d’acquérir la nationalité

[Ignacio Cerón · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems and texts from the first half of the book are really good; the second part is rather boring and just a compilation of articles from Baudelaire's surroundings.