[Prestidigitweeze]

Les Fleurs du Mal's an excellent choice -- far better than Poe, and I happen to love Poe! Who's next, Jules Laforgue?

When I was a teenager, I once typed multiple letters requesting a bilingual edition of the complete poems of Jules Laforgue, worded each letter differently, sent it to a friend or family member at a different address, and instructed each person to sign their letter with a fake name and send it to New Directions. The idea was to make publisher James Laughlin think there was a massive Laforgue craze all across America, so that he'd have no choice but to publish an edition of the complete poems as he'd done with Flowers of Evil (as it were).

It didn't work, of course.

Laughlin wrote to me personally to say why he was against the idea. According to him, William Jay Smith's versions weren't good enough -- "more Smith than Laforgue" -- and neither were anyone else's -- not even Pound's! This despite the fact that Eliot spent most of his career doing fabulous impressions of Laforgue (and admitting as much in interviews) which suggest that good translations in English are quite possible. Anyone who doubts it should compare "Complainte des pianos" to "Prufrock" -- they're similar in tone and meter, as Eliot was the first to point out.

I think I still have Laughlin's letter in a box somewhere.