Translating Les Fleurs du Mal: With Peter O'Neill

What happens when one of the most influential works of French poetry is brought into English by a contemporary Irish poet?

Join poet, translator and novelist Peter O’Neill for a fascinating conversation about his current project, a new English translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal [The Flowers of Evil - rendered by O'Neill as "The Crown of Pain"].

This event will take the form of a public interview, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the pleasures, problems and possibilities of translating Baudelaire for a modern English-speaking audience. How is O'Neill balancing the darkness, beauty, sensuality and shock of Baudelaire while allowing the poems to speak in a new language? In this interview, Peter will discuss his fascination with Baudelaire in general, the challenges of translating Les Fleurs du Mal in particular, and what this extraordinary nineteenth-century collection can reveal to readers today.

This event is free of charge and open to everyone. There are both in-person and online ticket options available. No prior knowledge of French or Baudelaire is required.

Peter O’Neill is the author of six collections of poetry, the most recent being Henry Street Arcade a bilingual collection translated into French by the poet Yan Kouton ( 2021); the novella More Micks than Dicks ( 2017) and a volume of translation The Enemy – Transversions from Baudelaire ( 2015). He has also edited two anthologies of poetry The Gladstone Readings Anthology ( 2017), And Agamemnon Dead ( 2015) and he has organised and hosted a number of festivals and readings, most recently Baudelaire at 200! for the Alliance Francaise. As well as French, his writing has been translated into Spanish, Arabic, German and Italian. His first novel The Fetishist is due to be published in Berlin next year.