Montreal-based professor of English and translator Nathan Brown will read from his translation of The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire. Verso Books says: “Probing the depths of the modern psyche in a voice at once caustic and vulnerable, melancholic and humorous, Baudelaire’s infamous book brings to the surface a new understanding of evil, of eroticism, and of social life through an astonishing variety of poetic forms and styles. This edition adds the poems banned from the original 1857 publication to the expanded collection of 1861 and includes an introduction from the translator, acclaimed poetry scholar Nathan Brown” (versobooks.com). Writer and musician Patti Smith praises Nathan Brown’s translation of The Flowers of Evil as “the unfailing vision of Baudelaire who trumpeted the space and light of the future,” while Rachel Kushner, author of the New York Times bestselling and Booker Prize-longlisted novel Creation Lake, says, “Fleurs du mal is full of beauty and riddles which are notoriously difficult to render in English. I’m so grateful that Nathan Brown, a scholar of such rigor and sensitivity, has taken the plunge and translated this ever-living masterpiece, and by a novel and much-needed approach: with nimble fidelity to the line, with a commitment to “hear” the poem and be out of its way, to let Baudelaire speak to us, as directly as he can, through the prism of a new mind.”

Nathan Brown received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2008 before beginning his career at UC Davis as Assistant Professor of English. He joined Concordia in 2014 as Canada Research Chair in Poetics and founded the Centre for Expanded Poetics in 2015. Professor Brown’s research moves between literature, philosophy, and the arts, with particular focus on comparative approaches to modern poetry and poetics.