Charles Baudelaire: Le Spleen de Paris

By Charles Baudelaire. Illustrated by Marlene Dumas

After their successful collaboration in William Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Hafid Bouazza and Marlene Dumas decided to reunite. This time he would translate the fifty prose poems collected by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) in Le Spleen de Paris , and she would illustrate his translation. 
Hafid Bouazza passed away on April 29, 2021. Marlene Dumas made paintings and drawings for the twenty prose poems of which he completed the translation. She was inspired by the atmosphere of the text and the specific timbre of Bouazza. The book thus became a posthumous ode to their friendship.

Charles Baudelaire is considered the poet of the spleen, a melancholy, an intense boredom that leads to weltschmerz. In Le Spleen de Paris he paints portraits of grieving widows, rejected lovers, people who fight against the dark around them and within themselves. Anyone who reads this magnificent collection will realize that Les Fleurs du mal is wrongly more widely known.

The French original has been recorded in its entirety in Parisian disgust , as has an English translation by Louise Varèse. The heart of the book is formed by the twenty translations of Hafid Bouazza, illustrated by Marlene Dumas.