Jan Owen, The Offhand Angel: New and Selected Poems (Eyewear Publishing, 2015): Charles Baudelaire, Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal translated by Jan Owen and introduced by Rosemary Lloyd (Arc Publications, 2015)

Jan Owen, The Offhand Angel: New and Selected Poems (Eyewear Publishing, 2015) Charles Baudelaire, Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal translated by Jan Owen and introduced by Rosemary Lloyd (Arc Publications, 2015) As an undergraduate in the 1980s, I took French translation classes with the famous Professor Colin Duckworth at Melbourne University. [...]I was very intrigued by the opportunity to review this double offering: a volume of new and selected poems by South Australian poet Jan Owen, as well as her translation of selected poems from Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil, or, maybe, The Bad Flowers). In the westernised version, the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the following stanza. [...]it presents particular challenges to the translator.

As an undergraduate in the 1980s, I took French translation classes with the famous Professor Colin Duckworth at Melbourne University. I was less impressed then than I am now at his story of sleeping in Voltaire's own bed (sans Voltaire, needless to say); and we all did grow rather tired of hearing about Samuel Beckett, on whom he was a world authority. I had left university by the time he started acting in Neighbours; probably that would have impressed me most of all.