“Being pre-eminently a moralist, he needed a medium that enabled him to illustrate a moral insight as briefly and vividly as possible. Being an artist and sensualist, he needed a medium that was epigrammatic or aphoristic, but allowed him scope for fantasy and for that element of suggestiveness which he considered essential to beauty.”

— Michael Hamburger

Introduction to his translation, Twenty Prose Poems by Charles Baudelaire

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Michael Hamburger 7

British translator, poet, critic, memoirist and academic 1924–2007

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