The Complete Poetry and Translations of Clark Ashton Smith

In addition to being a prolific and innovative poet in his own right, Clark Ashton Smith was a noted translator of French and Spanish poetry. Teaching himself French in the mid-1920s, Smith undertook the ambitious program of translating the entirety of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) into English.

Over the next several years he succeeded in translating all but six of the 157 poems that comprised the definitive (1868) edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Smith would begin with a relatively literal prose translation and would later render it into verse; in the end, Smith versified about a third of the poems, the rest remaining in prose.

His mentor George Sterling testified to the remarkable spiritual affinity between Smith and Baudelaire, rendering him the perfect translator of this difficult poet. Smith also translated other noteworthy French poets-Paul Verlaine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and Théophile Gautier, among others-as well as such obscure poets as Marie Dauguet and Tristan Klingsor. In the 1940s Smith taught himself Spanish, making splendid verse translations of such poets as Amado Nervo, Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, and and Jorge Isaacs. The great majority of the poems included in this volume are unpublished.

The current edition presents, for the first time, Smith's complete translations in French and Spanish, also printing the French and Spanish texts on facing pages. All texts are annotated by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz.

Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) is a towering figure in American poetry and in the literature of fantasy and horror. Born and raised in California, Smith early fell under the tutelage of George Sterling, and later established friendships with H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, Benjamin de Casseres, and other leading figures. His tales of exotic fantasy have achieved a worldwide audience, while his meticulously crafted poetry, published here in a complete edition for the first time, will establish him as a leading poetic voice in his time.

S. T. Joshi is a leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, and other writers of fantasy and horror. He is the author of The Weird Tale (1990) and H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996) and the coeditor of World Supernatural Literature: An Encyclopedia. He has edited Smith's juvenile novel, The Black Diamonds, for Hippocampus Press. David E. Schultz is a pioneering scholar on H. P. Lovecraft. He is the editor of Lovecraft's Commonplace Book (1987) and the coeditor (with S. T. Joshi) of Smith's The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems (2003) and The Shadow of the Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith (2005).