I do not claim to know exactly what a Parisian reader felt in 1857. No one can. Time has changed language, culture, morality, religion, and the emotional weight carried by certain words and images. The world that first encountered Les Fleurs du mal no longer exists. But the challenge fascinated me. If language changes...if symbols change...if taboos change...if even beauty changes... What does it mean to remain faithful to a poem? ... Those questions eventually led me to a

| Dante Remy "Fetishism, far from being a perversion, reveals the interplay of the symbolic and the imaginary." — Jacques Lacan Bear X’s...