Baudelaire : Eighteen poems in translation.

Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris. He made a name as an art critic and translator of Edgar Allan Poe, but his fame rests on the poems of Les Fleurs du Mal. He visited Mauritius in 1841 but lived most of his life in Paris in poverty on a small allowance. He is pre-eminently the poet of the City, and an illusory immorality clings to his poetry that reveals, in reality, the sensitivity of a deeply moral spirit.

Perspectives / From the Mountain: Original poetry, in the mainstream European tradition. s

The tone is serious, wide-ranging, and critical, in the sense of promoting scepticism towards social structures, and validating the importance of the unique, individual and private mind.

Ovid: The Amores: Ovid's three books of elegies, mainly erotic, and mostly addressed to his unidentified lover Corinna.

The setting is sophisticated Augustan Rome, the tone cool, ironic, witty with an underlying seriousness. Ovid shows his understanding of the game of illicit love, and reveals his mastery of language, and his desire for, and expectation of, immortality.

Ovid: The Art of Love : Ovid's Ars Amatoria, three books of worldly advice to those involved in the game of love.

Ovid was exiled to the Black Sea Region by Augustus for "a song and an error" (carmen et error). This was the song. The error is a matter for speculation. Certainly this work is near the edge of what might be conventionally acceptable even in later times, more for its worldliness than its explicit sexual reference.

Ovid: The Cures for Love : Ovid's Remedia Amoris, his book of worldly advice to those trying to escape from love.

In a witty and cool manner, Ovid describes the various methods for disentangling the heart from a love affair. Along the way, Augustan Rome once more comes to life, explicitly and amusingly.

Ovid: The Heroides: The Heroides are fictional letters  written by eighteen women of myth and history, to their lovers or ex-lovers, capturing their thoughts and feelings at a critical moment in their story.  Ovid shows the depths of his humanism, and a sensitivity towards the female psyche remarkable at this early date. Among the women are Phaedra, Dido, Ariadne, Medea, Sappho, Helen, and Hero. The Hero and Leander letters are particularly fine, and influenced Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander' and Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet' among other works.