Maldoror Author:Comte de Lautreamont Translated from the French by Paul Knight — "'It is not right that everyone should read the pages which follow; only a few will be able to savor this bitter fruit with impunity.' So wrote the self-styled Comte de Lautreamont (1846-70) at the beginning of his sensational Chants de Maldoror. — One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of su... more »rrealist writing, Lautreamont's fantasy unveils a world - half-vision, half-nightmare - of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and pederasts, lunatics and strange children. The writing is drenched with an unrestrained savagery and menace, and the startling imagery - delirious, erotic, blasphemous and grandiose by turns - possesses a remarkable hallucinatory quality.
The writer's mysterious life and death, no less than the book itself, captured the imagination of surrealists. Jarry, Modigliani, Verlaine and others hailed it as a work of genius. Andre Gide wrote 'Here is something that excites me to the point of delirium', and Andre Breton described the book as 'the expression of a total revelation which seems to surpass human capacities'.
This volume also contains a translation of the epigrammatic Poesies.« less