Les Chants de Maldoror

by Comte de Lautréamont, Guy Wernham (Translator), Nataliya Mavlevich (Translator)

The macabre but beautiful work, Les Chants de Maldoror, has achieved a considerable reputation as one of the earliest and most extraordinary examples of Surrealist writing. It is a long narrative prose poem which celebrates the principle of Evil in an elaborate style and with a passion akin to religious fanaticism. The French poet-critic Georges Hugnet has written of Lautréamont: "He terrifies, stupefies, strikes dumb. He could look squarely at that which others had merely given a passing glance."


Little is known of the author of Maldoror, Isidore Ducasse, self-styled Comte de Lautréamont, except that he was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1846 and died in Paris at the age of twenty-four. When first published in 1868-9, Maldoror went almost unnoticed. But in the nineties the book was rediscovered and hailed as a work of genius by such eminent writers as Huysmans, Léon Bloy, Maeterlinck, and Rémy de Gourmont. Later still, Lautréamont was to be canonized as one of their principal "ancestors" by the Paris Surrealists.


This edition, translated by Guy Wernham, includes also a long introduction to a never-written, or now lost, volume of poetry. Thus, except for a few letters, it gives all the surviving literary work of Lautréamont.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, France, Classics, French Literature, Horror, Literature

342 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1869

About the author

Comte de Lautréamont (French pronunciation: [lotʁeaˈmɔ̃]) was the pseudonym of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, a Uruguayan-born French poet. Little is known about his life and he wished to leave no memoirs. He died at the age of 24 in Paris.

His only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on modern literature, particularly on the Surrealists (similarly to Baudelaire and Rimbaud) and the Situationists. Comte de Lautréamont is one of the poètes maudits and a precursor to Surrealism.

Reviews

[Alejandro Saint-Barthélemy · Rating 5 out of 5]

1) Before reading Rimbaud I thought I would see fireworks; the problem was that I had read Lautréamont first.
(Michel Houellebecq)

2) After reading the last part of "Les Chants de Maldoror" I thought of giving up literature due to embarrassment of my own literary achievements.
(André Gide [in a diary entry, in 1905])

3) Lautréamont has been the biggest influence on my writing career. My books are toys for adults who have read Lautréamont.
(César Aira)

This book embraces both classical rules of art (craft, depth and beauty [beauty whereas in the classic sense, such as when writing about the ocean, or modern one, meaning Picasso's, Baudelaire's, Dalí's... diabolical one) and contemporary ones (modernity, originality and provocation) brillliantly.
It was half a century ahead of its time, after all (surrealists in the 1920's were the first ones to consider it the visionary masterpiece that it is).

It may not be as deep as Rimbaud's A Season in Hell (Caravaggio)

... but it's far more creative (El Greco).

Rimbaud focused on psychological misery, introspection and analysis, in the work of art as a finished object, marble block, last will...
On the other hand, Lautréamont focused on imagination, ideas, surprises, in the work of art in progress, as a process.
Both Rimbe and Isidore were highly intelligent and crazy (in the words of Argentinian author César Aira: So many people write, but so little is worthy… Why? I think it’s because in order to write something valuable one must posses two opposite qualities: you must be as intelligent as possible (because writing is not easy) and, at the same time, as crazy as possible (for the writing to matter).

The gate-master of tomorrow's literature, called it Nobel Prize Winner André Gide, this is a book which fans of modernism, postmodernism, metaliterature, etc., should totally savour as one of the precursors of those movements (with its many passages about the very process of writing) that it is (needless to say, a must-read for poetry lovers too).

My review of Lautreamont's "poems":
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Sinem A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

kötülük ve iyilik hakkında ortalama fikre sahip kişilerin uzak durması gereken ama okyanusun abislerinde kaybolmayı sevenlerin unutmaması gereken eserler bütünü.

[Annetius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Πρέπει να φυσάει λίγο μέσα στο μυαλό σου για να διαβάσεις Λωτρεαμόν.

Η ποίηση ήρθε και ξάπλωσε, έγινε πεζό.

Μια φάλαινα ανοίγει το στόμα της και σε παίρνει μέσα. Και παραδέρνεις χτυπώντας στα τοιχώματα του τεράστιου στομαχιού της, χωρίς να πατάς πουθενά.

Βαφτίζεσαι έτσι στο σκοτάδι του απύθμενου βυθού, μέσα σε ένα κείμενο καταραμένο, μισάνθρωπο αλλά και τρομερά ανθρώπινο, χωρίς αρχή, μέση και τέλος, χωρίς νόημα.

Ένα άγριο και τρυφερό ποτάμι λέξεων, ένα αιωρούμενο έργο τέχνης που είτε κλείνεις τα μάτια και ανεβαίνεις σε αυτό το περαστικό μαγικό χαλί, είτε το πρόσωπό σου συσπάται από το βαρυφορτωμένο, υπερβολικό για σένα κείμενο.

Δεν θα αγαπηθεί από όλους αυτός ο έφηβος και τα τραγούδια του.

Πρέπει να φυσάει λίγο μέσα στο μυαλό σου για να διαβάσεις Λωτρεαμόν.

[Capsguy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well wasn't that a ride, boys and girls?

Maldoror is a trip, and what a trip it is.

Being 20, I enjoyed the adolescent tone and nature of this prose poem, however I can see how other readers may view it as nothing more than grotesque random scenes with at times almost incoherent babbling.

The lack of central plot, and disjointed style of the story often led me to be confused, but I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing. I appreciate when others try to take a step out of the contemporary novel of the time and experiment, sometimes it just comes out better than others. The late 1800's must have been an amazing time for emerging writers, so many 'new' concepts and writing styles were created then.

This is my first real taste at surrealism, and I don't mind what I just tasted. Mixed in with rebellion against man and God, I can see why this may suit those of a younger audience, mixed with similar feelings.

Sure, at times he may have gone too far, but if you look through that, there is some quite memorable scenes in this gem.

Or you could always just check it out for the reading cred, it'll at least be an interested read!

[[P] · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have been following my reviews for any length of time you will be aware that there are many things of which I am afraid. Spiders! Fatherhood! Demonic possession! Death! Yet it is increasingly the shark that haunts my mind like he haunts the sea, silently slicing through the darkness until he is upon me, intent on ripping out my throat! He is a ghoul, shaped like a knife-blade. He is swift and agile madness, with the skin of an elephant and teeth like the sharpest shards of glass. How feeble, how ungainly man seems when compared to this creature, how unlike a God.

Given its awesome, horrifying appearance, and its savage power, it is no surprise that Maldoror – the sinister creation of the Comte de Lautréamont, who was himself the alter ego of Isidore-Lucien Ducasse – is an admirer of, and sees himself in, the shark. Indeed, he wishes that he were the son of one and, in Les Chants most [in]famous passage, he actually couples with a female, inspiring the most eyebrow-raising title of any article I’ve ever come across: Shark-shagger. Yet his admiration isn’t limited to these beasts; Maldoror [or the Comte] sings the praises of the louse, the tiger, the ocean, mathematics[!]…anything, it seems, that isn’t human.

Maldoror was, we’re told, once a happy, ’upright’ child, indicating that something [or a combination of things] happened to effect a change in his personality or character. Yet it is also claimed that he felt as though he was ‘born wicked’, and had tried his best to disguise his nature. In any case, one is led to believe – due to the sheer number of rants dedicated to the subject, if nothing else – that an ever intensifying disgust for humanity was at least partly responsible for his subsequent ‘career of evil’. Throughout, Maldoror rails against human weakness of character, hypocrisy, hunger for fame and money, etc.

However, while all that might be enjoyable [especially if, like me, you agree with the sentiments expressed], such misanthropy isn’t unique or even unusual in works of literature. What sets Les Chants apart, what makes them a still thrilling, shocking, and amusing experience, is that Maldoror doesn’t simply hate humanity, he wants to make it suffer, in imaginative, creative ways. My favourite example of this is when he breeds a pit of vicious lice, which he then lets loose upon the unsuspecting public. Moreover, he openly enjoys these activities, so that the book reads like an ode to cruelty and sadism. Children, one assumes because they are representative of innocence and purity, are paid special attention, with Maldoror extolling the pleasures of abusing and then freeing them, so that one is seen as both their torturer and their saviour. He also gleefully admits to wanting to slice off their rosy cheeks with a razor.

“One should let one’s nails grow for a fortnight. O, how sweet it is to drag brutally from his bed a child with no hair on his upper lip and with wide open eyes, make as if to touch his forehead gently with one’s hand and run one’s fingers through his beautiful hair. Then suddenly, when he is least expecting it, to dig one’s long nails into his soft breast, making sure, though, that one does not kill him; for if he died, one would not later be able to contemplate his agonies.”

Before continuing it is necessary to return to that comment, that assertion that Les Chants is funny, especially as a lot of the book’s content is, without question, unpleasant [sadism is, in fact, something that I find particularly abhorrent]. The reason I find Les Chants entertaining, rather than unbearable, is that they are, for the most part, [intentionally] over-the-top, bizarre and vaudeville; and they feature a main character so thoroughly dastardly, such that even the nastiest bits are absurd or almost farcical. The best example of this is when Maldoror is watching a ship sink and delights in the forthcoming annihilation of the crew and passengers. At this stage, the story is engaging, but not necessarily funny. It is when the hero decides to shoot a survivor as he swims towards the shore that the scene is taken into the realm of comedy [although you may argue that what it provokes is the uncomfortable laughter of disbelief].


[Sedlec Ossuary or bone church, Czech Republic]

There are an abundance of religious references in Les Chants, and God, in particular, is routinely mocked and criticised and doubted. Lautréamont says that God, although powerful, is untrustworthy, and suggests that the creation of heaven, or the bestowing of any kind of eternal reward, is inconsistent with a Being who causes suffering, or is prepared to allow his people to be miserable or wretched, on earth; in one of the most memorable and amusing passages, he imagines God as a kind of blood-thirsty tyrant, sitting on a throne of gold and excrement, wrapped in unclean hospital sheets. Of course, for anyone who wants to offend, who wants to position themselves as anti-establishment, religion is an obvious, necessary target. An author intent on writing filth and getting up people’s noses isn’t really doing his job if he doesn’t blaspheme.

Some critics would have you believe that Maldoror is the Devil, which isn’t the strangest claim, considering how grotesque and seemingly immoral he is. Certainly, there is something of Milton’s charismatic Satan about him; and he does harbour ambitions of overthrowing God and taking his place, indicating that he is no mere mortal. Moreover, there is one quite chilling scene in which he endeavors to tempt a young boy into murdering someone who has wronged him. Yet I prefer not to think of Maldoror as the Devil, as something so easy to digest. To label him thus is almost a kind of comfort. We may not like the Devil, but we do understand him. It is, therefore, far more frightening to think of Maldoror as an ordinary man, although I don’t believe he is that either.

“I am filthy. I am riddled with lice. Hogs, when they look at me, vomit. My skin is encrusted with the scabs and scales of leprosy, and covered with yellow pus.[…] A family of toads has taken up residence in my left armpit and, when one of them moves, it tickles. Mind one of them does not escape and come and scratch the inside of your ear with its mouth; for it would then be able to enter your brain.”

So, what, then, is he? For me, he is a bogyman, a nightmare; he is Nosferatu’s shadow climbing up the wall. One might also call him an outcast, although I’m not sure myself how accurate that is [for you have to want to be part of something to be cast out from it]. He does, however, identify with outcasts, with prostitutes [with whom he claims to have made a pact to ruin families] and hermaphrodites. In any case, what most struck me while I read Les Chants is that Maldoror is essentially a kind of Mr. Hyde, he is the bad in every one of us, the dark side. Indeed, it is said in the text that evil thoughts exist in all men. This theory is given extra weight when you consider that it isn’t always clear who is narrating the book, that while it begins in the manner of someone [the Comte] describing, in the third person, the outrageous acts and character of another man, the majority of it is written as though the one committing these acts is the narrator, almost as though Maldoror has seized control, of the text and of Lautréamont himself.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Historically important and lyrically brilliant, Maldoror is nonetheless a tedious read for those who have accepted a godless universe and survived their tumultuous twenties (to say nothing of the immense chasm opened by the twentieth century). If you did not know Lautreamont died at 24, you would still know that the text in hand is that of an impetuous and visionary young man. Daring works are always necessary, but seldom does posterity preserve the heat of the moment from which a work drops cold. What he represents takes precedence over how he represents it; in other words, the impulse is exemplary if the result is hardly edifying. A pungent fleur de mal, a rhapsody of nostalgie de la boue, not even a Season but a fortnight in Hell, a pre-Nietzschean manifesto excoriating despair and weakness, dogmatic late-juvenilia encomiums to a purely affective Absolute beyond the Good, veering between deliberately prolix pedantry and faux profound laconic bombast, Lautreamont's frisson is by now attenuated and superannuated. This is not to say the the experience he pursues is worthless in itself, but it demands more discerning sublimation. But I would still take this bestial menagerie of hallucination and cosmic transgression over the sterile wards of realism any day (especially Judgment Day).

[B. Faye · Rating 3 out of 5]

Το συγκεκριμ��νο βιβλίο δεν μοιάζει με τίποτα απ’ όσα έχω διαβάσει ως τώρα. Εντυπωσιακή εισαγωγή το πρώτο και το δεύτερο άσμα εκπληκτικά. Από κει και πέρα όμως με κούρασε. Νομίζω πως απλά ο υπερρεαλισμός δεν μου ταιριάζει.

[Žilvinas Gečiauskas · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Maldororo giesmės" – tai literatūrinis šedevras , kurio autorius mirė tebūdamas 24 metų , o pilnai užbaigta išleista likus metams iki autoriaus mirties. "Maldororo giesmės" ilga laiką plačiajai auditorijai nebuvo žinoma ( netgi pakliuvo į Antrosios imperijos draudžiamų Knygų sąrašus) ir iš tamsos ištraukta siurrealistų , ir jau nuo pat pirmų Knygos puslapių nekyla abejonių dėl ko siurrealistams ji tapo koranu.
Maldororo giesmėse autorius meistriškai žaidžia skaitytojo vaizduote ir jausmais , vedžioja už nosies ir paklaidina sąmonės tuneliuose ir labirintuose. Lautreamont itin taikliais ir negailestingais kirčiais kerta į veidmainišką žmonijos moralę ir kultūrą.
Tai tamsi , groteskiška ,daugiasluoksnė kelionė į pačias tamsiausias ir šlykščiausias žmogaus sielos gelmes.

[Osiris Oliphant · Rating 5 out of 5]

the exact change version is beautiful and has notes
but in side by side readings
i like this version better
not to mention its extra wide margins
like two deadwhite legs straddling the text

[Jesús De la Jara · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Debes de ser poderoso; pues tienes un rostro más que humano, triste como el universo, bello como el suicidio"

Lamentablemente no me gustó tanto como esperaba y las razones son diversas. Primero que no me encanta la poesía (esto es más poesía que prosa), no me gusta lo vanguardista ni lo surrealista (detesto cuando actualmente sólo se hacen obras de teatro de ese estilo) prefiero mucho más lo clásico y además he encontrado particularidades que no van con mis preferencias digamos así. El relato en sí, hubiese pensado yo debería ser más ordenado o por lo menos tener un desarrollo un poco coherente ya que el interior del mismo es tan oscuro e incomprensible (entiendo desde luego que ésa era la intención). Imaginé que los cantos, como todos los que he leído a la fecha por lo menos tuviera algún orden, ya no cronológico o episódico pero por lo menos algo de orden. Eso le hubiese dado más consistencia al mensaje que se quiso dar si es que había alguna intención.

De otro lado la artificialidad se nota a mi parecer mucho en toda la obra. Cuando leía comprendía que era lo mismo que leer a un autor bajo efectos de alguna droga (lo digo con todo el respeto posible), como sé que muchos poetas de algunas generaciones lo hacían para "inspirarse" y poder escribir textos incomprensibles. En efecto, en "Los Cantos de Maldoror" lo que cuenta el autor rápidamente pierde el hilo y va por caminos sin sentido y con expresiones grotescas que parecen un delirio más que una inspiración. Pero a pesar de ello eso no lo noté tan tan natural, muchas expresiones eran demasiado artificiales, construidas para llamar la atención más que por inspiración, sobre todo muchos párrafos en los que el autor narra temas que de seguro no son de su pleno dominio como zoología, medicina, fisiología, física, Etc. Eso se notó a mi parecer pues en algunos pasajes son copias de otros libros contemporáneos (como bien apuntaba la excelente edición de Cátedra). Y éste es otro punto en el que mi propia experiencia perjudicó mi apreciación de la obra. Al yo conocer muchas cosas fisiológicas por mi carrera las descripciones anatómicas que muchas veces hacía eran superficiales y aisladas, claramente se identificaba una afán de sorprender sin que él mismo comprendiera lo que decía.

Es imposible no admirar la obra como producto histórico y literario, Lautréamont fue un precursos extraordinario de movimientos surrealistas posteriores y muchos escritores franceses lo admiraron, la posibilidad de su pluma para dibujar episodios apocalípticos, descripciones crudas hasta sacrílegas que bien tienen la firma del mismo Sade, los pensamientos en fuga permanentes, la amoralidad, la ofensa constante a Dios, todo ello es algo novedoso y muy bien empoderado. Pero en general no me gusta tanto y habían párrafos que más que originales ya me parecían absurdos, como éste: "Ríe pero llora al mismo tiempo. Si no puedes llorar por los ojos, llora por la boca. Y si también es imposible, orina ..." o "¿Pero qué era pues la sustancia corporal hacia la que yo avanzaba? Sabía que la familia de los pelecánidos comprende cuatro géneros distintos: el pájaro bobo, el pelícano, el cormorán y el fregata."

Tiene muchas frases profundas, revolucionarias, que te pueden repulsar pero siempre te afectan, aunque no siempre emocionan y eso para mí es importante en toda obra. Estoy muy contento de todas maneras de haber leído por fin este clásico.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

The beginning of Canto the First ::
“May it please Heaven that the reader, emboldened and become of a sudden momentarily ferocious like what he is reading, may trace in safety his pathway through the desolate morass of these gloomy and poisonous pages. For unless he is able to bring to his reading a rigorous logic and a spiritual tension equal at least to his distrust, the deadly emanations of this book will imbibe his soul as sugar absorbs water.”

The beginning of Canto the Second ::
“What has been the fate of the first lay of Maldoror since his mouth, filled with the leaves of nightshade, gave utterance to it in a moment of meditation and released it throughout the kingdoms of wrath? What has become of that lay? We do not know precisely. Neither the trees nor the winds have preserved it. And Morality, who happened to be passing by ignorant of the fact that in its glowing pages she would find an energetic defender, saw it wending its way with a firm and direct tread towards the obscure fastnesses and the secret fibres of human consciousness.”

The beginning of Canto the Third ::
“Let us recall the names of those imaginary angel-like beings whom my pen during the second lay has drawn from a brain shining with a radiance derived from those beings themselves. They are still-born on the scorched paper like sparks the rapid extinction of which the eye can hardly follow. Leman! ... Lohengrin! ... Lombano! ... Holzer!...For an instant you appeared, covered with the insignia of youth, within my enchanted horizon.”

The beginning of Canto the Fourth ::
“It is a man or a stone or a tree about to begin the fourth canto.”

The beginning of Canto the Fifth ::
“Let the reader not be angry with me if my prose has not had the good fortune to please him. You maintain that my ideas are at least singular. What you say there, respectable man, is the truth; but, a partial truth. And what an abundant source of error and misapprehension all partial truth is! Flocks of starlings have a way of flying natural to them, which seems to be governed by a uniform and regular tactic like that of a disciplined army obeying with precision the voice of a single general.”

The beginning of Canto the Sixth ::
“You whose enviable calm can do no more than embellish think not that it is any longer a question of uttering, in stanzas of fourteen or fifteen lines, like a fourth-grade pupil, exclamations that will pass for inopportune and noisy cacklings of a cochinchina chicken, as grotesque as may be imagined without trying especially hard; but it is preferable to prove by facts the propositions on advances. Would you then claim that because I had insulted as if making light of them mankind, the Creator, and myself in my explicable hyperboles, my mission were complete? No: the most important part of my work still remains as a task to be done.”



Users may expect their own varying results according to the unique shape of each their prejudices and predispositions. The way I will say it is that within these six Cantos of Maldoror Herr William T. Vollmann discovered the permission to allow his prose to blossom and his imagination to range.

[Gustavo Offely · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sou o filho de um homem e de uma mulher, segundo me disseram. Isso espanta-me... julgava ser algo mais!

Rorty questiona, a certa altura, o que é que os filósofos acrescentam a Wordsworth. Rorty escolhe muito poeticamente Words+worth, dando assim a sua resposta. Os poetas parecem intuir o que os filósofos querem explicar.

Lautréamont intuiu muito bem o que Freud viria a explicar. (Freud é agora mais apreciado como poeta do que como pensador, mas isso é outra história.)

Vê-se sobretudo uma imaginação muito viva à volta de si mesma, e pouca vida; a "perversidade" compensativa dessa imaginação contribui para a imagem do poeta à part, que ainda impressiona muitos adolescentes e o adulto que traduziu esta obra.

Resta a poesia, que é a melhor maneira de utilizar a histeria, como dizia Pessoa, e é bem melhor do que andar aos berros na rua.

[Lio · Rating 5 out of 5]

في رحلة لاكتشاف الذات، أبحث أنا أيضاً عن كائنات تشبهني، لوتريامون ليس كئيباً للحد الذي يدعون، ليس قبيحاً للحدّ الذي يصفون.. لوتريامون يصف معشار القبح الذي يزيّن وجه هذه اﻷرض لوتريامون يكتب عن أولئك الذي يبحثون بمشقّة عن النوم في سنيّ عمرهم الطوال ولا يجدونه!.. في النشيد الخامس - المقطع الثالث لا أبحث عن شيء أجدني هناك مباشرة.. فقط أجدني هناك.. أجِدُّ السير أصل إلى فقط أنه لا يلزمني شيء إلا كائنات تشبهني..
كلما أحسست بالوحدة جلسته معه!.. توحّدتُ معه..

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish that the mourning reader may at least be able to say to himself: "One must give him his due. He has greatly stupefied me. What might he not have done had he lived longer!

Dead, in fact, at 24, after having sufficiently stupefied readers of the late 1860s to have ensured his own obscurity, the Uruguayan-born Isidore Ducasse was resurrected by the Decadents, then the Surrealists, who found rare vision in his bizarre vignettes railing against god and mankind with a unique faculty for irrational analogy, black humored vitriol, and self-reflexive asides. (Of the latter: at one point, he agrees to go on with his story seeing as despite his fears, he had not died during the exceedingly long preceding sentence. At another, he spends a solid two pages discussing how he will fail to say anything, first through the mechanics of closing one's lips tightly, then through a tangle of parodic philosophizing). At times a bit of a pure provocation, a puerile punk-goth gesture in the 19th-century mode, tempered with Baudelairian verbosity, but honestly those that held this up later were right to despite how (intentionally?) irritating it may be. There's just nothing else like it.

First of all I shall blow my nose, because I need to. And then, potently assisted by my hand, I shall again take up the pen holder that my fingers had let fall.

[Andrew]

Good god. Or as Lautreamont would put it, bad god.

Sometimes you fuck sharks after shipwrecks. Other times you get your jollies squeezing out the skulls of small children. Oh, and some hedgehogs hollowed out your scrote and live there now. Etc etc etc. When Lautreamont was a young man, he wrote some wild-ass surrealist shit that went on to inspire countless legions in France as well as a fair number of punk-rock types in the Anglosphere. It's not haunting, transcendent genius or anything like that, but it is some really impressive surreal writing, and it dwarfs the pale imitations people like Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Klossowski were churning out in France a half-century to a century afterwards.

[aPriL does feral sometimes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, the author's real name, lived during a time, the mid-19th century, without an Internet, television, movies or cable (without even the Syfi Channel, home of the 'Sharknado' http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2724064/ and '30 Days of Night' http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0389722/ movies.

I have a point in including these two movies - Ducasse writes a famous shark scene, and there is a scene of a spider sucking blood from a dreamer's neck.

Today, 'The Songs of Maldorer', this historic opus of horrors, is dull and boring to slog through despite the subversive and gruesome subject matter.

The narrator is a demon? He tortures and kills male children, cuts up people after murdering them, shoots swimmers escaping from a shipwreck, disses god almighty himself, even spying on god while lovemaking (which actually isn't as interesting as it sounds - hint hint: ewwwwww)? Yawn.

Admittedly, the S&M scenes ARE still often stomach-turning and blasphemous. However, the author writes in an inventive style of his own with such nebulous and confusingly unique grammar that it makes the reading of this 'classic' a chore. Originally written in French, there are four English translations - I liked this one best of the two I read. However, although individual sentences often sing with glory, even in translation, and some particular nightmarish descriptions of the narrator's activities have apparently sent generations of readers into ecstatic creative productions of Surreal Art, the only reason for anyone to attempt reading this book would be out of curiosity or for a Literature class. It is strictly a 'History of the Novel' read.

If googled, there is a lot of expert guessing about the author and his purpose in writing this unique book - was it transformed from real events or was it all imagination? The horror stories we see now every day on cable television, with vivid graphic gore commonplace and accessible to us sitting in our living-rooms would only be known to Ducasse either through conversation, pictures, books or having seen or done something similar in real life.

I think this book is the work of a juvenile, or perhaps a schizophrenic, mind - intelligent and educated, but juvenile, a young man playing at being a 19th-century male goth. Or he was simply unable to control the fantasies and images which may have been assaulting him. I think it is possible the author actually did some of these things (in a manner with no fantasy elements) or saw them done. Heavy use of alcohol-drugs give a schizophrenic or psychotic madness to thoughts and dreams, too. I was sure that the author had to be in bad health when he wrote this; when I read his bio (what there is), apparently it may have been as bad as I guessed - even if he only starved to death from Napoleon's war - but I suspect he was diseased as well. Syphilis, perhaps? In any case, he died at age 24.


""Ducasse was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, to François Ducasse, a French consular officer, and his wife Jacquette-Célestine Davezac. Very little is known about Isidore's childhood, except that he was baptized on 16 November 1847 in the cathedral of Montevideo and that his mother died soon afterwards, probably due to an epidemic. In 1851, as a five-year-old, he experienced the end of the eight-year Siege of Montevideo in the Argentine-Uruguayan War. He was brought up to speak three languages: French, Spanish and English.

In October 1859, at the age of thirteen, he was sent to high school in France by his father. He was trained in French education and technology at the Imperial Lycée in Tarbes. In 1863 he enrolled in the Lycée Louis Barthou in Pau, where he attended classes in rhetoric and philosophy (under and uppergreat). He excelled at arithmetic and drawing and showed extravagance in his thinking and style. Isidore was a reader of Edgar Allan Poe and particularly favored Percy Bysshe Shelley and Byron, as well as Adam Mickiewicz, Milton, Robert Southey, Alfred de Musset and Baudelaire. During school he was fascinated by Racine and Corneille, and by the scene of the blinding in Sophocles' Oedipus the King. According to his schoolmate Paul Lespès, he displayed obvious folly "by self-indulgent use of adjectives and an accumulation of terrible death images" in an essay. After graduation he lived in Tarbes, where he started a friendship with Georges Dazet, the son of his guardian, and decided to become a writer.

After a brief stay with his father in Montevideo, Ducasse settled in Paris at the end of 1867. He began studies at the École Polytechnique, only to abandon them one year later. Continuous allowances from his father made it possible for Ducasse to dedicate himself completely to his writing. He lived in the "Intellectual Quarter", in a hotel in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, where he worked intensely on the first canto of Les Chants de Maldoror. It is possible that he started this work before his passage to Montevideo, and also continued the work during his ocean journey.

Ducasse was a frequent visitor to nearby libraries, where he read Romantic literature, as well as scientific works and encyclopaedias. The publisher Léon Genonceaux described him as a "large, dark, young man, beardless, mercurial, neat and industrious", and reported that Ducasse wrote "only at night, sitting at his piano, declaiming wildly while striking the keys, and hammering out ever new verses to the sounds".

In late 1868, Ducasse published (anonymously and at his own expense) the first canto of Les Chants de Maldoror a booklet of thirty-two pages which is considered by many to be a bold, taboo-defying poem concerning pain and cruelty.""

The above information is from the following Wikipedia article: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comte_...


The historical record explains this book enchanted many artists who later read this book. Presto! The Surrealist Movement was born!

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrea...

The below quote in particular is relevant:

"Because Surrealist writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize their thoughts and the images they present, some people find much of their work difficult to parse. This notion however is a superficial comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton's initial emphasis on automatic writing as the main route toward a higher reality. But—as in Breton's case—much of what is presented as purely automatic is actually edited and very "thought out". Breton himself later admitted that automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and other elements were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of visual artists in the movement forced the issue, since automatic painting required a rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus such elements as collage were introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling juxtapositions as revealed in Pierre Reverdy's poetry. And—as in Magritte's case (where there is no obvious recourse to either automatic techniques or collage)—the very notion of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation in and of itself. Surrealism was meant to be always in flux—to be more modern than modern—and so it was natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new challenges arose.

Surrealists revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, and for the line "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", and Arthur Rimbaud, two late 19th-century writers believed to be the precursors of Surrealism."


Many Literature readers and literary critics of ancient Canon/Great Books love these intelligent, talented, drugged-out alcoholic, usually male (millennia of prejudice meant women were often forbidden to read anything but their religious books, if they could read at all) writers of genius. Their lifestyle invariably involves abuse of wives and children and prostitutes, while living in decrepit attics with sh** on the floors. Insects crawled on them in their stupefied sleep. They starved from having spent whatever cash they had on alcohol/drugs.

Some of these drug-alcohol-fueled authors ARE very good, and worthy of being respected as great writers (if not family guys). Some seem to have become totally psychotic and took up a pen while blitzed or while having an episode of mental derangement. The world of mostly male Literature experts applauds wildly and buys every copy printed. Is it of value? Reluctantly, I say yes. At worst we females gain insight to the male mind. At best, some really wonderful books are written.

But this isn't one of those.

Sigh. That said, history shows the author was a huge influence on wonderful Surreal Art produced in later centuries. As another example of Great Things developing from the lowest common denominator, out of the many college boys who went to Mexico after reading 'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac, hoping to find some girl-child prostitutes and guilt-free drug use instead of actually picking up on the author's message about how destructive his life had been, some Kerouac admirers have gone on to be Genius Artists.

To me, Ducasse appropriated the style of writing from the Revelations book in the Bible. His main character (characters?) wrote from a follower(s) of Lucifer's viewpoint, and placed his nightmarish scenes (dreams?) in his contemporary Paris. He includes particularly revolting religious imagery one being god shagging a prostitute and leaving behind a long hair which jumps around, which our demon lover finds and decides to lecture. The idea was perhaps of creatively and satirically attempting to toss writing conventions (particularly in the grammar rules which identify the subject, i.e. 'I, you, me, they', so that there is a struggle by the reader to understand which narrator is speaking) and social mores of decency out the window.

I understand the intellectual point of this. I can imagine the shock of a 19th-century reader. However, for a 21st-century reader, this book is a tremendous bore. I think there are lots of satirical transformations of other authors' philosophical writings and stories included (I saw references on the Net from experts who say that Ducasse stole entire sections of material, verbatim, from other books of the time), but if so, there was almost nothing I found funny, clever or interestingly done.

There are TWO moments of interest: "Throughout my life, I have seen narrow-shouldered men, without a single exception, committing innumerable stupid acts, brutalizing their fellows and perverting their souls by every means. They call the motive for their actions glory. On seeing these spectacles, I wanted to laugh with the others, but such a strange imitation was impossible, so I took a sharp-edged penknife and slit my flesh in the two places my lips joined." First Canto, near the beginning.

omg. The source for Heath Ledger's Joker in 'The Dark Knight'?!?!? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/

Also, another scene seems to cause EvERY reader a bit of a chuckle - our evil ringmaster has sex with a female shark, his equal in depravity and thus a soulmate.

In the entire book, these two short brief scenes/descriptions were the ONLY paragraphs that woke me up and caught my interest.

I am an atheist, an ex-Christian. I get it - the author's disappointment with God.

[Šarlo · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The wish to be a pig is a desperation arising from the inability to be human."
- Sreten Marić on Les Chants de Maldoror

The six chants of Maldoror are an untouchable literal success through the scopes of dadaist and surrealist intention and Lautréamont's personal artistic catharsis. It might be a somewhat subjective and unprofessional thing to say, but I am certain that the writing process was exhilarating, and it could not have been so had it not been "burdened" by its classic form, since Ducasse - as he expresses - "writes for himself," and the work, in all its vitality, sprouted from the author and his perceived epitomes of poetic beauty; he wrote like a fanboy, allegedly for himself, yet always in regard to an imaginary reader, stern and conservative, laregely so as to heal his lonely, troubled mind.

Maldoror absolutely refuses any form of servitude either to God or to Man and accordingly acts out a total destruction of humanistic values, be they of Christianity or Reason, whereby Lautréamont's knot of neuroses disentangles itself and liberates the author. It is obvious from the start that there is no actual hate present in his expression. Once his mental "illness" (social abnormality) joins hands with tuberculosis (apparently a favorite of apocalyptic writers - this one here, Kamov, and many more!), he writes a repugnant prologue "for a future book" titled Poésies, much more realistically appaling than any of Maldoror's many fictive wrongdoings, as it is the equivalent of any old satanist embracing sweet Jesus on his deathbed in hopes that it will buy him a ticket to Heaven. Lautréamont is dying, and - in accordance to his writing - by that point it would be easiest to brand him a coward, if only his effort hadn't remained so sincere.

But it is how it is, and very few important authors (who are also, coincidentally, famous) have remained true to themselves, untarnished by dead-end idealism; this is especially true in surrealism, from France to Serbia, and all the way to Russian futurism. There is no justification for turning oneself and one's most personal work into a function of the societal structures that induced massive amounts of frustration and alienation which originally gave birth to this pure, naive need for expression, for poetry, for protest (all the same) against those same old structures, yet this is what Lautréamont did with Poésies in an attempt to negate MALDOROR, his old self, his instinctive, unencumbered, natural inner self.

A century and a half later, one of the two lives on.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Be blessed by my left hand, be hallowed by my right hand, angels protected by my universal love! I kiss your face, I kiss your breast, with my smooth lips I kiss the various parts of your harmonious and perfumed body. Why did you not tell me at once what you were, crystallizations of a superior moral beauty? I was obliged to discover for myself the countless treasures of tenderness and chastity consealed by the pulses of your oppressed heart. Your breast is bedecked with garlands of roses and cus-grass. I was obliged to open your legs in order to know you and attach my mouth to the insignia of your modesty. But (and this is an important matter) do not forget to wash the skin of your parts every day in warm water, for if not veneral chancres will inevitably develop upon the lacerated surface of my insatiable lips. O, if only, instead of being a hell, the universe had been an immense celestial anus! See the gesture I am making with my abdomen: yes, I would have plunged my penis through its bloody sphincter, rending apart by my impetuous motions the very bones of its pelvis! Sorrow would not then have breathed into my blinded eyes entire dunes of flying sand; I should have discovered the subterranean spot where thruth lies slumbering, and the river of my viscous sperm would thus have found an ocean into which to precipitate itself!'

[akemi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Swerving between reactive and active, Maldoror makes his way from God to Man, but much in him is still God. There's power in affirming the other's terror, falling so deep into their conception of sin that you corrupt yourself and the others around you with jouissance. Becoming-evil is a visceral and viable strategy towards contesting hegemony. It's why we reclaim terms like faggot and tranny and bitch—to delight in the visceral theft of a word once used to dispossess you of your being. Yet mere inversion of the other's morality is still entrapment in their morality. If nothing is resignified beyond inversion, we remain reactive beings. Maldoror is often that, a reactive edgelord who revels in inverting Christian tropes. All that is holy is profaned: children are tortured, virgins are raped, God is drunk and covered in shit—the entire repertoire of death metal iconography is regurgitated in splendid detail. But as Angela Nagel asked in Kill All Normies , what are we transgressing towards? Because transgression without purpose quickly turns into a nihilistic death cult of incels, pedophiles, and fascists.

I also find that the cruelty Lautréamont depicts pales in comparison to de Sade, because Maldoror's cruelty is directed at others, and in being directed at others, is therefore dependent on others. To be a master is to need a slave. However, de Sade showed in Philosophy in the Boudoir that cruelty can be self-negating, self-transgressing, and full of collective, joyous love. Cruelty can be life-affirming if it is employed towards rupturing the chains that bind you to any one singular form of being. Despite being written a century before Maldoror, Philosophy in the Boudoir is a far greater positive statement on becoming than Maldoror.

There are glimmers of a positive project beyond mere transgression in Maldoror, though. There's a strange, cute chapter where Maldoror's just riding a horse with his bro, vibing on their shared capacity for self-responsibility that frees them from Christian morality and the Victorian Big Other. There're passages of earthly delight, material affirmation, and monstrous multiplicity. These build Maldoror's project of Man, which often mirrors Nietzsche's Ubermensch. Here, Christianity falls away, and a new world emerges. The hideous face of Maldoror, whose power lies in its iconic perversion of angelic representations, becomes irrelevant to a bodily joy whose foundations resides in self-affirmation and sensorial being. Life becomes more than a negation of what you detest. The self is depicted as a bricolage of exteriority (multiple), which nonetheless is agential towards its own becoming (singular). Inheritance isn't radically rejected, but radically grasped—steered towards a project of one's own making. In such a move, Maldoror mirror's Marx's understanding of history as a circumstance not of one's choosing, yet capable of dialectical transformation. Through self-reflexive creation, we become active forces in a reactive world, capable of pushing and pulling the material forces around us—as well as ourselves—into new forms.

[Berna Labourdette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Otra de las figuras obscurecidas por su obra, si bien las dos pueden unirse, el falso conde nace en Montevideo en 1846, hijo de un diplomático francés, después de vivir en Uruguay algunos años, es enviado a Francia, primero a un colegio en Tarbes y enseguida al Liceo de Pau, que también era un internado. Conoce allí a Paul Lespes, condiscípulo, uno de los pocos que guarda memorias de un Ducasse adolescente (características que una vez más coinciden extrañamente con el célebre estereotipo gótico): "era un joven delgado, con la espalda un poco encorvada, la tez pálida, los cabellos negros le caían sobre la cara, estaba generalmente triste y silencioso y como retraído en sí mismo. Nosotros pensábamos que le hacía falta su país indígena... amaba extraordinariamente la parte donde Edipo se extraía los ojos y maldecía su destino, decía que le parecía muy hermosa; admiraba a Edgar Allan Poe y recuerdo que le dejó a otros de sus amigos un volumen con poesías de Teophile Gautier. Le teníamos por un espíritu fantástico y soñador, pero en el fondo un buen chico que no sobrepasaba el nivel medio de instrucción, seguramente por un retraso en sus estudios. Me mostró un día sus versos, no podría juzgarlos, pero me parecieron de ritmo un poco extraño y de pensamiento oscuro. El detestaba particularmente los versos latinos y sufría de migrañas penosas que creo que influenciaron sostenidamente su carácter..."

Ducasse sale del Opera de Barcelona (otro colegio donde termina su educación) en 1863 y envía a Lespes y otro condíscipulo años después una edición de los Cantos de Maldoror sin dedicatoria, pero que Lespes reconoce inmediatamente como obra suya: "por el estilo, por las ideas que eran una mezcla rara..."

Una de las explicaciones más difundidas a la creación de los Cantos de Maldoror (Mal d'aurore: mal de aurora) es la historia de una discusión pendiente en el Liceo con un profesor que admiraba mucho, luego de leer uno de sus poemas en clase. Así Gaston Bachelard y Julien Gracq imaginaban que Maldoror se había producido producto de un resentimiento de adolescente, impregnado de una atmósfera escolar y el segundo lo atribuía a un rencor por su estadía forzada en el Opera de Barcelona. Enseguida tenemos otra visión, la de Jules Clôture, que muestra a Ducasse como un agitador político y revolucionario, visión que le parece a su condíscipulo Lespes exagerada. Ciertamente no podemos ignorar la influencia de su siglo y las convenciones de la novela gótica.

Ducasse muere tísico en 1870 a los 24 años, habiendo publicado Maldoror a los 22. En los Testimonios sobre Ducasse recopilados por su primer biógrafo Genonceaux lo muestran como un espíritu afiebrado, siguiendo extrañamente el camino de su admirado EA Poe, según Gomez de la Serna ; "en los días fríos y lluviosos de París, Ducasse permanecía en cama hasta la noche, pensando y escribiendo; tenía un piano, su único lujo" y Andres Malraux : "Ducasse comia apenas, no trabajaba salvo en la noche después de haber tocado su piano y bebía tanto café que escandalizaba al propietario del hotel".

Los Cantos de Maldoror son publicados en 1869 y pasaron totalmente desapercibidos hasta que son desbloqueados por los surrealistas en 1920. Existe una edición muy bella de sus Obras completas y Poesías hecha por André Breton con dibujos muy logrados, especialmente de André Masson, Max Ernst y como no, Salvador Dalí. Hay muchas fotos e imágenes del Conde, pero solamente se conserva una sola imagen que podemos presumir verdadera.

Algunas opiniones sobre esta obra que acumula millares de tesis, estudios, ensayos, plagios e influencias:
André Breton: "comprendo que soy absolutamente incapaz de considerar con sangre fría el mensaje fulgurante que parece sobrepasar todas las posibilidades humanas".
Albert Camus: "es el libro de un escolar casi brillante".
André Gide: "la lectura de Rimbaud y el canto 6 de Maldoror hacen que me averguence de mi obra"
Louis Aragon : "si uno lo prueba, toda la poesía se transforma en un cosa falsa y preparada".
¿Podemos imaginar un mejor material para la leyenda?

[kaelan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Les Chantes de Maldoror is best known for the praise afforded to it by the Surrealists. Of course, their infatuation is completely understandable: within these hallucinogenic pages, one may find the now famous line comparing beauty to "the random encounter between an umbrella and a sewing-machine upon a dissecting-table." But despite the obvious temptation, I strongly believe that we should avoid viewing Isidore Ducasse's magnum opus through the anachronistic lens of influence—i.e., as a "dark progenitor" of Surrealism, to steal a phrase from the book's back cover. Les Chantes de Maldoror stands up on its own.

Nevertheless, I found myself making my own anachronistic comparisons: with its fevered imagery and sordid descriptions, often presented in pseudo-scientific language, Les Chantes suggested to me a sort of proto-Naked Lunch. Yet this resemblance can only be superficial. Whereas Burroughs gleefully wallows in confusion and irreverence, Ducasse seems driven, at the end of the day, by a powerful sense of morality. And nowhere is this more clearly articulated than in the following passage, which I've drawn from the Fourth Canto:

[I]f I let my vices soak into these pages, people will believe even more in the virtues that shine, and in the halo which I will place above those virtues, that the greatest geniuses of the future will be sincerely and recognisably grateful to me.

For some, such didactic moralizing may be off-putting; but personally I find it refreshing, for it serves to elevate Les Chantes from a mere curiosity piece into something grander. Which is not to say, of course, that it isn't curious. Indeed, it is probably one of the strangest literary works that I've ever had the pleasure to read. But it's also passionate and idealistic. In short: highly recommended.

So why only three stars? Not speaking any French, I was unfortunate enough to read Les Chantes in translation: specifically, R.J. Dent's version, published by the Solar Nocturnal imprint of Solar Books. I have not read any other English translations of the work, although I'm aware that several alternatives exist (a thoughtful comparison of these has been conducted by The Bricoleur, who speculatively concludes that "the definitive English version of Maldoror has yet to be written"). But regardless of Dent's skill as a translator, the book is severely marred by numerous typos—the least of which simply annoy the reader, while the worst seriously limit one's understanding of the text. My rating, therefore, has been reduced accordingly.

And one final point of contention: The Solar Nocturnal edition claims to contain illustrations by Salvador Dalí, which resulted in a profound sense of disappointment when I discovered that these "illustrations" were no more than cheap facsimiles, three inches by four inches in size, black-and-white and inexcusably pixelated. In the future, I plan to skip anything published by Solar Books, if only out of spite.

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not impressed. There's no plot and no structure, just page after page of debauchery. It's like one of the more ridiculous sections of Naked Lunch, but for 300 pages. It is kind of funny sometimes, though, like when the narrator has sex with a shark. I thought only Led Zeppelin groupies did that.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a work reminiscent of the sort of wonderfully mindless and meandering crap that you'd expect from a trench-coated, emotionally (or sexually) insecure teen, the titular Maldoror, shark-fucker and god-hater extraordinaire, weaves his black and demonic way through a pastiche of abominations.
I can reduce its broad inanity to a few main themes:

Maldoror sits on a bench next to an 8-year old and feeds him evil thoughts.
Maldoror shoots shipwreck survivors as they crawl onto shore.
Maldoror fucks a shark (maybe).
Maldoror tries to molest a teenaged boy.
Maldoror fights a running battle against God (in rhino form) in the streets of Paris.

Long heralded as a kind of "work of evil", it's clear almost from the get-go that this is a colossal joke which merits closer study. I'm thinking particularly of the early "bench scene" where the nonsense Maldoror spouts out to the kid very closely resembles very prevalent nihilist views of the time, the same that Dostoevsky was tackling in works like "Demons". Maldoror is so ridiculous, his spoutings so inane and stupid, that it's hard to take him seriously but in this day and age with our glorification of the villain and the now rancid banality of evil, it seems that people might be missing the point here. What do I know? I'd never have sex with a shark.

[Josh! · Rating 5 out of 5]

Third line: "It would not be well that all men should read the pages that are to follow; a few only may savor their bitter fruit without danger."
Well you know what mysterious French guy from the 1800s? I fucking loved it.
I was assigned to read two short excerpts of this for class, and instead of getting through it with the minimum pieces of flair, I read the whole thing. I couldn't not (fuck you double negative police.) This book is consider the ancestor of surrealism, and having been written in the 1860s was way ahead of its time. It is an ode to his hatred of humanity but still has a soft side. I don't know how to explain it but if your into experimental lit (or act like you are on alternate Tuesdays and Thursdays (like I do)) then you really should check this out.

[Bradley Clacy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Probably something I would have enjoyed when I was younger, more misanthropic and when my taste was less refined, but now having read it, I just find Lautréamont to be an immature, overly conceited, misogynistic misanthrope whose (at times) nice imagery and surrealistic driftings do nothing to save the text as a whole. I couldn't wait for it to be over.

This edition also includes Lautréamont's Poésies, which are a collection of humanistic aphorisms in contrast to Maldoror. I found this section to be much better, although as far as aphorisms go, they weren't that great.

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the most disturbing books I have ever read, but there is no doubt that Isidore-Lucien Ducasse was a pioneer of Surrealism.

[Alana · Rating 5 out of 5]

shit is so fucking fire. what wouldnt i give to go back and read this again for the first time on school holidays when i was 14/15 feelin like an absolute madman having to look up every second word

[Aslı Can]

Klasik edebiyata ve edebiyatçılara bir isyan bayrağı niyetine yazılmış bir kitap. Yazar olarak kendisini ve okuyucuyu sınamak, sürekli ve sürekli zora koşmak isteyen bir hali var.

"Acıların ürünü olan ve artık acı olmaktan çıkmış deneyimleri akrtarın yalnız okuyucularınıza yalnızca. Herkesin önünde ağlamayın. Yazınsal güzellikleri söküp çıkarmayı bilmek gerek ölümün bağrında bile olsa: ama ölüme ilişkin olmayacak bu güzellikler."

Arada bir metni ele geçiren uzun cümleler metne hakim olan coşkulu anlatım havasına engel olmuş bence. Sanki coşkulu coşkulu konuşurken durup nasıl daha dolaylı anlatırım anlatmak istediğimi diye düşünerek yazılmış gibi. Çevirenin zorlanmış olmalı, arada bir çaresizlikten mi yoksa tercihten mi, çok garip kelimeler kullanmış; özdeksel, özekdeş, ölümseklik gibi.

Okumak biraz zor hatta bazen savaş alanı gibi bir kitap ama bence mücadele etmeye değer.

[Azjericho · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is THE BOOK! And when I say that, I mean it. Isidore Ducasse, Better Known as The Count of Lautréamont, is the "L'enfant terrible" by excellence. When you read the poetry of these pages, get prepared for all the misantrophy and rage emanated from the letters, but behind all you will meet the solitude of a young spirit confronted with the hipocrisy and banality of a cowardly society. Maldoror will make you laugh, cry, love, hate, live and die; he is the avatar of rebeldy, and with beautiful surrealism and symbolism Lautréamont transform this beast or god in the maximum expresion of his life. Absolutly recommended!

[كريم راهي · Rating 5 out of 5]

روعة السرد النثري في أناشيد مالدورور لايستطيع المرءُ منها فِكاكاً
من أمتع ما قرأت وما وقعتُ تحتَ تأثيره
كتبت بعد الفراغ منهُ نصّا شعرياً بعنوان هاراكيري



هاراكيري

ما يعجَزُ الكركيُّ عن تردادِهِ
هُنا وهُناك
يُغَنّيهِ في سَهمِ طيرانِهِ الطويل.

أوَدُّ أن أبوحَ بِسرّيَ للبئرِ
أو أدوّنَهُ على لَحاءِ الشَجر
لقد كنتُ كطائِرٍ مقتنص
يحومُ حولَ الشِراكِ ذاتِها
في كلِّ مرّة.
أتوقُ الآن
لإنعتاقي من إغواء الأمكنة
أتوقُ لجثوةٍ على الأرضِ، أخيرة
لنصلٍ ينفذُ في الخاصرة
وللحُبور في صيحةِ الروح المحلّقة.