Les Chants de Maldoror

[rewch]

Have just finished reading this in translation (red face of shame)... spectaculalry weird nonsense beloved of the Surrealists (it was illustrated by Dalí in 1934 and is definitely his only good illustrated book)... but it's a complete enigma... published in Brussells (first Chant only) in 1867, reputedly written by Isidore Ducasse using the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, but this is not certain... nobody seems to know anything about Ducasse and many have been spurred to wild conjectures on the subject... it seems like a classic hoax... but the text... holy cow! it is without doubt the precursor to many of the greatest & best of the twentieth century in art, philosophy & literature... summed up best in visual terms as very much akin to Max Ernst's cut-up engravings as in La Femme Cent Têtes, Une Semaine de Bonté & Rêve du Petite Fille qui Voulut Entrer au Carmel:

 

[bruno]

yes, it's mad. ducasse was from uruguay, by the way, definitely a real person.

 

[rewch]

i know he was born in montevideo & that he's real, but i'm trying to get my head round the fact thet noone really knows if he wrote it... he hinted that he did but the author on the first published chant was cited as lautréamont but nobody can work out why or even if it's spelt correctly... seems it was just accepted that it was ducasse...

 

[mistersloane]

I dunno how far you've gone into that lot rewch but it's well worth delving into. If you can find anything by Enid Starkie, she did great biographies of contemporaries of Ducasse and the early fin-de-siecle Paris period,

Petrus Borel: The Lycanthrope (1954) by Enid Starkie

being particularly good, and which helps explain what the FUCK was going on then, drinking absinthe from skulls in pubs and all that stuff.

I'd personally recommend ANYTHING written by and about Gerard de Nerval, who for me is just the master. Ducasse is just perfect though on that Chatterton thing / Rimbaud level of leaving perfect works of disgust and dying early. They were definitely the firsts in 'that stupid club' and good on 'em for it. But Enid Starkie man, she's pukka. They were definitely smoking some good shit in Paris in them days.

 

[john eden]

There was a book about Lautremont called "Nightmare Culture" iirc. I never read it tho - Coil named a mini-album after it...

 

[rewch]

thank you... i used to be quite keen on nerval... haven't read him for years though... will check out nightmare culture...

if anyone comes across a copy of the brussells 1867 edition of les chants let me know... there are only (top of my head) about five known copies... $$$$!

 

[rewch]

not the brussells 1867 edition, because that was published in 1873... it was first published (chant 1 only) in 1868 in paris... it was republished (chant 1 only in 1869)... the first complete edition was printed in 1869 but wasn't - apparently - issued... the same edition was remaindered and issued in brussells with a new title page in 1873... the 1873 one is available, the 1868 edition is the rare one... glad that's cleared up

even rarer is ducasse's poésies... 2 parts published in 1870... only 1 known copy of each