Comte de LautrÃ©amont,Guy Wernham
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 LautrÃ©amont: "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 LautrÃ©amont, 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, LÃ©on Bloy, Maeterlinck, and RÃ©my de Gourmont. Later still, LautrÃ©amont 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 LautrÃ©amont.
Poetry,Fiction,Cultural,France,Classics,Literature,Horror,European Literature,French Literature,Literature,19th Century,Surreal,Novels
Les Chants de Maldoror