Poetry
The Songs of Maldoror
Les Chants de Maldoror
Comte de Lautréamont · 1874
Opening lines
Plût au ciel que le lecteur, enhardi et devenu momentanément féroce comme ce qu'il lit, trouve, sans se désorienter, son chemin abrupt et sauvage, à travers les marécages désolés de ces pages sombres et pleines de poison […]
May it please heaven that the reader, emboldened and become for a moment as ferocious as what he reads, find, without losing his bearings, his abrupt and wild path across the desolate marshes of these dark pages full of poison […]
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Six prose cantos, made up of long stanzas, in which a voice addresses the reader to warn, mock and hold him. Maldoror, the being who tells his own story there, has broken with God and with men and lays claim to evil. He is seen defying the Creator, contemplating suffering and, at sea, uniting with a female shark in whom he recognises his like. The last canto takes the form of a short novel, in which Maldoror attaches himself to the footsteps of a Parisian schoolboy, Mervyn.
Context
The first canto appeared alone and without the author's name in November 1868. The six cantos were printed in Brussels in 1869 by Albert Lacroix, who refused to put them on sale; only about ten copies were bound for the author. In 1874 the bookseller Jean-Baptiste Rozez bought the stock and put it on sale again under a new cover. The poets of Jeune Belgique discovered it in his shop, before the Surrealists made it one of their bedside books.
Who it is for
A dense prose, without a plot until the last canto, read in fragments; the violence of the images is constant and deliberate.
Prizes and reception
Ignored when it appeared, it was taken up by the Surrealists; R. J. Dent translated it into English under the title The Songs of Maldoror.
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