The Songs of Maldoror, Isidore Ducasse

Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa - Haendel

 (Tr.Spa-Eng. from a review in Shvoong)

 Rescued from the rubble of oblivion by the surrealists, mainly by André Breton (despite the fact that before him Rubén Dario dedicated a brief sketch to it) to turn it into a kind of initiation monolith in which many of his ideas would soak, THE SONGS OF MALDOROR (in French Les Chants de Maldoror) is a long poem in prose consisting of six cantos (divided in turn into stanzas) in which Isidore Ducasse, best known for the bizarre pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, extols a thoroughly evil, focused on insulting the man, God (for having created such garbage) and himself, just and simply for being part of humanity, through the thought and actions of Maldoror, a sort of Angel of Evil whose sole purpose in life is committing the most heinous crimes and atrocities.
  It is a perplexing book as just a few, belonging to that "cursed" literature so in vogue in the second half of the 19th century, which Baudelaire opened shortly before with Les Fleurs du Mal and that shortly thereafter Rimbaud would continue with Une saison en Enfer, as the blasphemies that populate its lines, including the idea of a drunken God serving as derision for some animals or even represented in the manner of Saturn when it devours its own children with wild bites, as well as the bloody descriptions of sex crimes or hedonistic sadism when it comes to make a child suffers, have managed to disrupt the imagination of not a few readers nearly 150 years after having been published for the first time. And although there have been many other readers who reduce Lautréamont`s text at the level of a kind of disillusioned adolescent`s naive tantrum, it contains pages of brutal beauty, such as the stanza dedicated to the "old ocean", or the murder of a sailor who was trying to survive a shipwreck so that later Maldoror could mate sexually with a huge female shark, after a deaf battle on the high seas.

  In addition, The Songs of Maldoror also contain a veiled autobiography of Ducasse, which may be the only way to remember a poet whose life we know almost nothing, and that is already dyed with inks of legend because of the strange circumstances surrounding his death at age 24, in 1870, just a couple of years after he began to publish this work which he would never even suspect that it would be one of the main influences for much of the 20th century.

Pic: life wings, The Pic-Poem Book - (K)Eros