num_pages: 288
description: Alternate version of this book.It is not right that everyone should read the pages which follow; only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity.So wrote the self-styled Comte de Lautramont (184670) at the beginning of this sensational Chants de Maldoror.One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing Lautramonts fantasy unveils a world  half-vision half-nightmare  of angels and gravediggers hermaphrodites and pederasts lunatics and strange children. The writing is drenched with an unrestrained savagery and menace and the startling imagery  delirious erotic blasphemous and grandiose by turns  possesses a remarkable hallucinatory quality.The writers mysterious life and death no less than the book itself captured the imagination of surrealists. Jarry Modigliani Verlaine and others hailed it as a work of genius. Andr Gide wrote Here is something that excites me to the point of delirium and Andr Breton described the book as the expression of a total revelation which seems to surpass human capacities. This volume also contains a translation of the epigrammatic Posies.
language: English
title: Maldoror and Poems
publisher: Penguin Classics