Les Chants de Maldoror

Comte de Lautréamont

Quotations reprinted without permission from the New Directions edition (translated by Guy Wernham)


He who is singing now does not claim that his songs are new. On the contrary, he is proud in the knowledge that all the lofty and wicked thoughts of his hero reside within all men.
Abandon these thoughts which empty your heart like a desert; they are more burning than fire. Your mind is so sick that you are not aware of it and you imagine you are normal whenever you give utterance to words full of insanity, although redolent of infernal grandeur!
Do not be hard on one who has but tried out his lyre. It gives forth so strange a sound!
In ancient and in modern times more than one great human imagination saw his genius appalled by the contemplation of your symbolic figures traced upon burning paper like so many mysterious signs living with a latent breath, incomprehensible to the vulgar and profane, which were merely the radiant revelation of eternal axioms and hieroglyphs that existed before the universe and will continue to exist beyond it.
...he resumes his ferocious attitude and continues to watch the man-hunt, trembling nervously, and the wide lips of the vagina of darkness whence flow unceasingly like a river immense shadowly spermatozoa which take flight into the lugubrious ether concealing, with the vast manipulation of bat's wings, the whole of nature and the solitary legions of octopi, grown dejected at the aspect of these obscure and inexplicable fulgurations.
Yes, I feel that my soul is padlocked in my body and cannot free itself to flee far from coasts beaten by the human sea and be no longer witness to the livid pack of sorrows that pursues the human izard without respite across morasses and the abyss of vast despondancy.
I assure you that there is no fire in my eyes, although I do have a feeling as if my head were plunged into a helment of blazing coals.
See the madwoman as she passes by dancing and recalling something... Her face resembles no human countenace and she bursts into shrieks of laughter like a hyena. She lets fall rags of phrases which, if they were knit together, very few would have any clear significance. Her gown, torn in several places, flutters about her bony and filthy legs. She wanders on like a poplar leaf borne upon a whirlwind of unconscious associations, she, her youth, her illusions and her former happiness remembered now through the mists of a ruined mind. She has lost her pristine grace and beauty; her bearing is mean and her breath reeks of brandy.
I can acknowledge my faults; but not increase their gravity by my cowardice.
Hitherto poetry has followed the wrong road. Raising itself up to heaven or groveling upon the ground, it has misunderstood the principles of its existence, and has been, not without reason, constantly been flouted by honest folks. It has not been modest -- the finest quality that can exist in an imperfect being! As for me, I would exhibit my qualities; but I am not hypocrite enough to conceal my vices! Laughter, evil, pride, folly, will appear each in its turn between sensibility and love of justice and will serve as examples for the stupefaction of mankind. Each will recognize himself not as he should be but as he is. And perchance this simple ideal, conceived in my imagination, will however transcend all that poetry has hiterhto considered greatest and most holy .. thus hypocrisy will straightaway be chased out of my dwelling.
She has been long dead; abandon those remains and take care not to be transported irrevocably by the rage that consumes you: here is no longer justice, for egoism, concealed beneath the integument of your brow, slowly raises like a phantom the veil that covers it.
A secret and noble justice, towards the open arms of which I instinctively fling myself, commands me to hunt down without quarter that ignoble punishment... conqueror, I reject the ambush of your hypocritical opium. Consequently it is certain that my heart, that starving thing that feeds ypon itself, has matured its plans by that weird struggle. As impenetrable as a giant I have lived ceaselessly with the sockets of my eyes gaping... and implacable scalpel probes in its dense underbrush. Consciousness exhales a long death-rattle of malediction, for the veil of its modesty undergoes cruel lacerations... I wish to dwell alone within my intimate reason.
He contemplates the moon, which pours down upon his breast a cone of ecstatic beams in which silver atoms of ineffable sweetness flutter like moths. He waits, until the morning twilight shall bring, by a change of scene, a mocking relief to his prostrated heart.
Who is that being yonder at the horizon, that creature who dares to approach me fearlessly, leaping laboriously along its crooked way? And what majesty, yet what serene gentleness! Its eyes, though mild, are profound. Their enormous pupils move with the breeze and seem to be alive. I know not this creature. As I meet its monstrous eyes my whole body shudders for the first time since I sucked at the withered paps of what is known as a mother. There is a kind of glowing halo around this being. When he gave utterance all nature was stilled, trembling. Since it pleases you to come to me as if drawn by a magnet, I shall not hinder you. How beautiful he is! It pains me to say this. You should be strong for you have a superhuman countenance, sad as the universe, beautiful as suicide. I loathe you to the fullest extent of my power and would rather see a serpent coiled about my neck from the dawn of time than I would see your eyes.
What! Is it you, toad! Fat toad! Unhappy toad! Forgive me ... forgive me! What are you doing here on this earth where the accursed dwell? But what have you done with your fetid, viscous pustules that you should have so fair a look? When you came down from above, sent by a higher command on a mission to comfort the various existing races of men, you swept down upon the earth with the speed of a kite, your wings unwearied by that long, majestic flight ... I saw you! Poor toad! How you made me think on the infinite, no less than on my own weakness!