Maldoror = Les Chants de Maldoror Together with a translation of Lautréamont's Poésies Edition: [Ed. reprinted] /

This 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 Lautréamont: "He terrifies, stupefies, strikes dumb. He could look squarely at thatwhich others hadmerelygiven a passing glance." Little is known of the author of Maldoror, Isidore Ducasse, selfstyled Comte de Lautréamont, 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, Léon Bloy, Maeterlinck, and Rémy [...]de Gourmont. Later still, Lautréamont was to be canonized as one of their principal "ancestors" by the Paris Surrealists. This new paperback edition, translated by Guyé, 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 Lautréamont. Cover: from a bronze Dancer by Marino Marini, courtesy of Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York; design by David Ford.