Thought games
Alex de Jonge
Maldoror by Lautreamont, trans. Alexis Lykiard (Allison and Busby £4.95) Palsies by Isidore Ducasse (Laut• reamont), trans. Alexis Lykiard (Allison and Busby £4.95) Maldoror by LautreaMont, trans. Pad Knight (Penguin 95p) Some years ago the Spectator published 0 review of a study of Lautreamont which
ended with the observation: 'It is time Lautreamont came out of hiding. We have need of the violence with which he
splinters and outrages our tidy categories. He gets your adrenalin flowing and he makes your reality dance.' Yet Laut• reamont remains perversely under wraps, or at least ignored beyond small worlds which continue to assert the subversive value of the arts — mounting the °col' sional self-consciously nostalgic surrealist manifestation intended to twang the strings of our repressed eroticism. (Sips are that there is going to be a lot of it going on this year with plenty of poly' technic students doing their DuchamP thing.) Besides, the black humour and elaborate violence of Maldoror have 0 bookish quality that loses its dandy's bite in an age which has seen the final decaY of dandyism to the pathetic level of punk rock.
In other words to resurrect Laut• reamont it is pointless to talk about the relevance of his violence, his value as 0 primary disruptive force. Resurrection ls made no easier by his capacity to attract the wrong kind of critic, French pseuds largely, who have given his works a veil bad time indeed over the year. He has come in for more silliness even doe Rimbaud, which says it all. He also has biographers, although nothing or next to nothing is known of his life. This did not stop some idiot from writing several hundred pages about what someone in his position might have been doing at the time he could have been doing it. Lovely stuff. It is true though that something has come to light recently, a photograph Which appears on the cover of Alexis .Lykiard's translation of Poesies. It shows a dark young man with a bony face, high forehead, short curly hair, close-set eyes and a, curled lip. As a photograph of Ducasse it does not disappoint.
The Lautreamont problem is comPounded by the fact that his two works are totally contradictory. Maldoror celebrates violence, anarchy, black eroticism, and mounts a most effective assault upon God. It may also be considered as the therapeutic working out of a particular fantasy expressed through the development, of a whole chain of complementary metaphors, a development reaching its Climax in the elaborate action of the final canto. It is customary to consider Poesies as a deliberate negation of Les Chants. With its celebration of virtue, denial of romantic literature — school prize day Speeches being the ultimate literary achievement — and its perversely optimistic assertion of human goodness it constitutes the positive pole which imparts meaning to Maldoror, its negative counterpart. Meaning implies choice and the two texts imply the two extremes within Which all meaning must lie.
There is truth in this for, as Alexis Lykiard has suggested, albeit too briefly, in his careful introduction, Ducasse as a Poet is writing first and last about the Manipulations of language, how it creates our received worlds for us so that `if our culture is too rooted in language and that culture is unsatisfactory or the time has Come to reshape it, we must first attack language and remake that'. In Poesies, With its deliberate reworkings of aphorisms by Pascal and Vauvenargues, its assault on the major figures of romanticism for their celebration of violence and despair, he is playing language games, and thought games too. Plagiarism is used to show how frames of reference May be reassembled to subvert particular meanings, thereby demonstrating that all meaning is at risk. He devotes himself to the reworking of aphorisms in particular, and in this respect is reminiscent of another writer who tried to expose the decadence of his culture through the decadence of its language: I mean of course Karl Kraus.
Yet though Lautreamont may do such things, there is more here besides. Maldoror celebrates total anarchy, the need to destroy all received categories of culture in pursuit of a state of undifferentiated nature. The sense of disgust With culture and law that runs through writers from de Sade, Rousseau, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Dostoievsky reaches its most intense expression in the wild destructive and centrifugal fantasies of Maldoror, the book having all the extremity of a young uncurbed imagination. Poesies is a no less
severe rejection of that very tradition of romantic anarchy and a fanatical plea for a return to the world of classical order, humanism and morality. Perhaps these are statements to be taken at face value, not merely to be considered as a further subversion, or merely the reverse side, of Maldoror. Where the latter was a lunatic celebration of destruction, Poesies are a no less extreme affirmation that such destruction simply will not do. This makes the work Lautreamont's version of Rimbaud's abandon of the quest for ecstasy, or, more interesting, of the conservatism of the later Dostoievsky, who, most notably in his journalism, can be seen to condemn modes of action and appetites celebrated in his novels. If Maldoror implies Poesies, it is in the particular sense that an imagination which has given itself over entirely to anarchy learns to reject it and lend itself no less fervently to order and traditional orthodoxy — playing, let it be said, the odd language game the while. In other words it is time that we should consider the possibility of reading Poesies as if it meant what it said and taking it at face value.
Mr Lykiard has served Lautreamont well over the years. His translation of Maldoror is first-rate. He never flinches from the particular problems posed by the author's rhetorical extravagance, and his own skill as a writer makes for a translation that goes very close to the bones and tensions of the original; a magnificent achievement. Paul Knight's version does not compare well. One would guess he is familiar with Mr Lykiard's work but is unable to match its concision, or command of language, and when faced with a real difficulty he will either skimp or simply leave it out. His circumlocutions, where Lykiard is concise, make the pace falter, and Maldoror is hard enough going as it is. Mr Lykiard displays a comparable literary sense in his rendering of Poesies. There are some lovely solutions — 'give vent' for 'exhaler', for example; however, in some respects the translation won't quite do. The translator has his problems with parts of the French language, and the text abounds with mistranslations ranging from slight inaccuracies to the dreaded contre-sens. Here are a few: 'Vous me ferez plaisir' 'You will give me pleasure': `discours acaderniques"academic treatises': 'creusez le mot' underline the word': 'reunies en compagnie"reunited in company'; Paul et Virginie is an episode but not a serial; while 'fake passer la description du mal' most emphatically does not mean `do without the description of evil'. It's all a bit of a shame, because pointing mistakes out gives no pleasure and the mistakes themselves mar what is otherwise an elegant and lovingly prepared edition; one's only other complaint is that one could have done with a much longer introduction by Mr Lykiard who writes so well about his subject.
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