Lautreamont Quotes

As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.

I will leave no memoirs.

O Ocean, you remind me somewhat of the bluish marks one sees on the battered backs of cabin boys.

Oh incomprehensible pederasts, I shall not heap insults upon your great degradation; I shall not be the one to pour scorn on your infundibuliform anus. It is enough that the shameful and almost incurable maladies which besiege you should bring with them their unfailing punishments.

He was a young man of savage & unexpected originality, a diseased genius & quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane & in their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the madness of a man of genius some genius often remains: the form & not the quality of intelligence has been affected; the fruit has been bruised in the fall, but has preserved all its perfume & all the savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe.

Que se disent deux cœurs qui s’aiment ? Rien.

Je cherchais une âme qui et me ressemblât, et je ne pouvais pas la trouver. Je fouillais tous les recoins de la terre; ma persévérance était inutile. Cependant, je ne pouvais pas rester seul. Il fallait quelqu’un qui approuvât mon caractère; il fallait quelqu’un qui eût les mêmes idées que moi...

La pierre voudrait se soustraire aux lois de la pesanteur ? Impossible. Impossible, si le mal voulait s’allier avec le bien.

Ma poésie ne consistera qu’à attaquer, par tous les moyens, l’homme, cette bête fauve, et le Créateur, qui n’aurait pas dû engendrer une pareille vermine.

...the police, that shield of civilization...

The name Maldoror, suggesting as it does evil, gold, horror, dawn, sadness etc., seems a curious hybrid, but on reading the work its full title, Les Chants de Maldoror par Le Comte de Lautreamont, seems to contain & imply the constant switches in narrative emphasis-the self as a game (je-jeu) & the author as observer, participant & invisible man-as well as being an inevitable & accurate condensation of, or hint at, the contents.

Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity. And so it explains the twentieth century. Lautreamont, who is usually hailed as the bard of pure rebellion, on the contrary proclaims the advent of the taste for intellectual servitude which flourishes in the contemporary world.

Plût au ciel que le lecteur, enhardi et devenu momentanément féroce comme ce qu’il lit, trouve, sans se désorienter, son chemin abrupt et sauvage, à travers les marécages désolés de ces pages sombres et pleines de poison ; car, à moins qu'il n’apporte dans sa lecture une logique rigoureuse et une tension d’esprit égale au moins à sa défiance, les émanations mortelles de ce livre imbiberont son âme comme l’eau le sucre. Il n’est pas bon que tout le monde lise les pages qui vont suivre ; quelques-uns seuls savoureront ce fruit amer sans danger. Par conséquent, âme timide, avant de pénétrer plus loin dans de pareilles landes inexplorées, dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant. Écoute bien ce que je te dis : dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant.

Oh ! si au lieu d’être un enfer, l’univers n’avait été qu’un céleste anus immense, regardez le geste que je fais du côté de mon bas-ventre : oui, j’aurais enfoncé ma verge, à travers son sphyncter sanglant, fracassant, par mes mouvements impétueux, les propres parois de son bassin !

Then it will be understood, will it not, that the enemy whom Lautreamont has made the enemy, the cannibalistic, brain-devouring "Creator," the sadist perched on "a throne made of human excrement and gold," the hypocrite, the debauchee, the idler who "eats the bread of others" and who from time to time is found dead drunk, "drunk as a bedbug that has swallowed three barrels of blood during the night," it will be understood that it is not beyond the clouds that one must look for that creator, but that we are more likely to find him in Desfosses's business directory and on some comfortable executive board!

All rebel thought, as we have seen, is expressed either in rhetoric or in a closed universe. The rhetoric of ramparts in Lucretius, the convents and isolated castles of Sade, the island or the lonely rock of the romantics, the solitary heights of Nietzsche, the primeval seas of Lautreamont, the parapets of Rimbaud, the terrifying castles of the surrealists, which spring up in a storm of flowers, the prison, the nation behind barbed wire, the concentration camps, the empire of free slaves, all illustrate, after their own fashion, the same need for coherence and unity. In these sealed worlds, man can reign and have knowledge at last.

Dans tous les temps, il avait cru, les paupières ployant sous les résédas de la modestie, qu’il n’était composé que de bien et d’une quantité minime de mal. Brusquement je lui appris, en découvrant au plein jour son cœur et ses trames, qu’au contraire il n’est composé que de mal, et d’une quantité minime de bien que les législateurs ont de la peine à ne pas laisser évaporer.

Maldoror fut bon pendant ses premières années, où il vécut heureux ; c’est fait. Il s’aperçut ensuite qu’il était né méchant : fatalité extraordinaire ! Il cacha son caractère tant qu’il put, pendant un grand nombre d’années ; mais, à la fin, à cause de cette concentration qui ne lui était pas naturelle, chaque jour le sang lui montait à la tête ; jusqu’à ce que, ne pouvant plus supporter une pareille vie, il se jeta résolûment dans la carrière du mal… atmosphère douce !

Depuis ce temps, je respecte le vœu de la morte. Moi, comme les chiens, j’éprouve le besoin de l’infini… Je ne puis, je ne puis contenter ce besoin ! Je suis fils de l’homme et de la femme, d’après ce qu’on m’a dit. Ça m’étonne… je croyais être davantage ! Au reste, que m’importe d’où je viens ? Moi, si cela avait pu dépendre de ma volonté, j’aurais voulu être plutôt le fils de la femelle du requin, dont la faim est amie des tempêtes, et du tigre, à la cruauté reconnue : je ne serais pas si méchant.

Hawthorne was able to say of Melville that, as an unbeliever, he was extremely uneasy in his unbelief. It can equally well be said of the poets who rushed to assault the heavens, with the intent of turning everything upside down, that by so doing they affirmed their desperate nostalgia for order. As an ultimate contradiction, they wanted to extract reason from unreason and to systematize the irrational. These heirs of romanticism claimed to make poetry exemplary and to find, in its most harrowing aspects, the real way of life. They deified blasphemy and transformed poetry into experience and into a means of action. Until their time those who claimed to influence men and events, at least in the Occident, did so in the name of rational rules. On the contrary, surrealism, after Rimbaud, wanted to find constructive rules in insanity and destruction. Rimbaud, through his work and only through his work, pointed out the path, but with the blinding, momentary illumination of a flash of lightning. Surrealism excavated this path and codified its discoveries. By its excesses as well as by its retreats, it gave the last and most magnificent expression to a practical theory of irrational rebellion at the very same time when, on another path, rebellious thought was founding the cult of absolute reason. Lautreamont and Rimbaud—its sources of inspiration—demonstrate by what stages the irrational desire to accept appearances can lead the rebel to adopt courses of action completely destructive to freedom

Maldoror'un mutlu yaşadığı o ilk yıllarda nasıl iyi yürekli biri olduğunu anlatacağım birkaç satırda. Daha sonra, kötü ruhlu doğmuş olduğunu fark etti: Ne garip yazgı! Kişiliğini elinden geldiğince gizledi uzun yıllar, ama sonunda, şu alışık olmadığı gerilim yüzünden, her gün kan beynine çıkmaya başladı; böylesine bir yaşama artık katlanamadığı için de, sonunda, kararlı bir biçimde kötülük mesleğine adandı… ..... Yalancı biri değildi, gerçeği kabul ediyor ve kendisinin bir kan dökücü olduğunu söylüyordu. İnsanlar, duydunuz mu? Bu titreyen kuş teleği kalemle de aynı şeyi tekrarlamaktan utanmıyor. Sanki istençten de güçlü yetke… Bir lânet! Yerçekimi yasalarına karşı koyabilir mi taş? Olanaksız. Kötülük, iyilikle bağlaşma yapmak isterse, olanaksızdır. Yukarıda söylediğim de buydu benim zaten.

Il n’est pas bon que tout le monde lise les pages qui vont suivre ; quelques-uns seuls savoureront ce fruit amer sans danger.

Bello como el encuentro fortruito de una máquina de coser y un paraguas en una mesa de disección.

con el increíble entrelazamiento de sus plantas y la obscena promiscuidad de ciertos frutos, la maravillosa verdad del asunto devoró al pintor, dejándolo poco menos que impotente frente al papel en blanco. Y tuvo que ser un pintor de América, el cubano Wilfredo Lam, quien nos enseñara la magia de la vegetación tropical, la desenfrenada Creación de Formas de nuestra naturaleza –con todas sus metamorfosis y simbiosis–, en cuadros monumentales de una expresión única en la pintura contemporánea1. Ante la desconcertante pobreza imaginativa de un Tanguy, por ejemplo, que desde hace veinticinco años pinta las mismas larvas pétreas bajo el mismo cielo gris, me dan ganas de repetir una frase que enorgullecía a los surrealistas de la primera hornada: Vous qui ne voyez pas, pensez a ceux qui voient. Hay todavía demasiados “adolescentes que hallan placer en violar los cadáveres de hermosas mujeres recién muertas” (Lautreamont), sin advertir que lo maravilloso estaría en violarlas vivas. Pero

il dubbio è un omaggio reso alla speranza.

In more than one ambuscade, man, that sublime ape, has already pierced my breast with his porphyry lance: a soldier does not exhibit his wounds however glorious they may be. This terrible combat will bring down much sorrow upon the heads of the two parties: two friends striving obstinately to destroy one another: what a drama!

Mano mėgiamiausi poetai? Karalius Dovydas, Karalius Saliamonas, Ekleziastas; Lamartine, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Lautreamont, Valéry, Marie Noël, Jouve; Angelus Silesius, Goethe, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, George, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Traki, Langgasser; Leopardi, Campana, Montale; San Juan de la Cruz, Garcia Lorca, Blake, Keats, Hopkins, Yeats; Donelaitis, Maironis, Putinas, Aistis (pirmos 4 knygos). Bet mano preferencijos nuolat kinta Mano mėgiamiausi tapytojai? Piero della Francesca, Benozzo Gozzoli, Botticelli, Tiziano, Piero di Cosimo, Magnasco; Claude Lorrain, Georges de la Tour, Watteau, Fragonard, Chardin, Manet, Renoir, Soutine, Duffy, Chagall, Sérafine; Brueghel (Senasis), Memling, Hobbema, Vermeer; Dürer, Lucas Cranach (Senasis), Kokoschka; Gainsborough, Palmer; El Greco, Velazquez, Goya, Dali; Galdikas, Samuolis, Vizgirda, Valeška, Gudaitis.