Infinity Land Press have announced pre-orders for Lautréamont’s Apocrypha translated by R.J. Dent and with artwork by Karolina Urbaniak. They note that the new hardback volume is 'a comprehensive collection of all of Isidore Ducasse’s written work that he created before and after he had written and published The Songs of Maldoror. This volume includes the first English translation of the first draft of The First Canto of Maldoror (known and published as the Chant Premier), Poésies, the fragments, and the letters.' The first 28 copies come with a signed print.
Isidore Ducasse (1846-1870), who took the pen-name of Le Comte de Lautréamont, who was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, of French parentage, was the enfant terrible of late 19th century French literature, on a par with, perhaps even beyond, Rimbaud. He was a precursor of the Surrealists, who celebrated his work. Maldoror is both a grotesque re-imagining of Gothic literature and Poe and yet also a remarkably modern, audacious work. I encountered it as a young explorer of strange literature, rather surprisingly in a chain store newsagent on a new town housing estate, in the sombre-covered Penguin paperback of 1978. I did not know what to make of it exactly, but knew that it was experimental and exciting and utterly different from anything else. It is good to see this new translation into modern English of the rest of his work.
(Mark Valentine)
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