Background
He was born Aprile 4, 1846, in Montevideo, Uruguay, of French parents. He is said to have taken his pseudonym from the hero of Eugene Sue's historical novel Latréaumont, whose superhuman arrogance drives him to revolt and blasphemy.
( This macabre but beautiful work, Les Chants de Maldoror...)
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. Maldoror is a long narrative prose poem which celebrates the principle of Evil in an elaborate style and with a passion akin to religions fanaticism. The French poet-critic Georges Hugnet has written of Lautréamont: "He terrifies, stupefies, strikes dumb. He could look squarely at that which others had merely given a passing glance." When first published in 1868-69, Maldoror went almost unnoticed. But in the 1890s the book was rediscovered and hailed as a work of genius by such eminent writers as Huysmans, Léon Block, Maeterlinck, and Rémy de Gourmont. Later still, Lautréamont was to be canonized as one of their principal "ancestors" by the Paris surrealists. This edition, translated by Guy Wernham, 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.
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He was born Aprile 4, 1846, in Montevideo, Uruguay, of French parents. He is said to have taken his pseudonym from the hero of Eugene Sue's historical novel Latréaumont, whose superhuman arrogance drives him to revolt and blasphemy.
In October 1859, at the age of thirteen, he was sent to high school in France by his father. He was trained in French education and technology at the Imperial Lycée in Tarbes. In 1863 he enrolled in the Lycée Louis Barthou in Pau, where he attended classes in rhetoric and philosophy (under and uppergreat). He excelled at arithmetic and drawing and showed extravagance in his thinking and style. In 1866 Lautreamont went to Paris to study at the Ecole Polytechnique.
He wrote long prose cantos, the first of which was published in 1868. In 1890 it was republished, with five additional fragments, under the title Les Chants de Maldoror. Maldoror, a demonic figure, expresses his hatred of mankind and God, and his adoration of the ocean, blood, octopuses, and toads. There are nightmarish episodes with vampires or with mysterious creatures encountered on the seashore. The work contains an astonishing profusion of imagery - delirious, blasphemous, erotic, grandiose, and horrifying - but its style and language make it an outstanding example of hallucinatory, apocalyptic writing.
The cantos were little known during the Symbolist period, although Remy de Gourmont andLeon Bloy had called attention to their existence. According to Surrealist critics, Lautreamont is the greatest French poet, far greater than Rimbaud himself. He also wrote Poesies (1870), a series of paradoxes about poetry. Very little is known of his life in Paris, and his death on Nov. 24, 1870, is also mysterious, a legend reporting that he was assassinated at the personal order of Napoleon III.
( This macabre but beautiful work, Les Chants de Maldoror...)