The Songs Of Maldoror by Lautreamont Le Comte de

Author:Lautreamont, Le Comte de [Lautreamont, Le Comte de]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781908694232
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Published: 2011-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

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I’d fallen asleep on the cliff. He who has chased an ostrich through the desert all day without being able to catch it, has not had time to take in food or to close his eyes. If it is he who reads me now, he should, strictly speaking, be able to guess how heavy the sleep was that was weighing down on me. But when the storm with the palm of its hand has vertically pushed a vessel to the bottom of a sea; if, on that raft, only one man out of the entire crew remains, broken by fatigue and every kind of deprivation; if the waves toss him like flotsam for hours that seem longer than the life of man; and if, some time later, a frigate’s curved bow ploughs through those desolate regions, and sights the wretch’s skeletal carcass floating on the ocean, bringing help that has almost come too late, I think this shipwrecked man will be even better able to guess the degree to which my senses were steeped in drowsiness.

Mesmerism and chloroform, when they make the effort to do so, can sometimes induce similar lethargic catalepsies. They have no resemblance to death: it would be a big lie to say otherwise. But let us come immediately to the dream, so that the impatient readers, hungry for this sort of reading, do not begin to roar like a school of macrocephalous sperm-whales fighting among themselves over a pregnant female. I dreamed that I had entered the body of a hog, that it was not easy to get out of it, and that I was wallowing – my bristles covered – in the slime of the filthiest swamps. Was this a reward; the culmination of my wishes that I no longer belonged to humanity? That is how I interpreted it, and I felt a joy that was much more than deep. However, what I was actively hunting for was whatever act of virtue I had done to deserve this great favour from Providence. Now that I have gone over in my memory the various phases of my terrible flattening against the granite’s belly, during which the tide, without me noticing, flowed past twice over this irreducible mixture of dead matter and living flesh, it is perhaps not unprofitable to proclaim that this degradation was probably only a punishment inflicted on me by divine justice. But who knows his intimate needs or the cause of his pestilential joys? The metamorphosis never seemed to my eyes anything other than the magnanimous resounding of a perfect happiness I had long been waiting for. At last the day arrived when I became a hog! I tried out my teeth on tree bark, and I contemplated my snout with delight. Not the least trace of divinity was left: I raised my soul to the excessive height of that ineffable pleasure.

Listen to me then, and do not blush, inexhaustible caricatures of the beautiful, who take the ludicrous braying of your supremely despicable

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