Sunday

October 15, 2005

Georges Bataille, Collected Poems, trans. Mark Spitzer (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour, 1999).

Full of blood, madness, erections, death, so much so that when Bataille writes "there's nothing I don't dream / there's nothing I don't scream", the reader should have already accepted this statement as a truism (76).

Bataille's writing is pared down to a skeletal core, and much edgier than a lot of his contemporaries (1897-1962):

to love is to agonize
to love is to love dying
monkeys reek as they die

enough I wish I were dead
I am too limp for that
enough I am tired (79)

Being kicked out of Surrealism by Breton with the Second Surrealist Manfesto did little to damage his reputation as a writer and thinker.

Spitzer's translation seems fluid enough and readable.

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