If J. K. Huysmans’s A Rebours was the bible of the decadents, Les Chants de Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse Alias Le Comte de Lautréamont was surely the Bible of Surrealism.
An interesting product of the Ducasse craze of the 1920s is this Special issue of the Belgian Surrealist Magazine Le Disque Vert, dedicated to ‘Le Cas Lautréamont’.
It includes critical sketches, opinions, poems and Eulogies on Ducasse by the likes of André Breton, Jean Cocteau, René Crevel, Paul Eluard, Franz Hellens, Léon Pierre-Quint, Philippe Soupault and Many others.
Interestingly, the Magazine also includes a contribution by one of Ducasse’s earliest British Followers, John Rodker’s ‘Preface’ to his English translation of Maldoror (Here translated into French by Piet Heuvelmans).
Rodker’s Lay of Maldoror, published in 1924, was the first complete translation of Ducasse’s Text into English. It has not been reprinted and remains a remarkable and unjustly neglected achievement in modernist translation.
The copy in my collection is numbered 506 out of 1000, However, it is Possible that the actual edition size is smaller. Rodker published the book through his own imprint, the Casanova Society, which, by 1924, was in dire financial straits.
Related Correspondence in the Rodker archive suggests that he had 250 copies of this text bound in the 1940s, and I believe it is reasonable to assume that these were leftover sheets from the original print-run.
The Copy of Maldoror in my collection encourages me in this assumption. Its orange cloth binding appears to be original, however, it differs from the dark blue cardboard and quarter leather bindings found in other copies I have seen of this book, for instance at the British library and the Bodleian.
It appears therefore that my copy stems from this later binding in the 1940s, a curious afterthought in the history of a forgotten modernist text…
Evi Heinz 