Customer Reviews

The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille

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I'm a fan of Bataille, but I'm afraid that in most translations into English this major thinker comes across as being merely silly about sex and excrement and the Absolute. From his own febrile, pathological alluvium located in a fertile triangle between Eros and Thanatos, anus and genitals, Bataille (said in the helpful introduction by the translator to be using poetry to reach the Eternal) comes up with cuties like these:

The Wall

A hatchet
give me a hatchet
so I can frighten myself
with my shadow on the wall
ennui
feeling of emptiness
fatigue.

I have to admit feeling like that myself recently. And:

Laughing

To laugh and laugh
at the sun
at the nettles
at the pebbles
at the ducks

at the rain
at the pope's p**
at mommy
and a coffin full of sh**.

It doesn't get any better than that folks, although Bataille makes lots of references to the void, Zarathrustra, Heraclitus, and other touchstones of modern Western culture. I do admire his mixture of profundity and scatology and wish that more post-modern writers would follow Bataille's example. Why let the makers of popular movies and television sit-coms get a jump on the rest of us?

Bataille's poetry is often beautiful, using words and ideas to paint vague emotional pictures. You might get bored when he goes on and on about immensity or death, but it's worth it for the good parts.