Friday, October 20, 2006

Found a copy of that trash talk after all, here it is:

'I have not produced a translation of "Jabberwocky". I tried to translate a fragment of it, but it bored me. I never liked this poem, which always struck me as an affected infantilism... I do not like poems or languages of the surface which smell of happy leisures and of intellectual success - as if the intellect relied on the anus, but without any heart or soul in it. The anus is always terror, and I will not admit that one loses an excrement without being torn from, thereby losing one's soul as well, and there is no soul in "Jabberwocky"... One may invent one's language, and make pure language speak with an extra-grammatical or a-grammatical meaning, but this meaning must have value in itself, that is, it must issue from torment... "Jabberwocky" is the work of a profiteer who, satiated after a fine meal, seeks to indulge himself in the pain of others... When one digs through the shit of being and its language, the poem necessarily smells badly, and "Jabberwocky" is a poem whose author took steps to keep himself from the uterine being of suffering into which every great poet has plunged, and having been born from it, smells badly. There are in "Jabberwocky" passages of fecality, but it is the fecality of an English snob, who curls the obscene within himself like ringlets of hair around a curling iron... It is the work of a man who ate well - and this makes itself felt in his writing...'

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