Reference Librarian: Lautreamont's Maldoror

This prose poem comes up repeatedly in our first assignment. Les Chants de Maldoror was published in the 1870s in Paris by Uruguay-born author Comte de Lautreamont (the pseduonym of the mysterious Isidore Ducasse).
It comes up repeatedly because of its seed/spark status in the Surrealist movement.

from the wikipedia:
In 1917, French writer Philippe Soupault discovered a copy of "Les Chants de Maldoror" in the mathematics section of a small Parisian bookshop, near the military hospital to which he had been admitted. In his memoirs Soupault wrote:

"To the light of a candle which was permitted to me, I began the reading. It was like an enlightenment. In the morning I read the "Chants" again, convinced that I had dreamed... The day after André Breton came to visit me. I gave him the book and asked him to read it. The following day he brought it back, equally enthusiastic as I had been."

The book's first sentences are as follows (imagine you have just opened a strange looking tome in a dark Paris bookseller)
May it please heaven that the reader, emboldened, and become momentarily as fierce as what he reads, find without loss of bearings a wild and abrupt way across the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-filled pages. For unless he bring to his reading a rigorous logic and mental application at least tough enough to balance his distrust, the deadly issues of this book will lap up his soul as water does sugar.

Here is a new translation of the book on my fave press Exact Change.

Here is a translation of a few of the Cantos.