Poet, novelist and translator R J Dent discusses aspects of his new translation of one of Georges Bataille’s neglected works:
“In my new English translation of Georges Bataille’s The Dead Man, there is a three-page afterword by Bataille, explaining the genesis of his story. In that afterword, Bataille writes of a plane crash he went to investigate:
‘I remember one day hearing an aeroplane whose engine was in trouble.
After a series of splutterings faded into the near distance, there was a heavy, percussive shock. I got on my bicycle and pedalled in the direction of the crash. It took me a while to find the crash site.
It was burning in the centre of a large apple orchard. Trees near to the plane had been scorched black. Three, maybe four, bodies flung from the wrecked plane, lay dead on the grass.
It was a German plane, probably shot down by an English fighter somewhere over the Seine Valley, which was only a short distance away from where I was staying, which was why it had managed to get to the orchard before crashing.
A dead German airman…’
Georges Bataille’s crashed plane anecdote wouldn’t be out of place in one of J.G. Ballard’s books; it has the same detached and dispassionate tone and style. It was clearly a defining moment for Bataille, and its depiction of the horror of violent death in the midst of everyday calm is the same tone (and the same theme) that infuses The Dead Man.”
The Dead Man
Author: Georges Bataille
Translator: R J Dent
Language: English
Pages: 36
Format: A5
Published May 2020
Price: £3.75
The Dead Man by Georges Bataille
Originally published in 1967 as Le Mort by Jean-Jacques Pauvert
Translated into English by R J Dent
Translation Copyright © R J Dent (2020)
Cover Art by Alexander Adams
Image © Alexander Adams
https://www.alexanderadams.art/
Published by Ragged Lion Press in an edition of 100 copies
R J Dent 