Three translations and an adaptation by R J Dent
The Marquis de Sade’s Retaliation, book details here
The Marquis de Sade’s The Self-Made Cuckold, book details here
Louis Aragon’s Jean-Fucque (Le Cocque), book details here
Charles Baudelaire’s Selected Erotic Poems, book details here
All available as paperbacks in the Pocket Erotica Series from New Urge Editions
R J Dent’s official website is here
Translated into English by R J Dent
Charles Baudelaire’s decadent erotic poems caused a scandal when they first appeared in 1857. Both author and publisher were prosecuted for unveiling works that were ‘an insult to public decency’, and six poems in the collection were suppressed.
These so-called indecent works (banned in France until 1949) were: Lesbos; Condemned Women: Delphine and Hippolyta; Lethe; To One Who Is Too Happy; Jewels; and The Metamorphosis of the Vampire— and all are included in this Pocket Erotica edition, plus 20 more.
Selected Erotic Poems
Charles Baudelaire
Translated from the French by R J Dent
Pocket Erotica No. 21, New Urge Editions
ISBN 978-1737943037
Format: Paperback chapbook
Pages: 64
Dimensions: 4 x 0.16 x 6 inches
Weight: 3.2 ounces
Purchase link (US): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1737943034
Purchase link (UK): https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1737943034
Purchase link (Aus): https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/1737943034
Translator’s website: www.rjdent.com
The Self-Made Cuckold
The Marquis de Sade
Translated into English by R J Dent
The Marquis de Sade’s The Self-Made Cuckold, translated from the French by RJ Dent, is a rare work sans the notorious content Sade is infamous for. Indeed, it contains no savagely violent orgies nor flagellation. This little gem is — by comparison to The 120 Days of Sodom — libertine light and amusingly smutty. There is also a strain of feminism running through the book.
R J Dent’s brand-new English translation of the Marquis de Sade’s The Self-Made Cuckold, written by Sade when he was a prisoner in the Bastille in 1788, is now available as a paperback chapbook as #20 in the Pocket Erotica Series from New Urge Editions.
Product details:
Title: The Self-Made Cuckold
Author: the Marquis de Sade (D.A.F. de Sade)
Translator: R J Dent
Publisher: Pocket Erotica/New Urge Editions/Black Scat Books
Publication Date: November 2021
Format: Paperback
Pages: 60
Dimensions: 6” x 4” x 0.15” (15.24cm x 10.16 x 0.381cm)
Weight: 3.2 ounces (90.7185 grams)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1737371199
ISBN-10: 1737371197
The Self-Made Cuckold is available from New Urge Editions here:
or from Amazon.com here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1737371197
or from Amazon.co.uk here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Self-Made-Cuckold-Marquis-Sade/dp/1737371197/ref=monarch_sidesheet
RITUAL OF FILTH
A REVIEW OF GEORGES BATAILLE’S THE DEAD MAN (RAGGED LION PRESS, 2020)
by Tom Bland
RJ Dent’s masterful translation of Georges Bataille’s The Dead Man opens the work to the English speaking world. The work is essentially about the explosive lust that arises from grief: it may seem alien to connect the two, but psychoanalysis has often proposed a correlation between eroticism and mourning. I once read a case-study of a woman who masturbated for two days after she lost her father, which made me think of Bataille’s My Mother, where the main character masturbates while standing over the corpse of his mother in the funeral parlour.
In the opening of The Dead Man:
When Edouard fell back back dead, a vast emptiness opened up inside Marie. A prolonged shudder went through her, and lifted her up like an angel.
Marie seduces a rich Dwarf (with the title of Count) entangling him in the sexuality that erupts out of the “shudder”:
What Marie saw in the Dwarf’s eyes was the insistence of death.
…
On unsteady legs, she trembled.
Staring at the [Dwarf], she backed away.
Without warning, she vomited.
…
She looked at the pool of vomit in front of her.
Her torn and ripped coat was barely covering her body.
The book becomes more extreme as Marie’s world falls apart. As her life twists out of shape so does her libido, as the loss manifests as pure unadulterated desire like the cocaine only Kate Moss or Quentin Tarantino can afford. Marie needs to fuck but not the normal kind of fucking; her body explodes in the spontaneous acts of pissing, shitting, vomiting, which rip apart the confines of her life. The Dwarf has an erection throughout, and he is not the only one.
Marie went wild. She bared her teeth and bit down on the [Dwarf’s] cock, hard.
Pierrot dragged Marie off the [Dwarf]. He held her by the wrists, dragging her.
…
The [Dwarf] guided Pierrot’s cock into Marie…
Bataille describes everything in exquisite detail as if writing the notes for a case study he is going to submit to a psychoanalytic journal but he has yet to obscure the sexuality with technical terms such as the id, “the seething cauldron of excitation” [Freud].
“Stop staring at me,” Marie said, “or I’ll piss on you…”
She clambered onto the table and squatted.
“If you do, you’ll get me even more excited,” the [Dwarf] said.
…
Marie pissed on him.
The [Dwarf] received the stream of piss full in the face as Pierrot vigorously wanked his big cock.
RJ Dent’s translation of Bataille’s neglected work is superb and opens and lays bare the philosophical backbone of the work while remaining faithful to Bataille’s erotic story-telling. It is quite obvious that R J Dent is a poet and novelist himself by the way he opens up the intensity and the beauty of the language.
The Dead Man is published by Ragged Lion Press in a limited edition.
It is available at: https://www.raggedlionpress.co.uk/product-page/the-dead-man-georges-bataille-translated-by-r-j-dent
R J Dent’s books and information on current projects can be found at: www.rjdent.com
Tom Bland’s The Death of the Clown came out with Bad Betty Press in 2018, and his next book, Camp Fear, will be out in 2021. He trained in psychotherapy and dream analysis at SOPH/Middlesex University, and studied live art at UEL. He edits the online magazine, Spontaneous Poetics.
https://badbettypress.com/product/the-death-of-a-clown-tom-bland/
https://www.spontaneouspoetics.co.uk
Ritual of Filth: A Review of Georges Bataille’s The Dead Man (translated into modern English by R J Dent) – by Tom Bland – June 2020
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
Jean Genet (19 December, 1910-15 April, 1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist.
Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later took to writing.
Throughout his five early novels, Genet works to subvert the traditional set of moral values of his assumed readership. He celebrates a beauty in evil, emphasizes his singularity, raises violent criminals to icons, and enjoys the specificity of gay gesture and coding and the depiction of scenes of brutality and betrayal.
NOVELS:
By 1949, Genet had completed five novels, three plays, and numerous poems, many of them considered controversial for their explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality.
Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre Dame des Fleurs, 1943) is a journey through the prison underworld, featuring a fictionalized alter-ego by the name of Divine, usually referred to in the feminine, at the center of a circle of queens with colourful sobriquets such as Mimosa I, Mimosa II, First Communion and the Queen of Rumania.
The Miracle of the Rose (Miracle de la rose, 1946) is a fictionalized autobiography which describes Genet’s time in Mettray Penal Colony.
The Thief’s Journal (Journal du voleur, 1949) is also a fictionalized autobiography and it describes Genet’s experiences as a vagabond and prostitute, as he wanders across Europe.
Querelle of Brest (Querelle de Brest, 1947) is the story of a murder set in the midst of the port town of Brest, where sailors treat life with brutal carelessness.
Funeral Rites (Pompes funèbres, 1949) is a story of love and betrayal across political divides, inspired by the death of the narrator’s lover, Jean Decarnin, who was killed by the Germans during the Second World War.
PLAYS:
Jean Genet’s plays present highly stylized depictions of ritualistic struggles between outcasts of various kinds and their oppressors. Social identities are parodied and shown to involve complex layering through manipulation of the dramatic fiction and its inherent potential for theatricality and role-play.
In The Maids (1947), the eponymous maids imitate one another and their mistress.
In Deathwatch (Haute Surveillance, 1947), three prisoners are locked up in the same cell. One is to be guillotined. Confinement traps each of them in solitude and immense unhappiness, which lends them a certain dignity.
Splendid’s (1948) is a full-length drama, and
Her (Elle, 1955) is a one-act play.
In The Balcony (1957), the clients of a brothel simulate roles of political power before, in a dramatic reversal, actually becoming those figures, all surrounded by mirrors that both reflect and conceal.
In The Blacks (1959), Genet offers a critical dramatization of what Aimé Césaire called negritude, presenting a violent assertion of Black identity and anti-white virulence framed in terms of mask-wearing and roles adopted and discarded.
The Screens (1961), Genet’s most overtly political play, is an epic account of the Algerian War of Independence.
NON-FICTION:
Genet wrote an essay on the work of the Swiss sculptor and artist Alberto Giacometti entitled The Studio of Alberto Giacometti (L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, 1957).
It was highly praised by Giacometti himself and by Pablo Picasso. Genet wrote in an informal style, incorporating excerpts of conversations between himself and Giacometti.
Prisoner of Love (Un Captif Amoureux, 1986) is a memoir of Genet’s encounters with Palestinian fighters and Black Panthers. In 1970, he had spent two years in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Visiting Beirut in September 1982, Genet found himself in the midst of the Israeli invasion of the city. He was one of the first foreigners to enter Shatila refugee camp after the massacre of hundreds of its inhabitants.
POETRY:
Genet also wrote several poems.
These poems have been translated into English by Jeremy Reed and George Messo and published as Jean Genet: The Complete Poems.
Jean Genet developed throat cancer and was found dead on 15 April 1986, in a hotel room in Paris. He is buried in the Spanish Cemetery in Larache, Morocco.
Jean Genet’s books are available at:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jean-Genet/e/B000APBLYE
Follow R J Dent’s work on:
Website: http://www.rjdent.com/
Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/R.-J.-Dent/e/B0034Q3RD4
Blog: https://rjdent.wordpress.com/
twitter: https://twitter.com/RJDent
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One of the frustrations, the challenges, the problems – and probably the joys – of translating Baudelaire’s poetry is choosing the correct idiom to translate into.
Taking the words, sentences, phrases, lines, from the language of one country and translating them into the corresponding or equivalent language of another country is the type of work that can be done by almost anyone.
However, choosing the absolutely perfect cultural, social, geographical, spatial, historical, temporal and linguistic framework to put the translated words onto is another matter entirely, and will very much depend on the translator’s intentions and the receptive vocabulary of the proposed readership.
And when it’s poetry that is being translated, the task becomes even more complicated; the problems suddenly multiply. Read more…
R J Dent says: ‘I found translating Charles Baudelaire’s influential poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal from French into modern English to be a rewarding, but challenging experience. This essay outlines some of the challenges and joys of the translation process.’
R J Dent’s English translation of The Flowers of Evil is available at:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flowers-Evil-Artificial-Paradise-Nocturnal/dp/0979984777/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
On Translating Baudelaire
Copyright © R J Dent (2007 & 2016)
Follow R J Dent’s work on:
website: http://www.rjdent.com/
amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/R.-J.-Dent/e/B0034Q3RD4
blog: https://rjdent.wordpress.com/
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Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire’s seminal classic, The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) is now available in R J Dent’s modern English translation:
R J Dent discusses his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil:
R J Dent reads ‘I give you these verses…’ from his translation of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil:
A promotional book trailer for R J Dent’s modern English translation of Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil:
R J Dent’s translation of The Flowers of Evil is available from the University of Chicago Press:
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/F/bo10734555.html
and from Amazon:
A look in R J Dent’s library at the novel 37°2 le matin (the basis of the film, Betty Blue) by Philippe Djian.
In R J Dent’s Library – Philippe Djian’s 37°2 le matin
Text (c) R J Dent (2013)
Film (c) R J Dent (2013)
R J Dent 