The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille (review)

Stuart Kendall

SubStance, Issue 92 (Volume 29, Number 2), 2000, pp. 101-104 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2000.0021

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32253

Access provided by The Eugene McDermott Library,University Of Texas at Dallas (8 Mar 2019 03:15 GMT)
 BOOK REVIEWS

Bataille, Georges. The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille. Trans. and with
Intro. by Mark Spitzer. Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 1998. Paper:
140 pages.

The publication of Mark Spitzer’s version of the poetry of Georges

Bataille only serves to remind this reader how well English language readers
of Bataille would be served by an adequate translation of this and other still
untranslated poetic writings by Bataille. In an adequate translation, Bataille’s
poetry should occasion rich debate among poets, philosophers and historians
of religion, not only for its violent and sexually explicit language, but as an
aid to understanding his challenging thought, a point of entry into his
sometimes arcane technical language, and a means to understanding the
personal and historical context and orientation of Bataille’s work as a whole.
Georges Bataille came late to poetry—he did not write a poem until he
was 44—and he came to it simultaneously with his maturity as a writer and
a thinker. He wrote most of his poetry between 1942 and 1945 while writing
the three volumes of La Somme athéologique, all of which include poetry. As a
totality, Bataille’s oeuvre includes writings that seek to define the possible
world, to describe things as they are, works like La Part maudite (1949). It
also includes writings that seek to elude the possible, to evoke what he calls
the impossible. Bataille’s poetic outpouring answered the force of this
necessity, as he says, rather than any discursive project, that of poetry
included. For Bataille, writing poetry meant writing against poetry, against
beautiful words, against lyricism, against sentimental effusion, against
carefully crafted observations or insights, psychological or otherwise; it
meant writing against nature, against positive, constructive or discursive
thought, even against language itself. Bataille published a volume entitled
La Haine de la Poésie (Minuit) in 1947, which, reedited and under a new title,
L’Impossible (Minuit, 1962), proved to be the final volume Bataille would see
into print.
Significantly, Bataille’s relationship to poetry at once mirrors and serves
as a helpful key to understanding his relationships to both Surrealism and
Existentialism. Where Surrealist poetry is often light, lyrical, and effusive
toward its goal of making unconscious desires come to life, Bataille’s poetry
is rigorous, classical, and considered in its function as a method of meditation,

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a turnkey to delirium, to ecstasy. Where Sartrean Existentialism rejects poetry

in favor of prose for its greater capacity for political engagement, Bataille
rejects such engagement, claiming that poetry and indeed all literature must
plead guilty, must admit its freedom, and be written against social constraint,
progressive or otherwise. Bataille’s poetry, then, should be read against the
dominant artistic and intellectual trends of his era.
Bataille’s textual mentors in poetry made for strange bedfellows:
Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and the poetic writings from the history of mystical
meditation. From the mystics, Bataille’s poetry took up the functional capacity
of meditation; his writings were at once the product and the path of his
inner experience. From Rimbaud, he resumed a spirit of revolt, of rebellion
and a fluidity of generic distinction, of direct and indirect address, of mockery
and pathos à l’extrême. From the Poésies of Lautréamont, Bataille developed
his senses of rigor, of premiers principes hors de discussion, and most importantly,
of juxtaposition whereby meaning could be created out of elements that
were, in themselves, contradictory: poetry and a commentary on poetry in
L’Orestie (1945), for example.
Unfortunately, Bataille’s poetry, a distillate and generator of inner
experience, is all too easily misunderstood or dismissed as mere depravity,
as obscenity for obscenity’s sake. And Bataille’s poetry is difficult: it is at
once simple and hermetic; it is base to the point of vulgarity and even
revulsion, yet abstract, metaphysical, often syllogistic; it is at once plain,
boring, and yet graphic, shocking, violent. Its range is deliberately limited,
rigorously circumscribed and claustrophobic, but its effects are, at times,
inspired, shattering, and delirious. As Bataille explains, poetry is the sacrifice
in which words are the victims, (OC V: 156). Here is the holocaust of words
we have heard so much about.
In order to appreciate this holocaust, an edition of the poetry of Georges
Bataille requires careful organization, a critically and historically informed
introduction, and an editorial apparatus of notes that elucidate the
intertextual relationships between the poems and Bataille’s work in general.
Mark Spitzer’s edition, his often conversational introduction, and his
“Miscellaneous Notes on the Text” fail on all of these counts. The introduction
is divided into three uneven sections, which consider the historical context
of Bataille’s life and works, the “philosophical” nature of the poems
themselves, and a few problems and peculiarities Spitzer encountered as a
translator struggling with Bataille’s writing.
The weaknesses of the first of these sections speak for and anticipate
the weakness of the other two and indeed of the volume as a whole. Spitzer

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has culled much of his historical information about Bataille’s life and work
from reputable works of Bataille scholarship like Allan Stoekl’s Visions of
Excess (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), although it is not listed in the
Works Cited.
Further, Spitzer seems unconcerned that Bataille scholarship has
advanced since his source texts were written. This cavalier attitude allows
him to make a number of fallacious and finally mystifying historical claims
toward the goal of advancing a subjectivist argument for his version of
Bataille’s poetry: “The true test of whether or not a translation works,
however, can only be felt on an individual basis,” (xvi). The remainder of
the introduction suffers from similar or worse oversights, some of them
egregious enough to warrant embarrassment (the Germans in World War I,
for example, were not “Nazis”) without substantially informing the reader
as to Bataille’s poetics, the peculiarities of his language, or the relationship
between the poetry and his work in general.
Still, Spitzer ’s limited understanding of poetics persists as the
fundamental editorial failing of the volume as a whole. This understanding
contaminates both the selection and presentation of the poetry and the
translation of individual poems. By “poetry” Spitzer seems to understand
anything that “looks like a poem,” loosely speaking. This apparently in mind,
Spitzer has collected a substantial selection of those writings that “look like
a poem” from Bataille’s Oeuvres complètes (Gallimard, 1970-1988) and,
inexplicably, from an earlier Mercure de France volume, the contents of which
are all within the Oeuvres complètes.
But even this loose definition has been applied carelessly, as individual
poems are missing from groups of poetry: four short poems are missing
from L’Orestie, for example. Spitzer has also excerpted “poetry” from larger
constellations of writing. This is particularly problematic in the excerpts
from L’Impossible and La Tombe de Louis XXX, wherein the juxtaposition of
poetic meditations and more typically prosaic sections creates much of the
meaning of the works. Once isolated, the poems have been organized more
or less haphazardly. This editorial carelessness can be found at every level,
from these problems of selection and presentation to basic mistakes of spacing
and capitalization. Long poems are broken up incorrectly and without
indicators of continuity on several occasions.
In short, the poems have been handled as though they were discrete
entities rather than parts now taken from an oeuvre that makes startling
and original use of juxtaposition in creating its meanings and effects. The
extent of his lack of understanding for this notion and these works is evident

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in Spitzer’s warning to the reader that Bataille “recycled” his poetry, reusing
phrases here and there. The complexities and purposes of this recycling
remain unexplored in Spitzer’s introduction or notes.
Spitzer’s versions of the poems themselves suffer from an enthusiasm
for racy lyricism and an inattention to Bataille’s technical language and his
philosophical and meditational concerns. Bataille writes “innombrable” and
Spitzer renders it “infinite” (125). In “À la Romaine” (4), Spitzer’s rendering
of Bataille’s word “gland” as “nut” eliminates much of the anatomical sense
of the verse as well as its intertextual connections to Le Petit, “Visage sans
fin” and “O crâne.” Spitzer’s end note for this poem offers alternate readings
of the verse without exploring its intertextual connections. Worse, this concern
for lyricism tends to create narratives and links between lines where Bataille
is writing against such an epistemological continuum. Bataille writes “je
pleure/ un mot/ que j’ai perdu” not “I cry/ over a word/ that I lost” (37).
The difference in this case is small, but the overall effect is misleading.
Mark Spitzer’s collection has been carelessly assembled. It misrepresents
the poems themselves and impedes a reader’s comprehension of their
importance. English language readers still need an adequate translation of
the poetry of Georges Bataille.
Stuart Kendall
SUNY Stony Brook

Substance # 92, 2000