Lautréamont

[loh-trey-a-mawn]

noun

1. Comte de Isidore Lucien Ducasse, 1846–70, French poet, born in Uruguay.

Example Sentences

IN HIS 1869 poetic novel, “Les Chants de Maldoror,” the French writer Isidore Lucien Ducasse, known pseudonymously as the Comte de Lautréamont, describes a young boy who is as “beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”

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Lautréamont’s book was rediscovered and championed by the Surrealists after World War I, and this particular simile became a kind of foundational mantra for the movement.

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His most famous book, 1917’s “Le Cornet a Des” — “The Dice Cup” — reinvigorated the 19th-century prose poem, a mainly Gallic genre represented by Baudelaire’s angst-ridden “Paris Spleen” and the Comte de Lautreamont’s phantasmagoric “Songs of Maldoror,” the latter notorious for its proto-surrealist imagery: “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”

Read more on Washington Post

Here again, absurd actions and juxtapositions reign, reminding you of the famous statement by the French writer Isidore Ducasse, better known as the Comte de Lautréamont, which was adopted by the Surrealists: “Beautiful as the accidental encounter, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”

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“I commuted to high school in Manhattan and would sometimes cut class, wander down the West Side through what was still a very industrial area of New York, looking for the dream landscapes of Rimbaud and Lautréamont.”

Read more on The Guardian