Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works From the Final Period

Including the fabled text “To Have Done with the Judgment of God,” this collection compiles the scatalogical writings of Artaud's final years

Clayton Eshleman's translations are the finest and most authentic which have yet been made from Artaud's writing. Artaud's final work is his strongest and most enduring, and this collection has been wisely selected and magnificently realized. Artaud is being taken into the 21st century." –Stephen Barber

Among Antonin Artaud's most brilliant works are the scatological glossolalia composed in the final three years of his life (1945–48), during and after his incarceration in an asylum at Rodez. These represent some of the most powerful outpourings ever recorded, a torrent of speech from the other side of sanity and the occult. In this collection, the most complete representation of this period of Artaud's work ever presented in English, and the first new anthology of Artaud published in the US since Helen Weaver's 1976 Selected Writings, cogent statements of theory are paired with the raving poetry of such pieces as “Artaud the Momo,” “Here Lies” and “To Have Done with the Judgment of God.” These are translated with drama and accuracy by Clayton Eshleman, whose renditions of Vallejo and Césaire have won widespread acclaim, including a National Book Award.

In French poetic thinking, Artaud is one of the so-called poetes maudits, those cursed creators, whose immediate predecessors were Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Artaud, the writer-dramatist-actor, has been, in spite of his weird, violent, incendiary style, a visionary and a seminal influence on French avant-garde circles. Eshelman and Bador present in this anthology a sufficiently representative quantity of Artaud's writings, including two influential letters, poems, and a short essay on his drawings, all from the period 1945 to 1948. The poems, "Artaud the Momo" (slang for "fool") and "Here Lies," written during and following his incarceration in an asylum, reconstruct his mental state. There is little doubt that his poems contain an element of masterful madness, reflecting his inner complexities and what he has endured. His last work, "To Have Done with the Judgment of God," is a showcase of Artaud's tremendous literary talent. The bilingual presentations and the lucid introduction prove helpful. Recommended for literary collections.?Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y.
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