Ain't Babelfish wonderful?

There's a fairly serious article about _Hogg_ on the "Topolivres" website 
(http://blog.topolivres.com/blogtopolivres/48/), which is in French.

I put it through Babelfish (babelfish.altavista.com) to help my faltering
French. It didn't help much, but the text that came back has some
great examples of bad machine translation. I'm posting it here for
y'all's delectation.

--Dan'l

Samuel Delany devastates his reader

topolivres
Your library will not occur from them.
topolivres underlines some works by the way of the Net.

Still a novel of blood and indecent assault? Bruce Benderson, J.T.
LeRoy, Scott Heims... The American vogue is with the obscenity.
The recent publication of Hogg, refused during more than twenty
years, seems to confirm it. Let us guarantee that the hero and
narrator, old with twelve, thirteen years, will be endowed with a
quasi-supernatural sexual precocity and will be affublé of the nickname
of "cocksucker", which will summarize his report/ratio with the beings
perfectly; that the book will be reduced to a series of scenes of an
insupportable sexual violence, according to crescendo of atrocity, on
bottom of bars of lorry drivers and crasseuses lanes; that the ultimate
objective of the author will consist in revealing the infamous share
placed of each one of us, with the edges of inhumanity, human
perversion. Gained, gained and regained. And yet, Hogg relegates
all its successors to the row of impostors, perverts at the small
week. Delany aims higher.

Its ambition pushes it to devastate its reader, to reduce out of pulp
its least wills of identification to the characters, to destroy his righter
definition of the "literary" word. Perhaps the first chapter read, you
will smile of the abuses language to which the typically American
practice of the co-optation of authors leads - which "remarkable literary
qualities" Norman Mailer it could well detect in this orgy of orduriers
terms and tables smeared with the body fluids? It is to be wondered
how the author manages to compose of the sentences who hold
upright with the only words "chibre", "pisses", "jute" and "shit"!... But
here, it is really the question raised - vomitted, éructée - by Hogg : as
from which moment a novel does cross it the terminals of the "arts
person"?

The first crack (but not only) by which the charpie of the book flows
on its reader, at the point to bury it, it is the body with body. The
moment when the grimace wave of dislike, posted to mark a certain
distance with "this kind of books", transfers with the abrupt fall of
blood in the heels, accompanied by cold sweats and powerful nauseas,
of those which force you to close again the book under penalty of him
to return immediately what it inflicts you. How many novels made you
this effect? It will be objected that any horrible or pornographic
description, the Pavlovian reflex of the body answers, that a gadget
SAS fulfills this function just as easily, and that the true literature
precisely consists in suggesting without showing. Question of subtlety.
But how to explain, in this case, that last "the" scene of apotheosis,
with the ray tortures mental and abomination, the effect remains and
does not release you any more, following the example virus which
would have contaminated you? You will miss weakening by reading
the episode of the self-mutilation practised by the character of
Denny, but certainly not because what arrives to him could have
arrived to you. You have nothing to do with Denny, who masturbates
exactly as it breathes and with which it idea to rape somebody can
appear tempting. On the other hand, you know it closely, if not why
such an amount of compassion in its connection? Like Cocksucker and
of monstrous Hogg, ogre ventripotent remarkable by his stink and his
vocation to produce human waste, Denny is the reincarnation of a
mythical figure - in fact, that of Priape. Only the mutilation can tear
off it with this black share projected in him by the shade of the satyr
and reject it, brutally, on the firm ground (reasonable reality, cleansed,
human).

And what discovers Denny, by taking its painful first steps there? That
this space is deserted. By beginning your reading, you thought of
dealing with band of removed from rim social cases, irremediable
perverts: Hogg, Cocksucker, Neg' and the Wop, selling their services
of sworn in rapists with some notable cocufiés (and vindicatory),
symbolically represented this barbarian impulse driven back by the others,
assumed by them. Insipid social criticism, you thought then, opposing
the sleeping partners, powerful machiavelic, with the fauna of obscure
who, "at least", do not hesitate to put the hands in dirty oil. But here,
you guess soon that the matter of Samuel Delany is not there. The
monsters which populate Hogg are not symbols decorating the texture
of the novel, they make it up very whole, like the scraps of a flesh
sutured together. All monstrosity and only monstrosity.

In Hogg, you do not have your place as yourself. Thus, the character
of the police officer who, surprising the rape of Cocksucker by two
fishermen, pronounces the first judicious words of the book - "What is
it that this mess?"-, is not long in you giving up, mutant in his turn in
a monster of the olden days -"But what it is that this small tared",
halète it before crawling on the young boy, whose simple presence
seems to be enough to metamorphose the men in animals... You here
again only with your humanity. To continue your reading (and you will
want mordicus to complete it, would be this to only show again some
the infamous writer), you know that it will be necessary for you to be
stripped yourself and to choose, among the peels at disposal, that
which will suit you like a glove. Neither derision nor subjacent morals
to which to hang up again itself, it will be necessary to go there. Will
you be ogre, demon, goule, satyr? This choice is left to you, but you
will not have any right to call upon a "reason" with this one, in a world
where only "the desire", with the most barbarian direction of the
term, fact office of law. Lesson uttered by Hogg, monster décisionnaire
as regards monstrosity, in the legislature as in the executive: "If you
make a trick like that, guy, it is that t'en want (...). But you can find
me only one filth of reason to do that?"

In company of Cocksucker, you will drink until more thirst the dregs
which will be thrown to you in grazing ground. Then, in race end, the
engine will tire. When "the desire" for ransacking any piece of existing
matter and spirit decrease, that does there remain, in the world of
Hogg ? Once is not habit, the answer is delivered by Cocksucker, single
marked word by him, sounding as a perverted version of the nice
proverb according to which the truth always leaves the mouth of the
children: Nothing. Inevitably, nothing, no sound, no light. All is darkened.


Samuel Delany
Hogg
Translated from English (the United States) by Norbert Naigeon
Disorders/Laurence Viallet 2006
23 euros

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